By Laura Hyde |
Qiddiya Investment Company (QIC) is using Microsoft 365 Copilot to keep track of 700 companies and 22,000 workers involved in building Qiddiya City, Saudi Arabia’s largest purpose-built city.
Qiddiya City is being built approximately 40 minutes’ drive from Riyadh, the country’s capital, and will cover 360 square kilometres – an area three times the size of Paris, France. The city will be an entertainment, sports and cultural destination with theme parks, shopping, sports venues, a Formula 1 racetrack, museums and more. It will also be home to 500,000 residents in 20 neighbourhoods.
The project is being carried out by 22,000 workers from 700 companies, so QIC is using Copilot to keep track of what each organisation and contractor is doing, from project planning to managing invoices. Information is fed from different tools into a dashboard created by Microsoft Power BI. QIC employees can then ask Copilot to find relevant information from the project’s mega-pile of data.
Copilot is also being used to simplify workflows between the team of 200 people designing the plans for the city and the team of 100 people responsible for tracking and executing the project. Between them, the two teams have been using 20 separate systems with different programming languages that don’t understand each other and naming assets with IDs of 20 to 30 characters. Now, they are using Copilot to match asset names across the different systems.
QIC’s real estate development and construction teams have been using Copilot for around one year through the Power BI dashboard, but the tool has only been adopted by the project’s wider workforce recently. It has been used to improve productivity, mostly to summarise emails or writing reports, as well as to autogenerate about 250,000 email messages and chat interactions per month. It has also summarised more than 50,000 meetings and created over 13,000 documents based on corporate data in four months.
In a blog post on the Microsoft website, titled ‘Building Qiddiya City: How Copilot helps Abdulrahman AlAli navigate a project of unprecedented scale’, Abdulrahman AlAli, chief technology officer at QIC, said: “It’s about the right way to adopt Copilot and AI in general. If you spend time in planning and designing the implementation, you would get the best out of it.”