Why We Took An Audacious Decision On Microsoft Copilot

Our January Sales Kick-off theme was “Think Big. Be Bold”. It’s a catchy sentiment and putting this into practice in any measurable way is tough. A few weeks ago we took the decision to license Microsoft Copilot for every single Advania employee. Not just sales and marketing, not a small subset of the group – everyone.

It’s a substantial investment creating some short-term budget pressure and was unanimously agreed to by our entire leadership team. I couldn’t be prouder of the audacious decision we have taken, and the full support of our leaders in shouldering the investment, especially when most of the market is taking things slower.

Perusing leading London commuter paper CityAM one Wednesday a few weeks ago, the front page article laid out the impact Brexit has had on the UK economy. Unsurprisingly business services is now the UK’s largest export sector.

This is a sector that is ripe for innovation and automation. The generative AI wave will fundamentally change the way we work and has the potential to be more transformational than the internet was. For example, Clifford Chance, one of the first legal firms to commit to using AI to transform their business and their clients’ experience of this Magic Circle expertise and client care. These initial waves of change will hit knowledge workers first.

Discouragingly, the same CityAM paper referenced a Salesforce study claiming UK employees are 28% less likely than the global average to trust AI in their jobs. This is flat-out scary in an economy where productivity is too low, exports are harder than ever and, as an article in the same edition of the paper spelled out, foreign investment is plunging.

UK employers and workers cannot afford to close their eyes, and minds, to the incoming tsunami of innovation and change. That is why I am so vocal about our decision. We are meeting the future head on.

Of course, there are many open questions and unknown answers. We know we will find some people don’t benefit as much from Copilot others. We are certain we will solve some problems and perhaps, in doing so, create new ones. Despite all of this, the momentum for us is full speed ahead.

We already see from our pilots some of our people gaining hours a week back. It is not yet clear if that will contribute directly to the top line, or just improve our employee experience. What we do know for sure is that our employees are unlike the ones referenced in the Salesforce study. They’re excited to see how we can use AI to transform our business, to improve their daily grind, to solve client problems in very different ways and to become more productive, more creative and more effective.

The bigger picture is not just about Copilot. We’ve been using a private deployment of OpenAI’s ChatGPT for close to a year. It has proved invaluable in some of our internal use cases and has laid the groundwork for some exciting use cases we are working with clients on.

As one of the most certified Microsoft partners in the UK, what is the point of taking solutions to clients that we have not fully embraced ourselves? We would not be credible helping clients to deploy thousands of licenses if we have only run a limited deployment ourselves.

So, we’ve gone all in on AI. Our real-world experience, both the failures and the successes, will transform our business and empower our employees to help our clients. We’re looking forwards to being a leader in this space for decades to come, by leading on AI adoption. And, above all of this, as a fast-growing player in the UK’s largest export sector, we are excited to share our experiences with the market!