How to get measurable value from your Copilot licences

Many companies have invested in Copilot licences, but struggle to realise the value. Our experience shows that three specific focus areas can determine whether the licences are used: Training employees, structured idea generation and targeted implementation with KPIs from day one. We explore these here and help you understand how we can help you create measurable business value with Copilot agents.   

Since AI broke through in 2022, many companies have felt compelled to jump on the bandwagon and invest in an AI solution. For many, the first step has simply been to roll out licences to as many employees as possible.   

But it has more often been a reactive "we have to do something" move than a proactive strategic initiative. The consequence is that many still struggle to work out how to get real value from the investment – and measure it. This also applies to Copilot.   

The potential can only be realised when employees know how to use the technology – and when the company has identified the right use cases that can be measured on the bottom line.   

What do you want? When should this become an integral part of the workflow? Who should be involved and when? These questions don't answer themselves, and that's why it's important for leadership in a modern company to actively take a position on not just strategy, but also execution. Success with Copilot is ultimately not an IT project, but a change project that requires us to work in parallel with people, processes and technology to succeed.   

It's about shifting focus from the technology itself to the business problems it should solve.  

Therefore, in the following, we spotlight three key areas that deliver measurable value, namely training, idea generation and implementation   

Wave after wave of new digital tools has washed over most employees in larger companies. The risk of hitting a form of technology fatigue is always present – and it's quite understandable if the tools have been placed in employees' hands without the necessary training. Because even though it's the technology that's on the agenda, it's important to bear in mind that it's people who live out and practise change in their everyday work. And if both you and your employees are to get the most out of Copilot, training and involvement must be much more than an afterthought.    

How can you move forward?   

A tailored training programme helps employees understand Copilot's possibilities here and now and paints a picture of where the technology and Copilot are heading. AI is far more about understanding a state – a development in possibilities and functionalities – than simply getting to know a new user interface.  

If you ask employees where AI can be used, you'll most likely get answers that are limited by what they know and can see from their perspective right now. That's rarely an adequate starting point for exploiting the potential of new technology. Therefore, we need to start somewhere else. Employee participation is important when you need to arrive at usable ideas you can build on, but it must be flanked by the right technological understanding of AI and compliance.   
 
How can you move forward?   
Frameworks and structured approaches make it possible to analyse the potentials and pitfalls of generative AI in a more structured way – which creates a solid foundation for identifying concrete use cases with real value.   

When we invite you to our idea workshops, for example, we can map out which concrete tasks Copilot can solve in the individual company's everyday work in two tracks:   

1. What do we want to build?   
Here we map out strong use cases for the company's Copilot agents, and which success criteria are attached to them. Bear in mind that if you electrify an inefficient process, you simply get a faster inefficient process – therefore process optimisation is an unavoidable part of the exercise.  

2. How can we govern what we build?  
Here we translate compliance requirements and regulation into concrete cases that we can work with further – without losing momentum.  

Both workshops involve a high degree of employee participation, which ensures that the ideas fit the tasks employees actually solve. Technology ideas are always an extension of current processes and perspectives – not a replacement.   

The two types of workshops are therefore explorative sessions where we invite creativity into the room and ensure that Copilot and AI ideas are shared across the group and don't just sit with individual people.  

The goal is use cases you can actually measure the value of – where you can govern and validate the impact – and which your employees buy into and take ownership of.  

The implementation phase is where it all needs to fall into place. Here you go from strategy to systems that work in practice. It's also the phase where many projects lose momentum, because technical integration, data quality and user adoption suddenly become more complex than expected. Without a solid foundation, you risk building solutions that nobody uses or can use – or value that nobody can measure.    

Copilot agents can perform almost infinitely many tasks – and that's precisely why it's crucial that the implementation phase is closely coupled to solid governance. Here, an important lever for success can be an external partner who helps you assess what makes sense to build, in what way, and what risks becoming a short- or long-term burden for the organisation.  

 
How can you move forward?   
Implementation requires technical competence that can build and integrate Copilot into your existing environments. This involves connecting relevant data sources, testing and optimising precision and establishing robust connections between the agents and the business. In addition, it's also a question of evaluating concrete ideas and rolling out an implementation plan, so that testing, user involvement and KPI design are factored in from the very start.    

When we work with the implementation phase, we often build small prototypes that make it easier to visualise the value of a full solution. It's an effective method for creating buy-in for the change that's coming, that employees can see the contours of the tool they're about to get. And it's an effective way to get a sense yourself of whether the scope and project actually fit with wishes and purpose.  

Ultimately, it's about what value you want to achieve, and what it takes to achieve it? Whether you're building a Copilot just for yourself or for the entire department? Whether it should have access to all documents from multiple systems or just a single one. The answers to those questions are crucial for the scope – and for the success criteria.   

The basic principle is therefore quite simple when we talk about technology – and Copilot and AI: Nothing flies without KPIs. Without measurable success criteria from day one, even the best AI project risks becoming an investment without visible return.