Discover how one company is harnessing the power of AI to transform its workplace. Glyn Merritt, IT Manager at Alt Han Co, shares insights on how Copilot is revolutionising their operations. From drafting emails and taking meeting notes to generating complex documents and analysing spreadsheets, the possibilities are endless. Get ready to be amazed by the real-world impact of this groundbreaking NextGen AI solution.

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Reading Time: 9 minutes

Points of Discussion:

• Unveiling Copilot’s Potential
• Challenges and Considerations
• Measuring Success
• Encouraging Widespread Adoption
• Glyn’s ‘Aha’ Moment

As one of our Certified MVPs, Glyn is no stranger to being a pioneer for innovation and making strides in the tech space. In Glyn’s Certified MVP story, we introduced you to Glyn, took you through his career journey, unpacked his current role as an IT Manager at Alt Han Co and shared his invaluable advice for his fellow tech leaders. Now that you’ve gotten to know Glyn, we will shift our focus to how he is making the most out of Copilot – with the best still yet to come.

Unveiling Copilot’s Potential

Q: Has Copilot turned out to be the productivity tool that it promised to be? Has it been easy to use?

Glyn Merritt (GM): Absolutely. Adoption is the key element: it’s really easy to enable the license on a user or member of staff and give them a couple of slides on how it can help with emails and the like. We’re focused on getting people to use more elements of it to get a higher return on investment.

Creation is a big thing. There are quite a few focus areas where we’re using Copilot to help with documents and meetings and other quick wins. For example, if I need a policy about AI usage it can generate that in an instant. I can also say that Copilot has integrated well particularly with Teams: it makes collaboration and information sharing so much easier and captures meeting action items perfectly.

After a semi-soft launch, we’re now planning to host a full-on Lunch and Learn event to show all our staff what the possibilities are beyond the obvious ones – which for me are emails and document creation. A really useful feature is Copilot’s ability to search for files, especially if you don’t remember whether you saved your work in OneDrive or SharePoint for instance. I appreciate the fact that you can search for documents across multiple platforms. Within seconds, Copilot pulls information from documents, email trails, Teams conversations and everywhere else into one place. You can imagine the huge amount of time this saves when trying to find something that you haven’t worked on or looked at in a while.

Challenges and Considerations

Q: Have you faced any difficulties in using Copilot? If so, what have they been?

GM: While useful, there is a slight danger with the search feature. Using the AI policy document example, when you search for it Copilot may not give you the version you’re after. So although it can serve you lots of documents, it might not necessarily give you the right one. This is where you see that while Copilot is a powerful tool, it should be used as a cloud solution partner – not your replacement. Given that it pulls information across different platforms and brings up various versions of the same document, you need to go through its suggestions carefully and make sure you’re using the most up-to-date document.

Measuring Success: It’s More Than Just Time Saved

Q: Apart from time saved, what would you say is one of the most important indicators – which you may be measuring – that Copilot is working?

GM: Copilot has personally helped me communicate more concisely and clearly – which is a bit of a weakness for me. I’ll have a lot of ideas and I’ll throw them into an email. Copilot then makes sense of my draft emails and helps me structure them better. So, while it’s not necessarily about time saved, more clear and concise communication has been a big benefit for me specifically.

As a company, we’ve just started to look at the analytics of the usage and adoption across the organisation. At the moment, most of the usage is on Teams and I suspect that’s due to its ability to take meeting notes – everyone loves that. As soon as people saw that others were distributing Copilot-produced meeting notes, they were blown away. We had some managers saying:

“Oh, I really need that. That’s going to save me so much time.”

So our main indicator at the moment is adoption. While lots of people are using Copilot in Teams, not many are using it in PowerPoint. But after Teams, it’s predictably Outlook and Word. The latter is very akin to our company with regards to the document, fact and policy checking which we do a lot of. We also make use of the Copilot chat.

Interestingly, Excel has the lowest usage. I suspect it’s because all your data needs to be set as a recognised table by Excel. Copilot can do all the analytics which isn’t too hard to implement but they need to be in a specific format first. So that’s an indicator of where we can enhance the usage by revisiting the KPIs to increase the volume.

“[We are working on levelling the] playing field of [Copilot] adoption across all the [Microsoft] apps. This is going to be a good indicator of its value.” – Glyn Merritt, IT Manager at Alt Han Co.

Encouraging Widespread Adoption

Q: What are your plans for the next big adoption process? What are you looking to do, and how are you planning to do it?

GM: We’ve got some advanced users and early AI adopters who are responsibly using other AI tools like Gemini and are part of the task force we’ve formed. So in the production of our upcoming Lunch and Learn, we will draw on their experiences and use their expertise to focus on the areas that will result in the biggest value.

We will use that session to also bring awareness to the benefits that Copilot brings to the other less-used applications. Additionally, outside of apps, we would love to have a team bonding where we will share information and ideas about Copilot in general.

Given that we tend to do the same thing, it would be good to get into the habit of checking in with Copilot to see if there is a better way to do certain tasks. We also make sure that Copilot remains inclusive and that we do not implement it in a way that alienates some of the team. We all know how important it is to use AI responsibly and there are a couple of ways to go about this. For example, you need to remove any bias by ensuring that the data you use to train Copilot represents the diversity of an organisation. I also encourage user feedback from our staff which helps us to address any inclusivity concerns that may arise.

Glyn’s ‘Aha’ Moment

Q: What would you say was the key moment that made you realise that Copilot was working well enough to introduce it to the rest of your organisation?

GM: It happened in a meeting at Microsoft’s headquarters in London that Phil Connor, Head of Business Development at Babble, organised. Given that Babble is a Microsoft Cloud Solutions partner, the two of us briefly talked about Copilot in January, before its launch. I instantly saw the possibilities and the ways it could help our business.

“There are literally no limits. My tiny little brain is the only thing holding Copilot back.” – Glyn Merritt, IT Manager at Alt Han Co.

GM: Just seeing that it touches on every area of work gives you confidence in using all of those Microsoft apps. Copilot helps me with the things I’m not the greatest at and puts me in the right direction. There is sometimes a little trial and error involved, but I get there in the end.

Q: Would you say that the people who are currently using Copilot are using it every day?

GM: Without a shadow of a doubt most people are. I’d say there are some members of staff that covertly aren’t using it daily. But on the other hand, there are people like myself, who are using it literally every hour.

We’d love to address how Copilot helps people and saves time in our Lunch and Learn. While we can’t make it perfect for every department, we can still tailor the possibilities according to our business needs. There are also certain features, like the meeting notes, that benefit everyone. If we didn’t have the licenses, I would’ve said to my boss, ‘If it isn’t in the budget, I’m happy to pay the £400 just for the email help.’

Q: Were there any “wow moments” while using Copilot, where it exceeded your expectations?

GM: I’m generally blown away and am open-minded about it. It combines so many IT solutions for businesses into one tool. But in speaking to a particular moment, during the recent CrowdStrike crash, my boss asked me to send a company-wide email to brief the organisation on the situation. This instantly made me go into a cold sweat, but Copilot helped me get that email out to the staff immediately. Luckily for us, our company was pretty much unscathed, and I just had to let our people know that they could still work and not pay too much attention to the news.

I asked Copilot what information I needed to include in the email, and prompted it to add a business continuity element to ensure that I indicated the right things. I also checked in with Copilot and it gave me some good ideas and nice ways of phrasing things as well.

But I know I’m going to be wowed even more in the future. If you ask me in six months’ time, I’m definitely going to have much more context to that answer, especially as we continue to embrace it throughout our organisation.

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Copilot is more than a tool: it’s a game changer. By empowering employees, streamlining processes, and driving innovation, Alt Han Co is leading the way in leveraging the full potential of AI.

Curious about how Copilot can turn your organisation into a productivity powerhouse? Click here to learn more.