Author: Department for Business and Trade

Small time savings were observed across most use cases, with written tasks presenting the largest time savings. However, some tasks, like scheduling and generating images, incurred additional time to complete the task when participants used M365 Copilot. Additional time to complete tasks was primarily caused by either M365 Copilot being unable to produce high quality outputs or the task being additional workload only completed due to users having M365 Copilot. The evaluation did not find evidence that time savings have led to improved productivity, and control group participants had not observed productivity improvements from colleagues taking part in the M365 Copilot pilot. However, many pilot participants reported noticing time savings in their own roles due to M365 Copilot. M365 Copilot was found to be particularly beneficial for neurodiverse colleagues, who were statistically significantly more satisfied than other users. Non-native English speakers also anecdotally reported significant benefits, including improvements to wellbeing, technical abilities, and future career ambitions. Training was identified as a significant factor in user satisfaction, with self-led training being more effective than formal departmental training sessions at increasing user satisfaction with M365 Copilot.

I think there’s a lot going on here. One you can’t just just roll out AI and say “the tool is available have at”. I think freakonomics did an article on this and the power of defaults. Just new hires who switched from company default to another browser outperformed people who went with the flow.

Same here of the m365 pilot. Self taught and exploratory nature of individuals is rewarded. That being said. AI is just a great rounding function, so I’m really not surprised that in a typical office environment there’s not that much juice to squeeze.

_{Quote Citation: Department for Business and Trade, “The Evaluation of the M365 Copilot Pilot in the Department for Business and Trade”, August 2025, https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/68adbe409e1cebdd2c96a19d/dbt-microsoft-365-copilot-evaluation.pdf}