Revolutionizing workflows with customized autonomous agents 

In my role as COO for Microsoft Western Europe, I’m seeking ways to accelerating business performances with a sustainable and transformative approach: delivering value to our customers, driving operational excellence and empowering transformative growth.

With AI impacting all dimensions of work, it is critical for organizations to evolve the way they operate, embracing AI in their workflows and strategies. To ensure our customers get the right support at the right time, we are building every piece of our go-to-market strategy with this goal in mind.

At Microsoft, our vision is for every person to have a Copilot and for every business process to be transformed with agents. With the introduction of Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat, it is easier than ever for every employee in the company to interact with AI and Agents, using a single pane of glass.

Microsoft has rapidly and deeply embedded AI through Azure Foundry into our own tools, allowing to demonstrate its value but also empower leaders like myself to work smarter and drive impact at scale. As the COO of Microsoft, I benefit daily from these capabilities—  tools like Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Studio – which help us create autonomous agents – are fundamentally changing how I approach my role.

As more organizations shift toward advanced, customized AI solutions, I wanted to share how Microsoft Copilot allows me to create tailored agents that maximize the impact of my day.

Delivering Value to Our Customers

Copilot is more than a tool to drive productivity. With agents, GenAI can help unlock value both at the departmental level, and even across the entire organization. Let me share some examples with you.

In conversations with customers, I’m always focused on understanding how we can support them in their AI journey. For us at Microsoft, it is critical to help customers through the process of integrating AI technologies into their business models and operations, so to drive innovation, enhance efficiency and productivity.

As technology evolves rapidly, so to for the needs of our customers. This creates an urgency for our team to react quickly and consistently at every step of their AI journey. In many cases a fast response is critical. AI plays a crucial role in allowing us to maximize the value we provide to customers.

Using Copilot as an unique interface for AI and through Copilot Studio we have created an agent to seamlessly assign follow-up tasks, based on the meeting notes to the right teams ensuring customers are connected with the right experts for next steps.

This process helps ensure that every customer receives timely support from the right experts, keeping momentum high and making every conversation as valuable as possible. This automated flow has made it easier to follow up efficiently and be confident that our customers feel fully supported and have the best experience.

Driving Operational Excellence

A large part of my role is improving business performance across our range of products and identify what delivers the best results. With so many initiatives happening across Western Europe, it can be challenging to measure the impact on the market.

The data I need to do this sits across different platforms. This can make it challenging to get a clear, integrated view of our overall performance. This is another example where Agents can help. With autonomous agents, I can connect our marketing KPIs with real-time sales pipeline data from our CRM, bringing together these critical metrics in a single view.

What really sets the agent apart, is its ability to proactively generate insights from the data it analyses. So, while a standard dashboard provides a static overview of information, an agent can predict trends or highlight opportunities in a fraction of the time it would take for manual analysis.

Building a culture of trust with seamless information checks 

At Microsoft, trust is foundational to everything we do. In my role, I aim to help our teams incorporate trust and data governance & compliance into every decision and process, ensuring that we maintain the highest standards across our operations. Using Copilot and Agents directly in Teams allow us to centralize key resources from various sites and documents, including our Legal Information and Branding Guidelines.

With these agents, my team can quickly and easily check that all actions align with Microsoft’s guidelines before launching a campaign or reaching out to customers. This streamlined access reinforces a culture of responsibility and trust, enabling our teams to act confidently and in alignment with our shared values. By embedding these resources directly into our workflows, we’re building a foundation of trust and accountability that empowers us to serve our customers with integrity.

Measuring the impact of AI tools

Microsoft Copilot and Agents have transformed the way I work. They allow me to stay connected across teams, make informed decisions with ease, and drive a culture of trust and accountability.

But how do I understand the impact of AI adoption?

Answering this question effectively helps us make strategic adjustments to boost the return on our AI investment and amplify its impact in areas already showing strong results. It also plays a key role in securing support from leaders, peers, and colleagues.

Copilot Analytics can help visualize the impact of AI adoption across the company, including usage, productivity and satisfaction metrics of the agents themselves. This way, it is possible to create Business Impact Reports that offer clear insights into how AI is driving tangible business results in the company, and evaluate how AI is impacting key functions in the business such as Sales, Service, Finance, and Marketing.

By having A and B groups (one using Copilot for a specific task and one not) we are able to see exactly what the impact is. We can then repeat this style of test to optimize how we are using Copilot in our teams.

The results of these tests whether it is through usage metrics, organization wide surveys and / or customer analysis, we are able to identify shifts in performance and adjust our strategies in real time, helping us stay agile and competitive.

As customers zero, at Microsoft, we have seen Copilot accelerating deal velocity, pipeline growth and close rates in our Sales department. In Marketing, we’ve seen AI influencing engagement rates, campaign creation timelines, and conversion metrics. These metrics have help translate AI tools into tangible business results and shown a clear ROI.

In Sales we observed 9.4% higher revenue per seller, helping to increase the pipeline and deal velocity and improve pipe conversion rates. And for Marketing, AI accelerated digital campaign creation processes from 12 weeks to 3 weeks, contributing to a 4.75x increase in engagement and a 21.5% increase in conversion rates on Azure.com

Copilot Analytics is also helping Service teams to measure the speed and quality of customer interactions and in Finance, it is showing how AI is reducing manual tasks, improving reporting accuracy, or enhancing forecasting capabilities.

By providing a consolidated view of these metrics, Copilot Analytics helps organizations not only measure ROI but also pinpoint where Copilot is delivering value and where it can go further. It enables leaders to make data-informed decisions about scaling AI adoption, adjusting strategies, or reallocating resources to maximize impact.

Having access to these insights ensures that AI isn’t just integrated into operations – it’s aligned with broader business goals, driving both innovation and efficiency across the organization.

I am truly excited about the power of Copilot and Agents in revolutionizing the way we work and their ability to empower every person and every organization in the world to achieve more.