Accenture is rolling out Copilot to a workforce the size of Denver. Here’s how they’re doing it.

From the start, Leraris says, Accenture realized the importance of tailoring its approach for different

audiences. “You can’t take a one-size-fits-all message into adoption,” he says. “We really had to demonstrate to certain people, especially leaders, how to use the tool and what the value would be specifically for them.”

That approach was affirmed by the data. In one tranche of roughly 200,000 licenses, monthly active Copilot usage reached 89%. In a survey of those same employees, 84% said they would “deeply miss” the tool if it were gone. “If Microsoft 365 Copilot weren’t delivering real value, our people simply wouldn’t be using it – our high adoption rate is what shows us that there is value,” Leraris says. “That’s what led us to continue deploying Copilot to more people.”

For Accenture’s marketing organization, Copilot has become part of the daily creative and communications workflows. Jason Warnke leads Accenture’s global Marketing + Communications Experiences (M+Cx) team of writers, designers and video producers supporting marketing and communications efforts. Maintaining a consistent approach at that scale, he says, is a challenge.

“One of the things that’s massively important in a global organization like ours is consistency of message,” says Warnke. “Before Copilot, teams would create something, it would go through a lot of review cycles, and then somebody in another part of the world would say, ‘That’s not how we talk about it.’” Now, writers routinely use Copilot to draft, revise and check content against existing materials, helping ensure new work aligns with how Accenture has talked about the same topics in the past. Teams also use Copilot to identify parallel efforts across the organization – reducing duplication that previously only surfaced by chance.

Designers and marketers use Copilot to generate early concepts and create assets aligned with Accenture’s brand guidelines. Having the company’s brand kit embedded in Copilot makes even noncreative teams more comfortable producing branded materials such as client presentation decks on their own, Warnke says. “It gives people a serious leg up on generating something in the flow of work that represents the brand.”

Copilot has also enabled marketers to tackle work they previously wouldn’t have attempted, such as drafting storyboards before involving video teams.

That shift moves work upstream, Warnke says, simplifying collaboration and expanding what employees feel comfortable doing. “People are now confident enough to say, ‘Hey, I just asked Copilot, it gave me a great idea,’ and then speak up,” he says. “Once people understood not just what Copilot does, but how it works, what it has access to – that was a major unlock for confidence.”

Rosowsky, who describes herself as “not a technical person,” was struck to find herself and her less techsavvy colleagues creating AI agents and building work processes with Copilot. “It’s surprising to see people in non-technical roles all across Accenture using it in pretty technical ways, trying different things that might be outside of their wheelhouse and using it to change the way we work,” she says.

A survey of Accenture’s M+Cx team found that 93% are using Copilot and 87% are satisfied with it. For Warnke, the biggest surprise has been the lasting enthusiasm about Copilot. “I thought that would go away, but it’s sustained,” he says. “We see it on every call: ‘Hey, did you guys know you can prompt Copilot this way? Did you know that you can do this?’ People are hungry to share the cool stuff that they found and are using Copilot for.”

As the rollout expanded, leaders at Avanade, the 25-year-old consulting and technology services joint venture between Accenture and Microsoft, saw an opportunity to use AI and Copilot to deliver more customer–focused sales insights, helping sellers engage with greater relevance and precision.

Avanade’s sales innovation team built an AIpowered sales intelligence solution known as D3 (for Data Driven Decisions) that aggregates proprietary internal data, industry context and external sources to build a comprehensive picture of a customer’s business. Copilot powers the AI intelligence and the conversational agent that sellers engage with, delivering in seconds the kind of research that once took days or weeks.

Avanade has rolled out the new tool to 25% of its sellers, and the early data is promising: Active users are generating 43% more sales opportunities than colleagues not using the tool, the company found.

Sellers pair the agent with shared Copilot notebooks that include presentations, call transcripts and

notes, creating a living knowledge base shared across account teams. These learnings will be crucial as D3 is made available to the rest of Avanade’s global sales team. “It’s about bringing content and context to the conversation,” says Avanade Vice President and U.S. Sales Lead Harry Holstrom. “That’s hard to do. It takes a lot of research. It used to take a lot of time looking through [SEC-required] 8-K and 10-K reports, company websites, understanding the industry, and understanding the Microsoft footprint. The tool now does that for you, so you can focus on the narrative. That allows us to scale and move quickly and be much more effective in those client conversations.”

Gord Mawhinney, Avanade’s Americas President and U.S. General Manager, says D3 makes it possible to engage meaningfully with thousands of potential customers, something that was impractical to sustain and scale with manual research. “With D3 and with Copilot, we are able to scale even more rapidly and bring our clients valuable insights on day one,” he says. The tool has also elevated junior sellers, Holstrom says, giving employees with just a year or two of experience the confidence to operate

Number of people to whom Accenture is deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot

Proportion of Accenture employees who say they would “deeply miss” Microsoft 365 Copilot if it were gone.

Number of countries in which Accenture operates

Proportion of employees reported completing routine tasks 15 times faster with Copilot

More sales opportunities being generated at Microsoft and Accenture co-venture Avanade by users of Microsoft 365 Copilot than non-users

Proportion of Accenture employees with Copilot licenses that use the tool on a regular basis

at a far higher level. “They come across in their emails like people with 20 years’ experience, thanks in no small part to the D3 tool and the framework we’ve set up around it,” he says.

While Accenture’s change management and adoption efforts played a major role in driving Copilot usage, Leraris says that the tool’s deep integration into Microsoft 365 was also a factor.

Accenture is technology-agnostic, working across multiple platforms rather than aligning itself with one vendor. Leraris pointed to Copilot’s multimodal architecture – drawing on both OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude – as a factor in Accenture’s decision to adopt the platform. Another consideration was that Copilot is embedded in the tools employees were already using. “Accenture people work in Microsoft platforms every day for a significant part of their day,” he says. “What we want is the generative AI to meet the employee in the flow of their work, instead of creating separate destinations for people to go to.”

Copilot’s ability to reason over data stored in SharePoint and OneDrive was also key. Accenture is among the world’s largest users of those systems, Leraris says, with 24 petabytes of data. Enterprise privacy and security controls were equally important, allowing Accenture to test new features with small groups and disable capabilities that run afoul of local regulations. “We have an amazing amount of granularity of control, which gives us flexibility to have new features available to different parts of our workforce at different times.”

Accenture’s Copilot rollout continues to evolve as new features arrive and teams find new ways to work with it. But one lesson has anchored the deployment from the start. “Real value from AI investments like Copilot doesn’t come from simply turning it on,” says Leraris. “It comes from investing in your people – helping them understand how to use it, how to trust it and how it fits into the way they work. Lead with people, and Copilot becomes a catalyst for reinvention – that’s when you start to see real, measurable impact.” ●