When someone in the UK dials 999 for an ambulance, their focus is understandably on when help will arrive. Less visible is the planning, training, analysis and coordination that happen long before a paramedic reaches the patient.

“We all think about the ambulance when it’s on scene, but there’s so much that happens before that goes on before an ambulance crew even arrives with a patient,” says James Goulding, chief clinical information officer at Yorkshire Ambulance Service (YAS) NHS Trust. YAS is one of 200 plus trusts, or organizational units, of the UK’s National Health Service.

That preparation includes planning services, recruiting and training staff, analyzing population health data and understanding the experiences of patients who do not speak English fluently.

Following an earlier trial involving 30,000 employees, NHS England announced plans in June 2026 to make Microsoft Copilot available to as many as 505,000 clinicians and support staff. Participants in the trial reported saving an average of 43 minutes per working day — which adds up to about five weeks of time per person a year.

Dr. Alec Price-Forbes, national chief clinical information officer for NHS England, says that the NHS is still in many ways an analog system. “It’s critically important that we use the opportunity that we have in front of us to truly reimagine the NHS,” he says, “to reduce cognitive load and administrative burden for healthcare professionals, make sure they get a better experience and then are in the position to give the best quality care.”

AI and digital tools such as Microsoft Copilot can help sustain the NHS by reducing administrative burden, releasing clinical capacity and enabling more productive, connected and person-centered models of care.

Tom Smith sees that work from several angles. As an area operations manager for Yorkshire Ambulance Service, he oversees operational managers and frontline teams, plans staffing and specialist resources, and responds personally to significant incidents as a tactical commander. The service received about 1.25 million calls to its 999 number in the 2025-26 fiscal year.

“It’s everything and anything,” he says. “No day is the same.”

Smith also has to read and produce many reports. Microsoft Copilot does not make decisions for him, he says. Instead, it organizes information into a format he can review and interrogate using his operational expertise.

For Smith, who is dyslexic, that support extends beyond saving time. Writing an email can take longer when he begins to overthink the wording or spelling, he says. The ability to structure a draft, summarize a long report and ask follow-up questions helps “level the playing field” for him.

His experience comes as NHS England expands access to generative AI tools across the health service in England.

The NHS has put clear, strict safeguards around its use of Microsoft Copilot: it is only for administrative tasks, not clinical work, says Price-Forbes. The NHS is supporting its digital transformation with standards for clinical safety, information governance, cybersecurity, interoperability and real-world evaluation, with transparency and human oversight considered essential to maintaining the confidence of staff and the public.

Like healthcare systems in many countries, the NHS serves an aging population, and many patients have multiple chronic illnesses.

Price-Forbes says, “It means that we’ve got the opportunity to redesign because we just cannot continue with the old analog model of healthcare delivery. And this is a challenge across the globe. So we now need to redesign care around people and technology, digital and data, and AI is going to be the only way to create those new service models of care.”

“Artificial intelligence can transform the NHS — improving care, giving time back to staff and delivering greater value — but only if we turn ambition into trusted action at scale,” he says. “Proven tools, including Microsoft 365 Copilot, must move rapidly beyond isolated pilots and into everyday workflows wherever evidence shows they improve outcomes, productivity or staff experience.”

He says that this transformation goes beyond technology; it requires that work be redesigned so that AI can help clinicians amplify their expertise while relieving them of unnecessary burdens.

This will free “clinicians to focus on judgment, validation and human connection.”

He also says that trust is essential for success.

“Patients and staff must know when AI is being used, how it shapes decisions and where human oversight applies, with unambiguous accountability for consequential choices,” he says.

The challenge now is to use digital capability to redesign pathways, improve flow, support clinical decision-making and release capacity back into care, Price-Forbes says. That means moving at pace, but with discipline.

“Done well, AI will not replace the human heart of the NHS; it will protect it — strengthening decisions, restoring time for care and helping create a safer, more personal and sustainable health service. The world has changed. We’ve got to create a digital front door for the NHS.”

Samantha Robinson, chief digital information officer at Yorkshire Ambulance Service, is responsible for helping information move between frontline teams, local operations and the wider NHS.

Copilot “gives us that ability to join dots that we wouldn’t see ourselves without a laborious several hours’ worth of trawling through data reports and trying to look at common themes,” she says.

The NHS’s information flows in all directions, Robinson says. She may need to turn operational information from across the ambulance service into a briefing for senior NHS leaders. At other times, she must translate national guidance into clear, practical instructions for different teams. Copilot can help produce a first draft, which Robinson and her colleagues review and adapt for the intended audience.

“We have a huge amount of data and information that we need to get out to our staff, frontline crew and contact center about how the NHS is performing,” Robinson says. Copilot helps turn that material into “really digestible information and in a way everyone can understand.”

That information matters when staff are considering how to connect patients with the most appropriate care. Not every patient attended by an ambulance needs to be taken to an emergency department. Depending on their condition, some people may be treated safely at home or referred to another service.

Yorkshire Ambulance Service is introducing a program with community teams, including a transfer-of-care hub that arranges for home care and referral pathways for patients who need non-urgent types of treatment. The aim is to support patients in the most appropriate setting while reducing avoidable pressure on emergency departments.

“We’re trying to get our conveyance to the emergency department down to 50%,” Smith says. Progress is being made; Copilot has helped Yorkshire Ambulance Service to collate the data and understand where opportunities could be, which has supported an improvement from 60% to 56% conveyance today.

“How Copilot has helped me with that is really understanding the data, being able to share that data to different forums, to use it as a big of a sounding board as well,” he says. “Like, ‘if we did this, what do you think the impact would be?’”

As a result, team members have better information to inform decisions about patient pathways.

“The big bit is getting the best patient outcome,” Smith says. “That’s what we’re really trying to drive.”