Workers in all kinds of roles and industries count on Copilot to do more — in less time
Veterinarians are spending more time with pets and less time typing notes. Factory workers are “talking” to their machines to diagnose problems faster. Employees in all sorts of roles and industries are getting help organizing their daily work lives so they’re not as overwhelmed by the demands of their jobs.
Less than two years after generative AI entered the public arena, 75% of the companies in a recent global survey said they’re using the technology, and for every dollar they invest, they get back an average of nearly four times that amount.
People are turning to Microsoft 365 Copilot, the secure AI assistant built into the company’s products and services, and agents, developed on Microsoft Azure OpenAI, to spark new ideas and assist with time-consuming and tedious tasks — freeing them up to do more interesting projects and make better decisions.
Here’s a look at some surprising ways Copilot and agents are helping people in finance, sales, manufacturing, veterinary medicine and other fields do more each day at work.
Speeding up shopfloor operations at Siemens
Markus Hermann, a process engineer at the Siemens Electronics Factory in Erlangen, Germany, uses a generative AI-powered assistant to help his team “talk” to the 16 soldering machines they’re responsible for operating and maintaining.
The complex machines often give cryptic error codes that are hard for the operators to understand, let alone resolve. Siemens Industrial Copilot for Operations,which the company developed with Microsoft, translates the messages into natural language and even suggests solutions based on a specific machine’s details and history. It does that by combing through machine data and information in about 600 documents, manuals, spare parts lists and more in its database to find relevant information, something that could take an operator hours to do.
The service technicians, engineers and operators type their questions into tablets, in German,right on the shop floor, and “it doesn’t always give a perfect answer right away, but it points you in the right direction so you don’t have to grope in the dark,” Hermann says. “Now we can first ask Industrial Copilot for help, as a nice colleague, and it helps us identify errors and solve them faster.”
The time savings for the operators themselves are significant but not the point, Hermann says.
“In the manufacturing environment, the most important thing is that the production machines run again as quickly as possible, because otherwise you might have 10 people down the line standing idle, waiting,” he says. “If I can get a machine back up and running even 10 minutes sooner, that’s a significant savings.”
“Crib notes” are popular at CarMax
Microsoft 365 Copilot helped Dianna Dees return to work after a brain injury.
As a senior enterprise architect for application systems at CarMax, Dees has a very technical job, ensuring all the used-car retailer’s services — sales listings, financing options, vehicle inspections and more — connect seamlessly for customers and employees. She meets with more than 100 product teams around the U.S. and is constantly summarizing, simplifying and sharing complex matters. “It’s a lot of cognitive switching and cognitive load,” she says. But the 60-year-old has been working in tech since she was 15 and loves it.
After Dees suffered a hemorrhagic stroke at the beginning of 2024, she worried the complicated job would overwhelm her recovering brain. CarMaxwas testing Microsoft 365 Copilot with a few employees, and Dees was offered the tool to see if it might help.
In one meeting, Dees says, there were 22 people talking about a certain process. Copilot’s transcription helped her keep track, and she asked it clarifying questions afterward and had it provide a summary with action items for coworkers. Her “crib notes for executives” got so popular, she says, that colleagues clamored for Copilot too. The tool organizes the reports, and Dees fact-checks them, adding a “Generated by AI and updated by Dianna” tagline.
“I’m very excited, kind of like back in the day when we very first got Excel,” Dees says. “I do believe this type of technology is going to change the way the world looks at things and how we conduct meetings.”
Pedal to the metal at Finastra
Joerg Klueckmann loves mountain biking in Germany’s Saarland region, so his favorite thing about Microsoft 365 Copilot is that it helps him get off his chair and back on two wheels faster.
Klueckmann is the head of corporate marketing and communications at Finastra, a global financial services company. His team recently launched a global campaign on the topic of open finance, an effort aimed at supporting positive societal change, in part by enabling new financial ecosystems. He had grand plans for web pages, white papers, e-books, explainer videos, social media posts and more but realized all of that would take at least six months to put together.
His team turned to Copilot to transcribe, summarize and sort through interviews with 50 people about open finance and then to repurpose the interviews for different campaign elements. They got their message out in just a month and a half, cementing the company’s lead in the market.
The speedy launch freed the team to come up with other creative concepts, like a coffee-table book about open finance to send to analysts and thought leaders. Then they used Copilot within the Power BI platform to get insights into each campaign’s performance.
“Relieve people from routine tasks, and they have more time to be innovative,” Klueckmann says. “We were faster than our competitors, we created relevant content, we pushed it out, we got a lot of response and engagement, and we’re dominating that space. And now, I can hop on my bike and ride off.”
Climbing JLL’s ranks with Copilot
Matthew Sweiss counts on Microsoft 365 Copilot to help him make an impact with professional, clear and compelling communications in his work evaluating real estate for institutional investors.
Sweiss, an associate vice president on the U.S. acquisitions team at LaSalle Investment Management, a subsidiary of JLL Inc. in Chicago, is constantly screening potential real-estate opportunities and pitching deals. That entails a flurry of “pretty dense” emails involving a lot of stakeholders, he says, along with overviews and proposals in the form of Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations. Copilot’s summaries help keep him up to speed on where things stand and what the nuances are.
Sweiss also runs text through the tool to help improve clarity and professional tone. “Our team isn’t just putting blocks of facts together,” he says, “we’re trying to convey a certain message about the deal and convince individuals to see why we think it’s a good deal. So how you say that message matters.”
As a newly minted manager, Sweiss uses Copilot’s coaching tool to communicate better. “This is the first experience I’ve had managing people,” Sweiss says, “and I want to make sure I’m conscious not just of what I’m saying but how I say it.
“As someone looking to continue to climb the ranks, a tool that helps me to present well and get my message across effectively and efficiently will help me achieve my long-term objectives.”
AI working for vets to help the UK’s pets
Dr. Samantha Butler-Davies, the veterinary services director for Pets at Home, sees the customized agent her company built with Power Apps, Azure AI studio and Copilot Studio as a helpful productivity tool for highly skilled practice owners and their teams.
The U.K. company’s veterinary arm, Vets for Pets, partners with 450 veterinary owners, with many clinics located within their pet stores. Butler-Davies leads the clinical team supporting those vets and says she started feeling “incredibly intrigued” about generative AI last year — albeit cautiously, knowing veterinary medicine is both science and art with clinical work that can’t be replaced by technology.
Administrative tasks such as drafting notes for clinical records are necessary but time-intensive, she says, so a boost in efficiency allows longer interactions with pets. The new tool not only records and transcribes during exams but also pulls out pertinent points, creating a document a vet can review and edit, rather than have to draft from scratch. That takes pressure off vets and lets them focus on conversations with clients.
The tool, used in a Pets at Home trial, has been especially helpful for colleagues with neurodiversity, such as dyslexia. “Their notes have gone to another level now,” she says, “and they get to describe things how they always wanted to.”
With digitally connected clinics, Butler-Davies can have the AI assistant monitor for any developing trends and potential causes, such as localized disease outbreaks. “It’s the eyes and ears that would take significant human resource to pull together,” she says.
Goodbye sticky notes, hello Copilot
Lisette Arocha finds that generative AI tools can make technology more accessible and inclusive.
With a background in software engineering, Arocha now leads digital accessibility testing and remediation projects at PwC,a network of firms providing audit, tax and consulting services. She handles a lot of conflicting priorities as a senior manager, leading a global team of 15 people. While Arocha says she excels with strategic planning, her neurodivergence sometimes means she struggles with initiating projects and completing repetitive or tedious tasks.
She used to post sticky notes everywhere to help her keep track. Now she uses Microsoft 365 Copilot as a sort of executive assistant to help organize her work, sort through and summarize emails, prioritize tasks, take notes during meetings so she can focus on what’s being said, and remind her of pertinent details related to her job — and to do it all in a way that matches her “really direct” communication style. In dealing with others, though, she uses the tool to check her tone in emails and help her soften her language if needed.
“It makes work more delightful and reduces the anxiety and task paralysis that we neurodivergent people face,” she says. “It’s definitely made me feel more empowered. It gives me more time to focus on those big-picture things, and that’s the core of where I do my best work.”
Payroll prowess with Copilot for Finance
As a finance transformation leader, Aruna Natarajan says she makes it a point to “walk the talk and experiment with AI anywhere and everywhere possible.” That has extended to exploring new capabilities with Microsoft 365 Copilot for Finance.
Natarajan is a chartered accountant in Bangalore and a finance domain expert, leading financial transformation for the past five years — and she has incorporated generative AI into her work over the last year and a half. She’s now the transformation leader for the internal finance function team atGenpact, a global professional services firm that focuses on business process management and IT services.
Natarajan is helping the company’s payroll operations team test Copilot for Finance. They’ve found that it cuts in half the time it takes to run checks across large data sets and generate summaries, she says, to allow them to focus more on “troubleshooting the gaps or outliers that are so critical to tax and regulatory compliance.”
The new tool, she says, “offers a user-friendly interface, empowering users to easily dive in and experiment with diverse use cases that can reveal exciting new possibilities in financial operations.”
Lead image: Top row: Joerg Klueckmann of Finastra, Lisette Arocha of PwC and Markus Hermann of Siemens; Bottom row: Matthew Sweiss of JLL’s LaSalle Investment Management, Aruna Natarajan of Genpact, Samantha Butler-Davies of Pets at Home and Dianna Dees of CarMax. Illustrations by Santiago y Nicolas.