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

Deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot to 20,000 employees might sound like a big undertaking, but Accenture was just getting started.

The global professional services firm is rolling out Copilot across its workforce to around 743,000 people – the equivalent of a city roughly the size of Denver. It’s the largest enterprise Copilot deployment to date, according to Microsoft, and Accenture says it’s paying off.

Ninety-seven percent of employees reported completing routine tasks 15 times faster with Copilot and 53% reported significant improvements in productivity and efficiency, according to 2025 company data involving 200,000 users.

“Copilot is a personal digital colleague,” says Tony Leraris, Accenture’s chief information officer. “It changes the way our people work, the way they research, ideate, analyze and execute many daily activities.”

The scale of Accenture’s Copilot deployment is striking – as is how the company has approached it. Accenture moved intentionally, starting with a large group, then extending that deployment even wider. Every step of the way was an opportunity to learn, set guardrails and understand how Copilot was changing the way people worked before continuing further.

A people-first strategy

Accenture began its Copilot deployment in August 2023, shortly after Microsoft unveiled the tool. It was important to enable employees with Copilot quickly, Leraris says, so they could learn new ways of working, share them with colleagues and talk knowledgably with clients about Copilot’s capabilities.

The rollout started with a pilot involving a few hundred senior leaders and select employees, then scaled up to 20,000 users. During that time, Accenture focused on its data strategy, data governance, access controls and, critically, understanding how people were actually using Copilot in tools like Outlook, Teams and Word.

“We were fine-tuning our adoption strategy and developing a blueprint for how it would be used in daily work,” Leraris says.

That was no small task for a company that employs around 780,000 people worldwide and operates in more than 120 countries.

Accenture’s Copilot adoption expanded in phases. The effort was driven by a highly tailored change management and adoption program that included one-on-one training with leaders, regular communications highlighting new features and use cases, group training sessions and active participation on Viva Engage – a social networking app built into Teams and Microsoft 365 – where employees shared how they were using Copilot day to day and provided support to new users.

‘A major unlock’

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, has long been 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 non-creative 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 tech-savvy 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.”

Serving customers at scale

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 AI-powered 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 knowledgebase 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 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.