The UK government recently released an interesting report on their cross-department adoption and usage of M365 Copilot with some interesting results. It was an experiment that ran for 3 months across 20,000 government employees (Sept 24 - Dec 24) with a goal to understand how AI could impact productivity and you can see it in its original form here
Top-Level Insights
Average Time Saved: Users reported saving an average of 26 minutes per day using M365 Copilot—equivalent to 13 working days per year.
High Adoption: 80% of the 20,000 participants actively used Copilot, with Teams and Outlook being the most used applications.
Positive Sentiment: 82% of users did not want to return to pre-Copilot workflows. Satisfaction and recommendation scores were 7.7 and 8.2 out of 10, respectively.
So generally, a lot of improvement and positivity from its use which is pretty cool to see. I thought it was interesting to note that senior civil servants saw the least benefits, which suggests perhaps that AI is the tide that raises all ships and also perhaps those more senior had less time to get engaged with newer tech or even perhaps less inclined to adapt to using AI in work they have been doing for a long time already - change is hard.
The report highlights some areas that were a bit of a challenge, none really surprising:
Complex Tasks: Copilot struggled with nuanced, context-heavy, or sensitive tasks (e.g., policy analysis, grievance handling).
Training Needs: Users needed time and support to learn effective prompting and usage patterns.
Inconsistent Experience: Variability in rollout and support across departments affected adoption and outcomes.
Tool Evolution: Mid-experiment updates (e.g., Copilot Agents) were not fully evaluated but generated strong interest.
My Thoughts
I thought this was interesting to see Teams and Word had the highest adoption of M365 Copilot. Teams makes a lot of sense since users probably spend a large portion of their time there.
Overall, the findings seem to suggest that AI had strong impact here, especially as adoption grew. I like that the UK Government is leaning strongly into AI and their AI playbook is well worth a read.
This recent article in New Scientist highlights how the UK tech secretary uses ChatGPT through a Freedom of Information request to see his prompts. I, for one, am glad to see someone who is responsible for leading the charge on technology is actively engaging with it, even if some of the prompts are not that ground-breaking. We are still at the frontier of this and we need to push the boundaries in many capacities.