By Vara Kumar Namburu, Co-founder & Head of R&D and Solutions, Whatfix

What would happen if organizations could transform every employee interaction with technology into actionable intelligence? The numbers tell a compelling story: businesses prioritizing data-driven employee experience initiatives achieve 25% higher profitability and 1.8x greater revenue growth than their peers. This isn’t coincidental—it’s the measurable impact of understanding how employees engage with digital tools and removing barriers that stand between them and peak performance.

The untapped potential of employee experience analytics represents both opportunity and challenge. While 80% of executives recognize EX as crucial to organizational success, far fewer have successfully connected their investments in employee technology to concrete business outcomes. The gap lies not in intention but in execution—specifically, in the ability to measure, analyze, and optimize the digital employee journey.

Stop Guessing the Silent Struggles

Organizations pursuing excellence in employee experience face a fundamental question: how do we know our EX initiatives are working? Traditional approaches relying on periodic surveys and anecdotal feedback provide only partial answers, often arriving too late to drive meaningful change.

Product analytics changes this equation by providing real-time visibility into employee interactions with digital tools. This visibility transforms abstract concepts like “employee satisfaction” into concrete metrics that directly connect to business performance.

Effective measurement frameworks track indicators across three critical dimensions: user engagement metrics, efficiency metrics, and business impact metrics. This multi-dimensional approach ensures that EX improvements translate directly to bottom-line results that executives and stakeholders can understand and support.

Breaking the Reactive IT Support Cycle

Most IT organizations operate in a perpetual cycle of reacting to reported issues. Product analytics enables a fundamental shift from reactive support to proactive optimization. By uncovering friction points and inefficiencies in real time, teams can streamline workflows, reduce time spent on manual investigations, and make data-driven improvements faster. This not only enhances user experience but also boosts overall process efficiency across the organization.

Real-World Proof: Analytics that Drive Value

One of the world’s largest automotive services and technology providers faced challenges after consolidating multiple business units onto Salesforce. Their CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote) process became increasingly complex, leading to usability issues and delays. Native analytics fell short, offering limited visibility into user behavior across managed packages like CPQ.

Whatfix Product Analytics changed that. With no-code instrumentation and powerful funnel analysis, the company was able to track how users interacted with CPQ workflows in real time. They identified bottlenecks, high drop-off points, and common errors during quote creation. Smart Tips were added to guide users, reducing submission errors and improving task completion times.

This resulted in improved process adherence, data consistency across regions, simplified compliance monitoring, and unified reporting on usage and performance for all stakeholders.

Feedback Loops That Multiply ROI

Organizations that achieve lasting success with product analytics go beyond isolated insights to create systematic feedback loops that drive continuous improvement. Enterprises with mature product analytics feedback loops achieve 3.2x greater ROI on technology investments compared to those with ad-hoc improvement processes. With the right data, enterprise IT can make smarter, more strategic decisions about what to build next, ensuring that each product enhancement compounds on the last, making every investment more impactful than the one before.

The impact extends beyond internal operations to customer-facing metrics. Per McKinsey’s latest report on ‘Superagency in the workplace: Empowering people to unlock AI’s full potential’, companies that improve internal technology experiences see corresponding improvements in customer satisfaction (22% increase), service quality (18% improvement), and revenue growth (11% acceleration). This correlation makes intuitive sense: when employees spend less time wrestling with tools, they can focus more energy on creating value for customers.

Using Analytics to Build an Intelligent Enterprise

A new era of employee experience is here. It is defined by data, measurement, and continuous optimization, rather than assumptions or intuition. At the center of this shift is Product Analytics, a strategic capability that provides clear, actionable insights into how employees interact with digital tools, where friction points arise, and how to improve the journey at every step.

When deeply integrated with Digital Adoption Platforms, advanced analytics tools take this even further. Enterprises can now use these insights to create highly personalized user experiences through DAP capabilities. Analytics no longer stops at capturing insights. It now drives immediate action, without a single line of code or dependence on long IT release cycles.

Leading enterprises are embracing Product Analytics to connect the digital employee experience directly to business outcomes. They are building self-sustaining feedback loops that fuel continuous innovation by pinpointing what works, identifying inefficiencies, and surfacing user challenges in real time, Guesswork is being replaced with a new mindset: measure, act, and iterate.

The ability to quantify the impact of every employee interaction with technology turns employee experience into a board-level priority. Whether it’s reducing support costs, boosting productivity, or accelerating adoption of critical tools, the business value is both immediate and scalable.

The path forward is clear. Product Analytics transforms employee experience from a soft metric into a competitive advantage. Companies that operationalize this intelligence will not only future-proof their workforce but will also define what the intelligent enterprise of tomorrow looks like.

This story reflects updated guidance from Microsoft Digital—it was first published in 2024.

Effective adoption doesn’t happen by accident.

It takes a coordinated effort that includes executive sponsorship, education, engagement, measurement, and more. When you deploy a next-generation AI technology like Microsoft 365 Copilot that introduces whole new ways of working, getting that process right is especially important.

Fortunately, Microsoft Viva provides a powerful suite of tools that are well suited to support our internal Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption.

New ways of working demand a modern approach to adoption

Microsoft 365 Copilot is an entirely new concept in workplace technology. Still, some adoption principles hold true no matter the tool you’re adopting.

“For any adoption strategy, the first thing we look at is the behavioral change we’re really trying to drive,” says David Laves, a director of business programs in Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization. “We’re looking for the key messages and value-added scenarios that will really stoke excitement for our users.”

From there, we strategize the vectors that will be most effective.

It starts with an assessment that identifies the key parameters of the change. That includes several questions. Who’s impacted? How extensive is the change? What are the barriers? What are the benefits? And most importantly, what’s in it for the individual user?

“It can be a challenge to get access to our entire user base because of competing priorities,” says Kevin Wooldridge, a senior director of Experiences and Devices in Microsoft Digital. “Everyone has their own business goals and metrics they need to hit, and they need to know how Copilot will specifically improve their lives.”

The sheer size of our Copilot adoption efforts—early this year we completed a company-wide rollout stretching across all 300,000 Microsoft employees and vendors—meant that any change management efforts needed to operate at a massive scale while accounting for a phased approach that included pilot programs and organization-by-organization activations.

“Take the Greater China region as an example,” says Kai Cheng, business program manager for Microsoft 365 Copilot in Microsoft Digital. “We have around 19,000 employees and vendors in our region, working across thirteen different organizations, so communication is always a big challenge for us.”

Driving Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption using Microsoft Viva

Our approach to deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot focuses on three main objectives:

Raise awareness and educate: We’re helping our employees build critical AI skills, learn about Copilot capabilities, and inform them about the elements of AI and other Copilot experiences they can start using today.

We’re helping our employees build critical AI skills, learn about Copilot capabilities, and inform them about the elements of AI and other Copilot experiences they can start using today. Drive excitement and user engagement: We’re building excitement and confidence in employees’ ability to use Copilot by offering specific scenarios to help them understand responsible and effective AI use.

We’re building excitement and confidence in employees’ ability to use Copilot by offering specific scenarios to help them understand responsible and effective AI use. Encourage feedback and track adoption: We’re gathering feedback and monitoring progress through both self-reporting and monitoring tools to understand opportunities for further growth.

Microsoft Viva provides ample opportunities to approach these goals across multiple apps. Two different aspects of the suite deliver a powerful advantage for change management at scale. First, Viva’s multimodality accommodates a diverse range of employee preferences for communication and engagement. Second, it offers opportunities for decentralized sponsorship and peer-to-peer support, giving organizational leaders and employee champions the chance to drive role-specific value for their colleagues.

“Copilot is a very new technology,” Cheng says. “As an employee, all the people you work with are experimenting at the same time, so it’s very easy for us to use Viva to build a social learning culture where people can grow together.”

We execute against our adoption goals by working according to Prosci’s ADKAR method, which breaks down into the five iterative stages of awareness, desire, knowledge, ability, and reinforcement. Different Viva apps have different roles in that model.

Accelerating Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption with Viva

Viva Connections Sharing key news related to deployment and enablement, generating “buzz,” and tying Copilot to Microsoft culture. Viva Amplify Producing and efficiently distributing employee communications to build awareness and excitement. Viva Learning Courses and training for our employees on how to maximize value from Copilot, inclusive of building effective prompts. Viva Engage Actively engaging employees, providing leader updates, listening to feedback, and enabling Champs community. Viva Insights Using the Microsoft Copilot Dashboard to identity actionable insights and usage trends. Viva Pulse Instant feedback from employees on their Copilot experience to fine-tune our landing and adoption approach. Viva Glint Understanding employee sentiment and gauging the overall effectiveness of our Copilot deployment effort.

Viva Amplify

A robust communication strategy includes both centralized, company-wide messaging and executive sponsorship. Leadership from within individual business groups, regional subsidiaries, and teams offers employees a familiar, trusted voice and tailors adoption efforts to specific organizational priorities and ways of working.

Viva Amplify is the ideal tool for these kinds of communications. Internally, we use it to distribute turnkey assets executive sponsors can use to promote awareness and desire.

“With Viva Amplify, we can run campaigns using templates,” Wooldridge says. “So, we save lots of productivity time for executives and their managers because we’ve created pre-packaged communications they can adapt to their organizations’ needs.”

This approach has been so effective internally that we’ve created a Copilot Deployment Kit for our customers to use in Viva Amplify. It provides a pre-built campaign, a brief to outline of the overall strategy, and tools for reporting and measuring success.

Viva Learning

David Laves (left to right), Tanya Roberts, and Kevin Wooldridge are part of the Microsoft Digital team driving company-wide Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption using Microsoft Viva, while Ju Bu and Kai Cheng support adoption efforts in the Greater China Region.

Building knowledge and ability are crucial, and Viva Learning is our workhorse app for equipping employees with Copilot know-how. It’s especially useful for employees who prefer self-directed, asynchronous, or gamified learning over facilitated training. It was an essential inclusion in our initial readiness communications, giving employees an early look at Copilot capabilities and providing preliminary skilling opportunities.

“Viva Learning made it possible to pick and choose the most frequently viewed or used learning assets across several different categories,” says Ju Bu, business program manager for Microsoft Digital in our Greater China Region. “For example, you can pull together pieces about working with content in Word, PowerPoint, or Outlook, and package that material into a unified learning path.”

The ability in Viva Learning to both create instructional modules and pull them in from different sources made assembling a Copilot learning path straightforward and easy to adapt as the technology grew. Out of that internal experience, we constructed the Microsoft Copilot Academy, now available to our customers.

Viva Engage

Of all the apps in the suite, Viva Engage has been the most impactful by far. It taps into the peer-to-peer support and role-based specificity that employees need for Copilot to drive value in their individual work. Like Viva Learning, it enhances employees’ knowledge and ability, just with a more relational, community-driven touch. It also ignites desire by showcasing how power users are saving time and maximizing productivity through AI.

For our Copilot adoption efforts, we leaned on our Copilot Champs Community—a dedicated group of more than 7,000 early adopters, AI enthusiasts, and peer leaders. Through community posts, ongoing conversations, and self-driven knowledge sharing in Viva Engage, their efforts turned into a powerful organic groundswell, with employees sharing prompts and advice on their own.

Viva Engage also gets to the heart of role-specific value. It enables peers who understand their colleagues’ work to share specific content with them that will help them do their jobs. It also eliminates bottlenecks associated with more broad-based communication models—for example, deploying centralized adoption communications to change cohorts containing thousands of employees and receiving overwhelming email responses.

“Between Viva Amplify and Viva Engage, these multiple touchpoints help employees tailor adoption content to their preferences,” Bu says. “It puts them at the center of our efforts because they can pick and choose the vectors that are most applicable to them.”

Viva Glint and Viva Pulse

Keeping our finger on the pulse of the user experience helps us reinforce usage and address any issues. Viva Glint and Viva Pulse help us uncover qualitative insights from employees through questionnaires and surveys.

Viva Glint provides change leaders with organization-wide, dashboard-based insights and analytics rooted in people science. Meanwhile, Viva Pulse provides opportunities for more rapid and localized feedback at the manager level.

“Any business transformation is a process of experimentation,” Laves says. “Glint and Pulse are our most powerful tools for capturing feedback to see how those experiments are progressing.”

Throughout our Copilot adoption process, we discovered which kinds of data are most valuable for transformation specialists and managers. Through those efforts, we assembled the Microsoft Copilot Impact survey templates for both Viva Pulse and Viva Glint.

These templates helped our internal teams gather user insights, opportunities for employee empowerment, Copilot’s impact on day-to-day work, and success stories. If you’re unsure of which qualitative data is most important or how to gather it, they’re a fantastic place to start.

Viva Insights

Effective adoption relies on robust measurement. When you combine qualitative and quantitative data, you get powerful results.

“What we try to do is marry what the user says through qualitative feedback with what they do through usage data and other metrics,” Laves says. “If users say they’re having pain, we want to see how that affects usage.”

Viva Insights enables this kind of visibility for both company-wide change leaders and more localized managers. At Microsoft, we’ve mostly used this tool to track usage across different apps like Word or Outlook. From there, we can return to Glint and Pulse to dig deeper into what’s happening.

Our internal efforts helped inform the Microsoft Copilot Dashboard powered by Viva Insights. This out-of-the-box feature provides privacy-protected data throughout every stage of your Copilot transformation journey and can help you understand its impact across meetings, email, chat, documents, search, and more.

Getting meta: Using Copilot to help us use Viva to drive Copilot adoption

Bringing Microsoft Viva and Microsoft 365 Copilot together has been a potent combination for us.

Kirk Koenigsbauer is chief operating officer of the Microsoft Experiences and Devices Group.

“Microsoft Viva is a powerful tool for fueling Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption,” says Kirk Koenigsbauer, chief operating officer of the Microsoft Experiences and Devices Group. “It gets to the core of AI adoption: enhancing people’s ability to work in new ways through genuine digital transformation that ensures you’re getting the return on investment you want.”

Getting a little meta with our Copilot adoption efforts, our change management professionals have been able to use Copilot in Viva to boost their Copilot adoption efforts.

Our team frequently leans on Copilot for help writing Viva Amplify and Viva Engage posts. Its translation abilities also make it much easier to disseminate communications to different disciplines or regions on a global scale

Writing support is just the beginning.

The skill of Copilot as an assistant with intelligent access to company data and repositories makes searching and summarization a breeze. In Viva Learning, change leaders can ask Copilot for tailored content suggestions. And when reviewing Viva Glint and Viva Pulse results, Copilot can pick out common themes or trends to help researchers understand usage and feedback more easily.

“Utilizing Copilot within Viva Engage helps employees uplevel their communications and increase their reach and impact. It encourages those who are more reluctant to post as now they have Copilot to help,” says Tanya Roberts, a PM in Microsoft Digital. “Some people don’t gravitate toward engagement forums, so bringing Copilot in to brainstorm different ways of activating employees is a real help.”

As a result, the engagement level within our Viva Engage Copilot Community has increased, and as such, is subsequently increasing the adoption of Copilot by embracing Copilot throughout Microsoft 365.

Different aspects of Microsoft Viva will be best suited for different employees, but the most important lesson has been that it isn’t just an HR or employee engagement suite. It’s a way to meet people where they work to drive organizational goals in the modality that works best for them.

The results for our Copilot adoption have been incredibly powerful. During a one-month Microsoft Viva campaign in the Greater China Region, we saw usage expand by as much as 20%. And that’s just one portion of our global workforce.

“If you’re really serious about Copilot usage in your company and environment, Viva is a powerful tool for accelerating adoption,” Koenigsbauer says. “It gets to the core of AI adoption: enhancing people’s ability to work in new ways through genuine digital transformation that ensures you’re getting the return on investment you want.”

Here are some tips on how to get started with using Microsoft Viva to help you deploy and drive adoption of Microsoft 365 Copilot: If you’re rolling Copilot out to your audience, consider the hero scenarios that will work best for their roles, then provide thought starters.

This is as much a cultural change as it is a technical change. It’s important to work in partnership with HR and organizational leaders who understand their team culture, what they value, and their best communication channels.

Be sure you have readiness material prepared. When people start getting their licenses, they’ll be able to access learning opportunities and informational content so they can hit the ground running.

Take the opportunity to connect with employees genuinely by capturing two-way feedback around where the value is, where the opportunities are, and what blockers people are experiencing.

Take advantage of a diversified channel communication strategy as much as possible. It provides multiple touchpoints for employees to help land your change.

This story was first published in 2018. We periodically update our stories, but we can’t verify that they represent the full picture of our current situation at Microsoft. We leave them on the site so you can see what our thinking and experience was at the time.

We’re transforming our IT infrastructure management internally here at Microsoft.

At Microsoft Digital Employee Experience (MDEE), we’re embracing our digital transformation and the culture changes that come with it. With over 98 percent of our IT infrastructure in the cloud, we’re adopting Microsoft Azure monitoring, patching, backup, and security tools to create a customer-focused self-service management environment centered around Microsoft Azure DevOps and modern engineering principles. As we continue to benefit from the growing feature set of Azure management tools, we’ll deliver a fully automated, self-service management solution that gives us visibility over our entire IT environment.

The result?

Business groups at Microsoft will be able to adapt IT services to best fit their needs.

Digital transformation at Microsoft

Our MDEE team is a global IT organization that strives to meet Microsoft business needs. Microsoft Azure is the default platform for our IT infrastructure. We host 98 percent of our IT infrastructure in the cloud. Here are a few details:

More than 220,000 employees

150 countries

587 locations

1,400 Azure subscriptions

1,600 Azure-based applications

17,000 Azure infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) virtual machines

643,000 managed devices

Like most IT organizations, we have our roots in the datacenter. In the past, our traditional hosting services were mostly physical, on-premises environments that consisted of servers, storage, and network devices. Most of the devices were owned and maintained for specific business functions. Technologies were very diverse and needed people with specialized skills to design, deploy, and run them. Our achievements were limited by the time required to plan and implement the infrastructure to support the business.

As technology evolved, we began to move out of the datacenter and into the cloud. Cloud-based infrastructure created new opportunities for us and has transformed the IT infrastructure we manage. We continue to grow and adapt in a constantly changing IT landscape.

Traditional IT technologies, processes, and teams

Our traditional datacenters were managed by a legion of IT pros, who supported the diverse platforms and systems that made up our infrastructure. Physical servers, and later virtual servers, numbered in the tens of thousands, spanning multiple datacenters and comprising a mass of metal and silicon to be managed and maintained. Platform technologies ranged from Windows, SQL Server, BizTalk, and SharePoint farms to third-party solutions such as SAP and other information security-related tool sets. Server virtualization evolved from Hyper-V to System Center Virtual Machine Manager and System Center Orchestrator.

To provide a stable infrastructure, we used structured frameworks, such as IT Infrastructure Library/Managed Object Format (ITIL/MOF). Policies, processes, and procedures in the framework helped to enforce and control security and availability, and to prevent failures. Microsoft product engineering groups that used hosting services had a similar adoption process for their application and service needs, which were based on ITIL/MOF.

This model worked well for traditional IT infrastructure, but things began to change when cloud computing and Microsoft Azure began to influence the IT landscape.

Evolution of the hybrid cloud

As IT infrastructure and services began to move to the cloud, the nature of the cloud and how we treat it changed. We’ve now been hosting IT services in Microsoft Azure for a long time, and as Azure has evolved and grown, so has our engagement with Azure services and the volume of our IT services hosted in Azure.

Early Azure: IT-owned, IaaS, and lift-and-shift

In the early years, Microsoft Azure was IT only. We had full control of cloud development, implementation, and management. We could create and manage solutions in Azure, but it was a siloed service.

The infrastructure consisted primarily of IaaS virtual machines that hosted workloads in the cloud the same way that they hosted workloads in on-premises datacenters.

Efficiency gains were small and infrastructure management still used the same tools—sometimes hosted in the cloud and sometimes hosted on-premises and connected to the cloud. It was very much a lift-and-shift migration from the datacenter to the cloud, and our management processes imitated the on‑premises model in much the same way.

The datacenter remained the focus, but that was changing.

Microsoft Azure evolves: PaaS, co-ownership, and cloud-first

As Microsoft Azure matured and more of our infrastructure and services moved to the cloud, we began to move away from IT‑owned applications and services. The strengths of the Azure self-service and management features meant that a business group could handle many of the duties that we offered as an IT service provider—which meant that they could build solutions that were more agile and responsive to their needs.

Microsoft Azure platform-as-a-service (PaaS) functionality matured, and the focus moved from IaaS-based solutions to PaaS-based solutions. Azure became the default target for IT solutions; datacenter decommissioning began as more solutions moved to or were created in Azure. Monitoring and management was becoming cloud-focused as we pointed more of our System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) and System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) instances at the cloud. Azure-native management started to mature.

Large-scale Azure: Service line–owned, IT-managed, PaaS-first

PaaS quickly became a focus for developers in our business groups, as they realized the agility and scalability they could achieve with PaaS-based solutions. Those developers shifted to PaaS for applications as we transitioned away from IaaS and virtual machine-based solutions.

With the advent of Microsoft Azure Resource Manager, which permitted a broader level of user control over Microsoft Azure services, we saw service lines begin to take ownership of their solutions, and business groups started to manage their own Azure resources.

The datacenter became an inconvenient necessity for apps that couldn’t move to Microsoft Azure. We still used SCOM and SCCM as the primary monitoring and management tools, but we had moved almost all our instances into IaaS implementations in Azure. Azure-native management became a mature product, and we started to plan and deliver a completely cloud-based management environment.

Microsoft Azure in a DevOps culture: Service line – managed, Internet-first, business-first

We’re continually nurturing a DevOps culture—DevOps has transformed the way that Microsoft Azure solutions are developed and operated. Our Azure solutions offer an end-to-end view for our business groups. They’re agile, dynamic, and data-intensive. Continuous integration and continuous development create a continual state of improvements and feature releases.

The Microsoft Azure solutions that our business groups use are designed to respond to their business needs. We actively seek and use Azure-native tools for control over and insight into IT environments, in Azure first, but also, back to the datacenter where required. We’re a long, long way past managing a stack of metal. The modern workplace is here at Microsoft, and it changes every day.

Realizing digital transformation

In the modern workplace, the developers and IT decision makers in our business groups have an increasingly critical business role. Our business groups need the autonomy to make IT decisions that serve their business needs in the best way possible. With 98 percent of our IT infrastructure in Microsoft Azure, we’re increasingly looking to the agility, scale, and manageability that Azure provides. Using this scale, we solve business needs and provide the framework for a complete IT organization, from infrastructure to development to management.

Managing the modern hybrid cloud

Our modern hybrid cloud is 98 percent Microsoft Azure—and Azure is the primary platform for infrastructure and management tools. Azure is not only the default platform for IT solutions—it is our IT solution.

Just as PC sprawl occurred in the late 1990s and server sprawl did the same thing in the 2000s, cloud sprawl is a growing reality. Implementing new cloud solutions to manage the cloud environment and the remaining on-premises infrastructure is critical for our organization. The new Cloud solutions scope includes the flexibility for our engineers to leverage PaaS, Functions, and Container models to optimize the management of Cloud Environments.

Embracing decentralized IT

Decentralized IT services are a big part of digital transformation. We need a management solution that offers us—and our business groups—what we need to manage our IT environments. We always want to maintain governance over security and compliance of Microsoft as a whole, but we also realize that decentralized IT services are the most suitable model for a cloud-first organization.

By decentralizing services and ownership in Microsoft Azure, we offer our business groups several benefits:

Greater DevOps flexibility.

A native cloud experience: subscription owners can use features as soon as they’re available.

Freedom to choose from marketplace solutions.

Minimal subscription limit issues.

Greater control over groups and permissions.

Greater control over Microsoft Azure provisioning and subscriptions.

Business group ownership of billing and capacity management.

Our goal in the management of modern hybrid cloud continues to be a solution that transforms IT tasks into self-service native cloud solutions for monitoring, management, backup, and security across our entire environment. With this solution, our business groups and service lines have reliable, standardized management tools, and we can maintain control over and visibility into security and compliance for our entire organization.

The areas where we retain oversight include:

General IT and operational policy implementation, as approved by the subscription owner. Areas include compliance, operations, and incident management.

Shared network connectivity over Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute, as needed.

Visibility into infrastructure inefficiencies and self-service tool development.

Our management solution must be as agile as the solutions we manage, and we provide best practices, standards, and consulting for Microsoft Azure management solutions to ensure that our business groups are getting the most out of the platform.

Supporting digital transformation with Microsoft Azure management tools

Managing the hybrid cloud in Microsoft Azure encompasses a wide range of services and activities. For our business groups to improve, they need to monitor their apps and solutions to recognize issues and opportunities. They need a patching and management solution that keeps systems up to date, manages configuration, and automates common maintenance tasks.

We must protect data with a disaster recovery platform and ensure security and compliance for business groups and the entire company. We use the management tools in Microsoft Azure to enable hybrid cloud management.

Monitoring the hybrid cloud

Monitoring is an essential task for our business groups and their service lines. They need to understand how their apps are performing (or not performing) and have insight into their environment. We’ve used SCOM for monitoring at Microsoft for more than 10 years—and a certain rhythm develops when you use a product for that long.

To ease the transition from SCOM to Microsoft Azure monitoring, we developed transition solutions that use native Azure functionality to recreate certain SCOM functions and views in Microsoft Azure Monitor.

The transition solutions consist primarily of PowerShell scripts and documentation. They give our business groups a familiar environment to work in while they become familiar with Microsoft Azure monitoring.

Our business groups can also start in a standardized environment with our built-in tested security and compliance components. This helps us maintain a centralized standard while allowing for decentralized monitoring. We maintain metrics for critical organizational services, but we leave operational monitoring to each business group.

Our Microsoft Azure monitoring is designed to:

Create visibility. We’re providing instant access to a foundation set of metrics, alerts, and notifications across core Azure services for all business units. Microsoft Azure Monitoring also covers production and non-production environments, as well as native monitoring support across Microsoft Azure DevOps.

We’re providing instant access to a foundation set of metrics, alerts, and notifications across core Azure services for all business units. Microsoft Azure Monitoring also covers production and non-production environments, as well as native monitoring support across Microsoft Azure DevOps. Provide insight. Business groups and service lines can view rich analytics and diagnostics across applications, as well as compute, storage, and network resources, including anomaly detection and proactive alerting.

Business groups and service lines can view rich analytics and diagnostics across applications, as well as compute, storage, and network resources, including anomaly detection and proactive alerting. Enable optimization. Monitoring results help our business groups and service lines understand how users are engaging with their applications, identify sticking points, develop cohorts, and optimize the business impact of their solutions.

Monitoring results help our business groups and service lines understand how users are engaging with their applications, identify sticking points, develop cohorts, and optimize the business impact of their solutions. Deliver Extensibility. Designed for extensibility to enable support for custom event ingestion, and broader analytics scenarios.

We’ve now retired our SCOM environment, leaving Microsoft Azure monitoring as the default for both cloud and on-premises monitoring now focusing on:

Automated installation and repair of the Microsoft Monitoring Agent using Microsoft Azure Runbooks.

Centralized visibility into comprehensive health and performance.

Fully featured transition solution development to enable complete self-service monitoring in Microsoft Azure.

Complete transition from SCOM to Microsoft Azure.

Patching, updating, and inventory management

As we’ve done for monitoring, we’re using transition solutions to make it easier for business groups to transition from previously used on-premises tools to Microsoft Azure.

Our patching processes depended on our preexisting solutions as we worked through the transition to Microsoft Azure. SCCM and associated agents provided the bulk of our patching, software distribution, and management process, but we’ve moved to Azure in a phased approach as our Azure subscriptions become ready to transition to Azure for management.

We’ve built transition solutions for our business groups to help them transition from the SCCM platform and other legacy tools to the Microsoft Azure update management patching service. We’re maintaining and modifying these transition solutions as Azure features replaced the on-premises functionality.

From a patching and management perspective, we’re focusing on:

The transition of inventory management from Configuration Manager to Microsoft Azure, including discovery, tracking, and management of IT assets.

Transition of our update processes to Microsoft Azure Update Management for business groups.

Enabling self-service patch management. We’re developing an orchestrated deployment of operating system and application updates with Microsoft Azure, including centralized compliance reporting.

Creating and updating solutions to support the transition of the above areas, including Resource Manager templates, PowerShell scripts, documentation, and Microsoft Azure Desired State Configuration.

The design for patching and management, as with monitoring, is to provide an Microsoft Azure-based self-service solution for our business groups that gives them control over their patching and management environment while giving us the ability to centrally monitor for compliance and security purposes.

Ensuring recoverable data

With Microsoft Azure as the primary repository for business data, it’s extremely important to have an Azure backup solution with which our business groups and service lines can safeguard, retain, and recover their data.

Our data recovery solutions address the following major areas of concern:

Recover business data from attacks by malicious software or malicious activity.

Recover from accidental deletion or data corruption.

Secure critical business data.

Maintain compliance standards.

Provide historical data recovery requirements for legal purposes.

Our Microsoft Azure data footprint is immense. We currently host 1.5 petabytes of raw data in Azure and use almost nine petabytes of storage to back up that data.

We’re using Microsoft Azure Backup as a self-service solution. It gives business groups more control over how they perform their backups and gives them responsibility for backing up their business data—because each business group knows its data better than anyone else.

We’re also using Microsoft Azure Backup for virtual machine-level backup, and we’re backing up some on-premises data to Microsoft Azure using Microsoft Azure Recovery Services vaults. We’ve created a packaged solution for backup management in Azure that consists of scripts and documentation—our business groups can use it to migrate to Azure Backup quickly and efficiently.

As with other areas of enterprise management, we’re evaluating new features for Microsoft Azure Backup that will offer more backup capabilities to our business groups.

Embedding security and compliance

Decentralization gets the greatest scrutiny when it comes to security and compliance. We’re responsible for security and legal compliance for the organization, so our security controls are the most centralized of all the cloud management solutions we implement. However, centralization does not directly affect day-to-day solution management for our business groups and their service lines.

We leveraged a broad set of security and compliance practices and tools that are generally applied across all Microsoft Azure subscriptions. The following imperatives govern the general application of security and compliance measures:

Microsoft Azure Policy. Using Azure Policy, we establish guardrails in subscriptions that keep our service engineers within governance boundaries automatically. Policy can help control a myriad of settings by default, including limiting the network configurations to safe patterns, controlling the regions and types of Microsoft Azure resources available for use, and ensuring data is stored with encryption enabled.

Using Azure Policy, we establish guardrails in subscriptions that keep our service engineers within governance boundaries automatically. Policy can help control a myriad of settings by default, including limiting the network configurations to safe patterns, controlling the regions and types of Microsoft Azure resources available for use, and ensuring data is stored with encryption enabled. Automation gives us a chance to keep pace with the constantly changing cloud environment. DevOps is heavily centered on end-to-end automation, and we need to complement DevOps automation with automated security. Automated security saves significant time and cost for apps that are frequently updated, and we can quickly and consistently configure and deploy security.

gives us a chance to keep pace with the constantly changing cloud environment. DevOps is heavily centered on end-to-end automation, and we need to complement DevOps automation with automated security. Automated security saves significant time and cost for apps that are frequently updated, and we can quickly and consistently configure and deploy security. Empower engineering teams. In an environment where change is constant, we want to empower our engineering teams to make meaningful, consistent changes without waiting for a central security team to approve an app. Our engineers need the ability to integrate security into the DevOps workflow. They don’t have to take extra measures to be secure, nor do they need to wait for a central security team to approve an app.

In an environment where change is constant, we want to empower our engineering teams to make meaningful, consistent changes without waiting for a central security team to approve an app. Our engineers need the ability to integrate security into the DevOps workflow. They don’t have to take extra measures to be secure, nor do they need to wait for a central security team to approve an app. Maintain continuous assurance. When development and deployment are continuous, everything that goes with them needs to follow suit—including security assurance. The old requirements for sign-offs or compliance checks create tension in the modern engineering environment. We want to define a security state and track drift from that state to maintain a consistent level of security assurance across the entire environment. This helps ensure that builds and deployments that are secure when they’re delivered stay secure from one release iteration to the next and beyond.

When development and deployment are continuous, everything that goes with them needs to follow suit—including security assurance. The old requirements for sign-offs or compliance checks create tension in the modern engineering environment. We want to define a security state and track drift from that state to maintain a consistent level of security assurance across the entire environment. This helps ensure that builds and deployments that are secure when they’re delivered stay secure from one release iteration to the next and beyond. Set up operational hygiene. We need a clear view of our DevOps environment to ensure operational hygiene. In addition to understanding operational risks in the cloud, DevOps operational hygiene in the cloud requires a different perspective. We need to create the ability to see the security state across DevOps stages and establish capabilities to receive security alerts and reminders for important periodic activities.

At MDEE, our goal is a completely cloud-based, self-service management solution that gives our business groups concise control over their environments using Microsoft Azure tools and features. We’ll continue to offer updated Azure-based solutions, transitioning away from on-premises, System Center–based management.

As we continue to transition business groups to cloud-based monitoring, we’re growing our feature set and making our Microsoft Azure-based management even better. We envision a near future where our management systems will be completely cloud based, decentralized, and automated—and our organization continuing to build our business in Azure.

This story reflects updated guidance from Microsoft Digital—it was first published in 2020.

At Microsoft, we believe our employees are the company’s greatest asset. That’s why, in 2017, we determined that for Microsoft to achieve its mission of empowering every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more, we would need to transform the way we do IT.

Why change?

We realized that to help our customers transform through technology, we needed to transform the experience for our own employees. The investments we made in a reimagined employee experience enabled Microsoft employees to innovate, create, and collaborate seamlessly.

Our shift to the Microsoft Azure cloud made us more agile. But even with a forward-looking vision and people-centric investments, nothing could have prepared us for March of 2020, when Microsoft employees globally were sent home to protect their health and safety. The era of hybrid work had begun.

In this article, we share how we’re making hybrid work, work at Microsoft. Our goal is to help fellow digital transformation leaders learn from our experience keeping over 300,000 people productive, connected, and empowered around the world. It describes our journey from Microsoft IT to Microsoft Digital; how we’re helping Microsoft and our customers thrive in the hybrid workplace across digital experiences, physical spaces, and cultural norms; our investments in AI to revolutionize our IT infrastructure, employee experiences, and corporate functions portfolio; and building and driving adoption of transformative new technologies like Microsoft 365 Copilot, Microsoft Viva, Microsoft Teams, and the Microsoft Power Platform.

Becoming Microsoft Digital

For years, Microsoft IT operated like a traditional IT organization—highly reactive to circumstances and more focused on the technology than the experience. Of course, we cared about the experience of our users, but it was mostly outside of our direct control, as we primarily deployed and sustained solutions built by other teams or other companies. In 2017, we adopted a new name—End User Services Engineering—which reflected our transition to a modern engineering organization. Our team was now “vision-led,” focused on building and deploying the right solutions to meet the needs of people, not just deploying the latest technology. We became proactive visionaries rather than reactive practitioners.

That transformation culminated with our transition to becoming Microsoft Digital. At the core of that transformation is an obsession with the needs of our employees that transcends tools and infrastructure and extends to the entirety of their daily experience, from the day they’re hired to their eventual retirement. We steward their digital experience through every dimension of their employment, ensuring they have the devices, applications, services, and infrastructure needed to be productive on the job no matter where they are or what they do.

While our journey to deliver a world-class digital experience for Microsoft employees began years ago, the COVID-19 pandemic unexpectedly enabled us to accelerate the evolution of our employee experience. Grappling with the pandemic gave us time and insights necessary to ensure that everyone at Microsoft has a great digital experience, whether they’re in the office or working remotely.

Subsequent sections of this article demonstrate how we’re bringing that vision to life for Microsoft’s global employees so they can thrive in a hybrid world.

Thriving in a hybrid world

Like most large companies, our shift to remote work happened almost overnight, with impacts to company culture, infrastructure, and processes that have lasted well beyond the end of the Covid-19 pandemic. The implications of hybrid work continue to resonate—from this moment forward, every investment needs to be considered through multiple dimensions of the employee experience: digital capabilities, physical spaces, and culture.

The sections that follow reflect on our journey at Microsoft across these three dimensions of the employee experience.

Digital capabilities

The pandemic and subsequent shift to hybrid work served as an accelerant to our efforts to revolutionize the employee experience for our employees and customers, with Microsoft Viva the centerpiece of that effort. In 2023, breakthroughs in generative AI enabled entirely new ways to support employee productivity, enabling Microsoft Digital to rethink “core” IT and to reimagine employee productivity with Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Additionally, other transformative investments in Microsoft Teams, the Microsoft Power Platform, and many other technologies are helping us accelerate the transformation of our employee experience, while a Zero Trust security posture keeps our enterprise safe and secure and our employees productive. More on each of these investments follows.

Microsoft Viva

When millions of people globally left the office to work from home in 2020, it marked a tectonic shift in how employees experienced the workplace and how companies supported their own employees to keep them safe and productive during a pandemic. Among the millions were thousands of Microsoft employees, and our challenges are like yours—how do we stay connected, informed, and motivated as we transition to the new world of hybrid work?

Despite positive feedback from many employees about the new availability of flexible work options, our CEO Satya Nadella describes a hybrid paradox wherein employees want both more flexible work options as well as additional opportunities to connect and collaborate with colleagues in person. And there is also compelling evidence that as employees have fewer opportunities to expand their networks and make new connections, innovation suffers. This is where Microsoft Viva initially came to market as a single, coherent platform built around the employee. Ultimately, the initial goals were centered around employee connection, wellbeing, and productivity. Now, since Viva’s 2021 launch, that experience has since shifted, rapidly evolving to a present-day focus on business impact and performance, driven by global macroeconomic concerns.

Microsoft Viva has also introduced several new Viva apps since initial launch, and the Microsoft Viva deployment at Customer Zero now includes extra capabilities in support of the new focus:

At Customer Zero, we are looking forward to new incoming AI-enabled features across the Viva Suite and seeing how these capabilities improve the employee experience. In the interim, we are still capturing employee feedback and sentiment to continue to improve the capabilities across Viva for our employees and customers, and we’re excited for what the future holds for the platform.

Transforming with AI

Employee productivity reached a new level in 2023 with the widespread use of AI. Microsoft 365’s generative AI has unlocked amazing new features that assist employees with essential tasks like composing emails, making presentations, summarizing meetings, searching for information, and more. The AI era has arrived!

AI offers new possibilities to improve employee experiences like never before, enabling seamless collaboration, personalized workflows, and simplified engagement across the organization. AI will simplify the many systems our employees must use and access, reducing daily work challenges, providing flexibility to perform tasks at any time and place, and enabling smooth cooperation in a hybrid work environment.

“The potential for transformation through AI is nearly limitless. We’re evaluating every service in our portfolio to consider how AI can improve outcomes, lower costs, and create a sustained competitive advantage for Microsoft and for our customers,” says Nathalie D’Hers, CVP, Microsoft Digital.

In addition to those typical employee productivity situations, we see that AI can transform other IT services and spark a wave of innovation that can enhance outcomes, reduce costs, and boost productivity for employees everywhere. We are taking advantage of this moment to use the power of AI to simplify operations and enhance services across our vast portfolio. Our goal is to use our extensive expertise of enterprise IT to speed up Microsoft’s own AI transformation while helping our customers to leverage this generational opportunity to speed up their own digital transformation.

One technology that will be central to our transformation is Microsoft 365 Copilot. Copilot helps you create and edit documents, presentations, emails, and more with the power of AI. It can suggest content, formatting, design, and data based on your context and preferences. It can also help you collaborate with your team and access relevant information from various sources. Research shared by Microsoft’s WorkLab team showed that early adopters of Copilot have seen remarkable benefits to their productivity:

70% of Copilot users said they were more productive.

68% said it improved the quality of their work.

Users were 29% faster in a series of tasks (searching, writing, and summarizing).

77% of users said once they had Copilot, they didn’t want to give it up.

Another key technology that will transform the employee experience at Microsoft is Microsoft 365 Chat. Microsoft 365 Chat will act as a core engagement hub for our employees, enabling Microsoft Digital to redesign the employee experience to no longer be app centric, but rather employee centric. Microsoft 365 Chat will enable employees to access essential information in a summary fashion rather than as a multitude of search results, delivered through highly context aware and natural language Q&A while also performing tasks seamlessly.

We’re in the early days of designing these AI-powered employee experiences and will share more as our vision matures.

Hybrid meetings with Microsoft Teams

Our deployment, maintenance, and support of thousands of conference rooms around the globe is a significant challenge. Because employees often encounter different conference room technology—even within the same building—it can lead to frustration, delay, and even support calls. As we prepare for a return to the workplace, we’re preparing our physical and virtual capabilities for an improved hybrid meeting experience.

An unexpected result of remote work has been an increase in meeting experience satisfaction by 31 points. The primary reason for that increase in satisfaction is simple—universal remote meeting participation helps create an even playing field, with a more inclusive atmosphere for all. Remote participants are no longer at a disadvantage to their peers attending in person, and as a result feel more included in discussion and meeting outcomes. A key priority as we prepare for the hybrid work environment will be to retain that inclusive environment and employee satisfaction through a combination of changes to physical spaces, improvements in our digital capabilities, and establishment of cultural norms that codify beneficial behaviors that began during the pandemic.

One way we’re extending that momentum is by taking full advantage of the new features in Microsoft Teams as well as new hardware in meeting rooms, like intelligent AI-powered cameras that help everyone participate equally in meetings. We will continue to take advantage of Microsoft Teams features that drive interaction and participation like meeting chat, the “raise hand” feature, as well as reactions, emojis, and integrated GIF support ensure a productive and interactive meeting experience for all.

Microsoft Teams benefits from Copilot integration as well, enabling users to quickly recap, identify follow-up tasks, create agendas, or ask questions for more effective and focused meetings. Intelligent Recap in Teams Premium can summarize key takeaways, help employees see what they’ve missed, and even pinpoint key people of interest in chats.

We’re continuing to retrofit conference rooms to utilize the latest Microsoft Teams Rooms features and capabilities, and we’ll keep partnering with the Microsoft Teams product group to push the envelope with innovative new capabilities that take advantage of investments in hardware, software, and physical space to create immersive and inclusive environments. We’ll achieve that while being sensitive to cost, prioritizing employee value. Like our customers, we face budget constraints, but we invest when we’re convinced that we’re delivering sufficient value to our employees to justify the expense. Our goal is to improve our current meeting rooms at a global scale while selectively deploying high-end rooms in targeted locations based on need. In that way, we’ll modernize the experience for all our employees while also delivering maximum value to Microsoft.

Microsoft Power Platform

While we have thousands of highly skilled developers and engineers at Microsoft, we also have thousands of employees who are not engineers by trade, but who contribute to our success as citizen developers using the Microsoft Power Platform.

Citizen developers use no-code/low-code solutions to accelerate digital transformation of their workstreams. At Microsoft, the technologies that comprise the Microsoft Power Platform empower literally anyone in the company to transform our employee experience. After all, who’s the person most likely to identify a process that could benefit from automation, or most likely to need to collect, visualize, and analyze data? It’s not normally someone in a central IT team—it’s the employee who is closest to the problem or opportunity.

The Microsoft Power Platform—as shown in this companion graphic—is comprised of four distinct capabilities that have made Microsoft more agile and productive than ever before.

Each tool is easy to learn and allows your team to enable digital transformation from the front lines of your workforce, empowering your employees and fueling innovation.

Securing employee experiences across devices, apps, and infrastructure

When the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the global economy in 2020, Microsoft was more prepared than most organizations, not because we had anticipated the pandemic, but because we had already done the work to shift nearly every critical workload to the cloud, implementing a Zero Trust security model. A cloud-first strategy is critical in a hybrid world.

Zero Trust security ensures a healthy and protected environment by using the internet as the default network with strong identity, device health enforcement, and least privilege access. It reduces risk by establishing strong identity verification, validating device compliance prior to granting access, and ensuring least privilege access (just-in-time, just-enough-access) to only explicitly authorized resources.

Zero Trust requires that every transaction between systems is validated and proven trustworthy before the transaction can occur. Ideally, the behaviors shown in this companion graphic are required.

The security threat landscape continues to change, with attacks on corporate networks increasing in frequency and complexity, partially as a byproduct of hybrid work. Through our Zero Trust security posture, Microsoft Digital plays a significant role in protecting our corporate assets and securing the enterprise while ensuring our employees have the best possible day-to-day experience. By implementing Zero Trust within your organization, you too can mitigate threats to your critical enterprise infrastructure.

Physical spaces and facilities

One of the three critical questions that all digital transformation leaders need to ask as they consider a return to the workplace is “What are the changes needed in the physical environment to support an inclusive and equitable approach to hybrid productivity?” After all, the best digital experiences mean very little if you don’t have the right physical spaces or hardware to maximize their potential for collaboration. And even more important than productivity is “How can I keep my employees safe and healthy?”

Between our Microsoft Global Workplace Services (GWS) team and Microsoft Digital, we represent the “front door of Microsoft”— the technology and the facilities. The first impression employees and visitors have when they walk into Microsoft is the physical environment and the technology they interact with, and we want their experience to be amazing. As Microsoft Digital’s Becky West put it in her recent article:

Typically, technology is added to a building many years or even decades after building construction. For example, software for booking a conference room or reserving a campus shuttle is developed independently from an office building being built, bought, or leased. This model works OK. However, to truly transform, technology needs to be integrated into the building, which requires a tight real estate and IT partnership.

While Commercial Real Estate (CRE) leaders and digital transformation leaders see things through different lenses, when both functions are aligned on vision with shared priorities and implementation, accelerated transformation of the employee experience is possible. The following are some examples of the work we’ve done with our counterparts in GWS to enable new experiences:

The lobby check-in experience is literally the first impression an employee or visitor has when they visit a Microsoft facility, and in a hybrid work environment it’s even more important to streamline and automate that experience. Working together, we built an amazing new guest management system, with streamlined check-in and optimized check-out procedures to help employees or visitors quickly get to their next destination.

Through our Microsoft employee mobile app, we’re enabling several new capabilities in conjunction with GWS, including the ability to order ahead at Microsoft cafeterias, or book a conference room or workspace. Soon our employees will have the ability to find available parking near their assigned workspace or meeting facility.

With Microsoft Azure Digital Twins and IoT connected devices, we’re powering smart buildings at Microsoft. By integrating inputs from previously siloed data sources (like motion and occupancy sensors), we’re evolving the way Microsoft employees interact with their spaces, with a focus on efficiency and productivity.

With Microsoft Dynamics 365 running on Microsoft Azure, we’re working together to consolidate all facility management processes and provide them to our vendors.

Working together, we built a simple-to-use health attestation app using the Microsoft Power Platform to ensure that our employees acknowledge their health and vaccination status before entering a Microsoft facility. Microsoft even released a version that’s free for eligible customers.

None of these capabilities would have been possible without a strong partnership with our real estate colleagues in GWS, supported by a shared vision of the employee experience. We’ve learned that working together on a shared vision informed by employee and industry data, carefully researched by user experience designers, and using our full portfolio of digital experiences leads to transformative outcomes.

By reimagining the physical and virtual spaces at Microsoft, we’re laying a foundation of innovation that will help our employees thrive in the hybrid workplace.

Cultural norms

While investments in hardware and physical spaces are important, the greatest technology in the world won’t help unless people embrace best practices and apply consistent norms to ensure that all meetings are inclusive and that remote participants continue to have a great experience. While norms might vary based on your location, culture, and technical capabilities, digital transformation leaders should consider simple steps like those shown in this graphic.

These are just a few of the behaviors and standards to consider codifying as norms in your organization to support productive and effective hybrid meetings. For additional tips, please review this Tips for staying productive in an evolving hybrid world article. The following resources offer additional guidance, insights, and ideas for maximizing the productivity and effectiveness of hybrid meetings.

Driving adoption of new employee experiences

An often-overlooked aspect of digital transformation is the need for consistent and principled change management services to ensure your employees realize the value of the investments you make in their experience. In fact, the importance of change management is so great, it’s reflected in our organizational vision.

Microsoft Digital is fortunate to have a global team of change management practitioners to help ensure that our employees benefit from the value of our innovations. We’ve also benefited from the Microsoft 365 standardized approach to change management. This simple three-stage model can help teams of all shapes and sizes unlock the value of their investments in digital transformation.

In addition to practical guidance, case studies, and templates, Microsoft also makes available free courseware to develop your skills as a service adoption specialist. This is a great way to develop the skills your team will need to unlock the value of digital transformation in the hybrid workplace.

Conclusion

The world of work has changed dramatically in the last few years. The first big shock was hybrid work, and the next is generative AI. We’ve captured some of our key learnings from that journey in this article and hope they will inspire you as you consider your own pathway to the future of work.

Hybrid work is more than a change in technology—it’s a change in mindset, a change in culture, and a change in the way you think about physical and virtual spaces to enable an inclusive and productive environment for all. The change isn’t easy, but it’s worth it. If you make the time to do it right, your employees will be more engaged, more productive, and more connected, even when they’re miles away. And they’ll be far less likely to leave for a competitor who has a more sophisticated and flexible model than you do.

Generative AI, like Microsoft 365 Copilot, has the potential to unlock creativity, productivity, and effectiveness in your workforce. Be bold in embracing AI in the workplace, so your employees have the tools they need to stay ahead of your competition.

The future of work will continue to evolve, and we’ll all learn along the way. As we continue our journey, we’ll keep you updated on our progress and learnings.

Rethink your employee experience across your digital capabilities and physical spaces to meet your business needs in a hybrid world.

Focusing on the three critical elements of the employee experience—digital capabilities, physical space and facilities, and organization culture—will help your organization to thrive in the hybrid workplace of the future.

Microsoft Viva can help your employees find balance in the hybrid work environment, enabling you to retain talent in a competitive labor market.

Microsoft 365 Copilot can unlock creativity and productivity in your workplace, while giving your organization an edge as AI becomes a key tool for organizational effectiveness.

Use the Microsoft Power Platform to unlock innovation from your front lines by enabling your citizen developers to visualize and analyze data, build apps that address common business scenarios, and automate business processes.

Adopting a Zero Trust security posture will keep your network secure and your employees safe.

Build a strong partnership between your IT and real estate teams.

Ensuring you have effective change management policies in place will help you extract value from your investments in digital transformation.

Want more information? Email us and include a link to this story and we’ll get back to you.

Updated April 22, 2025: The post contains 261 new customer stories, which appear at the beginning of each section of customer lists. The post will be updated regularly with new stories.

One of the highlights of my career has always been connecting with customers and partners across industries to learn how they are using technology to drive their businesses forward. In the past 30 years, we’ve seen four major platform shifts, from client server to internet and the web to mobile and cloud to now — the next major platform shift to AI.

As today’s platform shift to AI continues to gain momentum, Microsoft is working to understand just how organizations can drive lasting business value. We recently commissioned a study with IDC, The Business Opportunity of AI, to uncover new insights around business value and help guide organizations on their journey of AI transformation. The study found that for every $1 organizations invest in generative AI, they’re realizing an average of $3.70 in return — and uncovered insights about the future potential of AI to reshape business processes and drive change across industries.

Check out the top 5 AI trends to watch from IDC and Microsoft

Today, more than 85% of the Fortune 500 are using Microsoft AI solutions to shape their future. In working with organizations large and small, across every industry and geography, we’ve seen that most transformation initiatives are designed to achieve one of four business outcomes:

Enriching employee experiences: Using AI to streamline or automate repetitive, mundane tasks can allow your employees to dive into more complex, creative and ultimately more valuable work. Reinventing customer engagement: AI can create more personalized, tailored customer experiences, delighting your target audiences while lightening the load for employees. Reshaping business processes: Virtually any business process can be reimagined with AI, from marketing to supply chain operations to finance, and AI is even allowing organizations to go beyond process optimization and discover exciting new growth opportunities. Bending the curve on innovation: AI is revolutionizing innovation by speeding up creative processes and product development, reducing the time to market and allowing companies to differentiate in an often crowded field.

In this blog, we’ve collected more than 700 of our favorite real-life examples of how organizations are embracing Microsoft’s proven AI capabilities to drive impact and shape today’s platform shift to AI. Today, we’ve added new stories of customers using our AI capabilities at the beginning of each section. We’ll regularly update this story with more. We hope you find an example or two that can inspire your own transformation journey.

Enriching employee experiences

Generative AI is truly transforming employee productivity and well-being. Our customers tell us that by automating repetitive, mundane tasks, employees are freed up to dive into more complex and creative work. This shift not only makes the work environment more stimulating but also boosts job satisfaction. It sparks innovation, provides actionable insights for better decision-making and supports personalized training and development opportunities, all contributing to a better work-life balance. Customers around the world have reported significant improvements in employee productivity with these AI solutions:

New Stories:

Reinventing customer engagement

We’ve seen great examples of how generative AI can automate content creation, ensuring there’s fresh and engaging materials ready to go. It personalizes customer experiences by crunching the numbers, boosting conversion rates. It makes operations smoother, helping teams launch campaigns faster. Plus, it drives innovation, crafting experiences that delight customers while lightening the load for staff. Embracing generative AI is key for organizations wanting to reinvent customer engagements, stay ahead of the game and drive both innovation and efficiency.

New Stories:

Reshaping business process

Transforming operations is another way generative AI is encouraging innovation and improving efficiency across various business functions. In marketing, it can create personalized content to truly engage different audiences. For supply chain management, it can predict market trends so companies can optimize their inventory levels. Human resources departments can speed up the hiring process, while financial services can use it for fraud detection and risk assessments. With generative AI, companies are not just refining their current processes, they’re also discovering exciting new growth opportunities.

New Stories:

Bending the curve on innovation

Generative AI is revolutionizing innovation by speeding up creative processes and product development. It’s helping companies come up with new ideas, design prototypes and iterate quickly, cutting down the time it takes to get to market. In the automotive industry, it’s designing more efficient vehicles, while in pharmaceuticals, it’s crafting new drug molecules, slashing years off R&D times. In education, it transforms how students learn and achieve their goals. Here are more examples of how companies are embracing generative AI to shape the future of innovation.

New Stories:

CTAs:

IDC InfoBrief: sponsored by Microsoft, 2024 Business Opportunity of AI, IDC# US52699124, November 2024

Tags: AI, AI Azure, Azure OpenAI Service, Copilot, Copilot Studio, Microsoft 365 Copilot