Our 2024 Work Pattern Index Annual Report discovered that whereas 79 p.c of leaders agree that AI is essential for enterprise, 59 p.c are fearful about quantifying the productiveness positive aspects of AI. As all of us transfer from AI experimentation to actual enterprise transformation, leaders all over the place are questioning: How can I inform if that is truly making work higher for folks?
To begin to reply that query, we developed a brand new metric: Copilot Assisted Hours. It’s a primary step in serving to leaders perceive how Copilot improves work for workers throughout the group—and never simply by saving them time.
“Whereas time financial savings are essential, Copilot’s worth goes far and above folks saving time,” says Peter Bergen, Principal Venture Supervisor for Copilot Reporting, who helped develop the metric. “It impacts the standard of their work, it impacts the quantity of effort that they need to put into issues, it impacts their creativity.”
Measuring the advantages of AI
To zero in on how we might tangibly measure Copilot’s worth, our analysis, product, and advertising groups appeared to develop a composite rating that displays key information from our telemetry: assembly hours summarized by Copilot; Copilot chat searches; summaries of electronic mail threads, paperwork, and shows; and the creation of emails, paperwork, shows, Excel calculations, and extra.
“It’s all about how one can make your funding in your worker go farther,” says Shamsi Iqbal, a Microsoft researcher who labored on the metric. “How are you going to assist them ship higher high quality work with much less effort?”
Conferences are a terrific place to start out seeing the worth of AI—the Work Pattern Index additionally exhibits that point in conferences is holding regular at its post-pandemic highs. If you ask Copilot for a abstract of an hourlong assembly, that counts as one Copilot assisted hour. Based on our analysis, Copilot customers have been capable of retrieve data throughout recordsdata, emails, and calendars six minutes quicker with Copilot versus with out. That’s why trying to find data, like whenever you ask Copilot to find that deck your boss shared in a gathering earlier this week, counts for six minutes of Copilot assisted time. And utilizing Copilot to make one thing from scratch—say, writing a weblog submit or making a slide deck—additionally counts for six minutes, based mostly on our analysis on how far more rapidly Copilot customers work than non-users. (Creation, our researchers be aware, is very tough to measure in a single quantity, so this a part of the metric is a broad estimate that seemingly undercounts Copilot’s time financial savings. As analysis improves, we are going to alter our methodology.)
How one can use the metric
Leaders can view their group’s distinctive quantity—which displays the final 28 days with Copilot—of their Copilot Dashboard, filtering totally different organizations, scopes, and job features to drill down on smaller teams. Prospects inform us that these privacy-protected insights assist them higher perceive how Copilot enriches collaboration and productiveness in particular features.
Within the dashboard, you may see the breakdown of how your workforce is utilizing Copilot, from conferences summarized to electronic mail drafts generated. In case your org is lagging behind on, say, doc enhancing, that may level to alternatives for particular coaching and skilling in Phrase. (Copilot Academy in Viva Studying and Copilot Lab are glorious locations to start out.)
Keep in mind, too, that utilizing AI is a totally new means of working for most individuals, and it takes time to construct the behavior. Our analysis discovered that the magic method for unlocking Copilot’s worth is what we wish to name the 11-by-11 tipping level—that’s, 11 minutes of time financial savings per day over 11 weeks of utilization. It’s important to offer your those who trial interval—which comes out to rather less than a enterprise quarter—earlier than studying an excessive amount of into your quantity. Be sure that, too, that you simply roll it out with intention.
Whereas the function of AI is increasing from particular person productiveness to broader enterprise downside fixing—particularly as we glance towards a way forward for AI brokers that may act on behalf of their firms—we’re simply beginning to perceive the way it will remodel work for each worker. Copilot Assisted Hours is a crucial step in doing that, and as we study extra, our methodologies will get extra refined. By working to extend your quantity, you’ll see the advantages to particular person productiveness ripple throughout the group, together with innovation, creativity, and finally, the underside line.
