Accenture внедряет систему второго пилота для сотрудников размером с Денвер. Вот как они это делают.

Внедрение Microsoft 365 Copilot для 20 000 сотрудников может показаться сложной задачей, но Accenture только начинала.

Глобальная компания, предоставляющая профессиональные услуги, внедряет систему Copilot среди примерно 743 000 сотрудников, что эквивалентно городу размером примерно с Денвер. По данным Microsoft, это крупнейшее на сегодняшний день внедрение системы Copilot на предприятии, и Accenture заявляет, что это приносит свои плоды.

Девяносто семь процентов сотрудников сообщили, что с помощью Copilot рутинные задачи выполняются в 15 раз быстрее, а 53% сообщили о значительном повышении производительности и результативности, согласно данным компании за 2025 год, в которых приняли участие 200 000 пользователей.

"Copilot - это персональный цифровой коллега", - говорит Тони Лерарис, директор Accenture по информационным технологиям. "Это меняет методы работы наших сотрудников, то, как они исследуют, придумывают, анализируют и выполняют многие повседневные действия".

Масштабы внедрения второго пилота Accenture поражают, как и то, как компания подошла к этому. Accenture действовала целенаправленно, начав с большой группы сотрудников, а затем расширив это внедрение еще больше. Каждый шаг на этом пути был возможностью учиться, устанавливать барьеры и понимать, как второй пилот менял методы работы сотрудников, прежде чем двигаться дальше.

Стратегия, ориентированная прежде всего на людей

Accenture начала внедрение Copilot в августе 2023 года, вскоре после того, как Microsoft представила этот инструмент. По словам Лерариса, было важно быстро познакомить сотрудников с Copilot, чтобы они могли освоить новые методы работы, поделиться ими с коллегами и со знанием дела рассказать клиентам о возможностях Copilot.

Внедрение началось с пилотного проекта, в котором приняли участие несколько сотен руководителей высшего звена и избранных сотрудников, а затем было расширено до 20 000 пользователей. В течение этого времени Accenture сосредоточилась на своей стратегии обработки данных, управлении данными, контроле доступа и, что особенно важно, на понимании того, как люди на самом деле используют Copilot в таких инструментах, как Outlook, Teams и Word.

"Мы совершенствовали нашу стратегию внедрения и разрабатывали план того, как она будет использоваться в повседневной работе", - говорит Лерарис.

Это была непростая задача для компании, в которой работает около 780 000 человек по всему миру и которая работает более чем в 120 странах.

Внедрение системы второго пилота в Accenture происходило поэтапно. Этому способствовала специально разработанная программа управления изменениями и их внедрения, которая включала индивидуальные тренинги с руководителями, регулярные сообщения о новых функциях и примерах использования, групповые тренинги и активное участие в Viva Engage - приложении для социальных сетей, встроенном в Teams и Microsoft 365, - где сотрудники делились своими впечатлениями. использовал Copilot изо дня в день и оказывал поддержку новым пользователям.

‘Важное открытие"

Для маркетингового подразделения Accenture Copilot стал частью ежедневных творческих и коммуникационных процессов. Джейсон Варнке возглавляет команду сценаристов, дизайнеров и видеопродюсеров Accenture global Marketing + Communications Experiences (M+Cx), которая занимается маркетингом и коммуникациями. По его словам, поддержание последовательного подхода в таких масштабах уже давно является сложной задачей."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.

Haley Rosowsky, global Microsoft ecosystem partner marketing lead, says spotlighting employees’ Copilot stories helped encourage broader use.

"It fostered understanding and inspired people to go off and do their own experimentation and try new things," she says. "We showcased people who were getting value out of working in new ways with Copilot and gave them a bit of a pedestal moment that everyone could learn from."

From the start, Leraris says, Accenture realized the importance of tailoring its approach for different audiences.

"You can’t take a one-size-fits-all message into adoption," he says. "We really had to demonstrate to certain people, especially leaders, how to use the tool and what the value would be specifically for them."

That approach was affirmed by the data. In one tranche of roughly 200,000 licenses, monthly active Copilot usage reached 89%. In a survey of those same employees, 84% said they would "deeply miss" the tool if it were gone.

"If Microsoft 365 Copilot weren’t delivering real value, our people simply wouldn’t be using it – our high adoption rate is what shows us that there is value," Leraris says. "That’s what led us to continue deploying Copilot to more people."

An embedded AI assistant

While Accenture’s change management and adoption efforts played a major role in driving Copilot usage, Leraris says the tool’s deep integration into Microsoft 365 was also a factor.

Accenture is technology-agnostic, working across multiple platforms rather than aligning itself with one vendor. Leraris pointed to Copilot’s multimodal architecture – drawing on both OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude – as a factor in Accenture’s decision to adopt the platform. Another consideration was that Copilot is embedded in the tools employees were already using.

"Accenture people work in Microsoft platforms every day for a significant part of their day," he says. "What we want is the generative AI to meet the employee in the flow of their work, instead of creating separate destinations for people to go to."

Copilot’s ability to reason over data stored in SharePoint and OneDrive was also key. Accenture is among the world’s largest users of those systems, Leraris says, with 24 petabytes of data. Enterprise privacy and security controls were equally important, allowing Accenture to test new features with small groups and disable capabilities that run afoul of local regulations.

"We have an amazing amount of granularity of control, which gives us flexibility to have new features available to different parts of our workforce at different times."

Accenture’s Copilot rollout continues to evolve as new features arrive and teams find new ways to work with the tool. But one lesson has anchored the deployment from the start.

"Real value from AI investments like Copilot doesn’t come from simply turning it on," says Leraris. "It comes from investing in your people – helping them understand how to use it, how to trust it and how it fits into the way they work. Lead with people, and Copilot becomes a catalyst for reinvention – that’s when you start to see real, measurable impact."

Top photo by Morten Falch Sortland/Getty Images. Portraits courtesy of Accenture.

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Deborah Bach writes about the transformative ways organizations and people are using technology, and is also a writer for The Monthly Tech-In, Microsoft’s LinkedIn newsletter with 10 million-plus organic subscribers. A native of British Columbia, Deborah was previously a newspaper reporter for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the Baltimore Sun. Her work has been published in outlets including the New York Times, Vancouver Sun and TODAY.com, among others. You can reach Deborah on LinkedIn.