Advania is adopting Copilot for Microsoft 365, the artificial intelligence (AI) assistant, across its workforce of over 1,000 employees in the UK.
As one of the first major Microsoft partners in the UK to make this commitment, Advania is building on the success of its pilot programme. The Advania leadership team made the decision to standardise after noticing radical improvements in employee productivity and creativity with Copilot for Microsoft 365. Internal results inspired confidence that the market-leading AI companion would give Advania’s teams a clear competitive advantage in their daily work advising and digitally transforming hundreds of clients across the UK.
Advania’s CEO, Geoff Kneen, has shared what the investment means for the company.
Building on the success of Advania’s pilot programme
Advania is enabling its entire workforce to leverage the full Microsoft AI suite, including Microsoft 365 Copilot, Copilot Studio, and private ChatGPT deployments, to address complex client challenges such as efficiency, building out new digital capabilities and workforce productivity.
Geoff Kneen, Chief Executive Officer of Advania, said: “Our pilot deployments revealed the tremendous potential to improve employees’ experience and productivity by using Copilot for automating repetitive tasks. More exciting was the power it gave our employees to accelerate problem solving. We witnessed individuals coming up with creative ways to solve the little niggles that distract them from doing their best work. We had to go workforce-wide, the potential was too compelling to delay roll-out.”
On top of the standard use cases such as summarisation, sifting through inboxes, and jump-starting content creation, Advania’s Copilot users have already identified dozens of more complex use cases for Copilot. These include digesting and responding to complex requests for proposals (RFPs), analysing data and producing presentation ready graphs, analysing sentiment of client communications, and improving interactive client workshops. The productivity gains are fuelling higher quality systematic outputs and improving business processes.
Walking the talk on AI
As one of the first major UK partners to make this commitment following its successful pilot program, Advania is looking to share its experiences as broadly as possible, participating in a multi-portfolio working group, organised by global financial services leader and Advania partner, Goldman Sachs.
Orla McGrath, GPS Lead at Microsoft UK added: “As one of our most certified partners in the UK, I am thrilled that Advania has committed to bringing the value of Copilot for Microsoft 365 to all of its employees. Advania has been an early mover in the adoption of Microsoft’s generative AI technologies, and I know that the experience gained from its own use of Copilot will quickly inform how it helps its thousand-plus clients across the SMC, Enterprise and Public Sector segments achieve even greater value from this transformative technology.”
High-speed AI results
Another recent Advania AI implementation for a major construction project, a joint venture with four construction companies, overcame significant challenges managing vast and fragmented safety incident data from multiple sources. The resulting AI-powered e-discovery system efficiently collated and assessed relevant information for incident investigations delivering Iterative improvements, enhancing accuracy and reducing investigation times, supporting the project’s long-term safety goals and saving significant amounts of money on legal and software licensing fees.
Kneen added: “It was shocking to learn that UK workers are less likely to trust AI than the global average. Companies investing early in Generative AI will create a substantial competitive advantage over those slower to adopt. We recognise that not all employees or projects will benefit the same, and we believe that broad adoption is the best way to figure this out. This approach, which is quite different than traditional technology adoption plans, will allow us to learn and iterate faster, allowing us to share these real-life, real-time results with our clients, which has been impossible until now.”
