Our 2024 Work Development Index Annual Report discovered that whereas 79 % of leaders agree that AI is essential for enterprise, 59 % are anxious about quantifying the productiveness positive factors of AI. As all of us transfer from AI experimentation to actual enterprise transformation, leaders in every single 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 necessary, Copilot’s worth goes far and above folks saving time,” says Peter Bergen, Principal Undertaking Supervisor for Copilot Reporting, who helped develop the metric. “It impacts the standard of their work, it impacts the quantity of effort that they should 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 and marketing groups regarded 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 an ideal place to start out seeing the worth of AI—the Work Development Index additionally exhibits that point in conferences is holding regular at its post-pandemic highs. While you ask Copilot for a abstract of an hourlong assembly, that counts as one Copilot assisted hour. In line with our analysis, Copilot customers had been in a position to retrieve info throughout information, emails, and calendars six minutes quicker with Copilot versus with out. That’s why looking for info, like once 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, primarily based on our analysis on how far more shortly Copilot customers work than non-users. (Creation, our researchers be aware, is particularly 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’ll regulate our methodology.)
How you 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 completely 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 possibly can 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 modifying, that may level to alternatives for particular coaching and skilling in Phrase. (Copilot Academy in Viva Studying and Copilot Lab are wonderful locations to start out.)
Bear in mind, too, that utilizing AI is a totally new approach 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 people who trial interval—which comes out to rather less than a enterprise quarter—earlier than studying an excessive amount of into your quantity. Be certain that, too, that you simply roll it out with intention.
Whereas the position of AI is increasing from particular person productiveness to broader enterprise drawback fixing—particularly as we glance towards a way forward for AI brokers that may act on behalf of their corporations—we’re simply beginning to perceive the way it will remodel work for each worker. Copilot Assisted Hours is a vital step in doing that, and as we be taught 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.
