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.  

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:  

  1. 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.
  2. Reinventing customer engagement: AI can create more personalized, tailored customer experiences, delighting your target audiences while lightening the load for employees.
  3. 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.
  4. 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 200 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. 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 wellbeing. 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:

  1. Access Holdings Plc adopted Microsoft 365 Copilot, integrating generative AI into daily tools and, as a result, writing code now takes two hours instead of eight, chatbots launch in 10 days instead of three months and presentations are prepared in 45 minutes instead of six hours.
  2. Adobe is connecting Adobe Experience Cloud workflows and insights with Microsoft 365 Copilot to deliver generative-AI powered capabilities that enable marketers to increase collaboration, efficiency and creativity.
  3. Amadeus empowers its teams to focus their time and skills on value-added tasks with Microsoft 365 Copilot, by summarizing email threads, chat or transcripts and summing up information from diverse sources.
  4. ANZ has invested in Microsoft 365 Copilot, GitHub Copilot and Copilot in Microsoft Edge to boost productivity and innovation across its workforce.
  5. Asahi Europe & International (AEI) has adopted Microsoft 365 Copilot, saving employees potentially 15% of time previously spent on administrative tasks.
  6. AXA developed AXA Secure GPT, a platform powered by Azure OpenAI Service that empowers employees to leverage the power of generative AI while targeting the highest level of data safety and responsible use of the tool.
  7. Axon Enterprise developed a new AI tool with Azure OpenAI Service called Draft One, resulting in an 82% decrease in time spent on reports, which freed up officers to engage more with their community.
  8. Aztec Group enhanced productivity and client experience by trialing Microsoft 365 Copilot with 300 staff, uncovering “unlimited” use cases and plans for a wider rollout.
  9. Bader Sultan & Bros. Co. W.L.L implemented Microsoft 365 Copilot to enhance employee productivity and speed up customer response times.
  10. Bancolombia is using GitHub Copilot to empower its technical team, achieving a 30% increase in code generation, boosting automated application changes to an average of 18,000 per year, with a rate of 42 productive daily deployments.
  11. BaptistCare Community Services is using Microsoft 365 Copilot to save employees time as they navigate workforce shortage challenges, allowing them to focus more on the people they care for.
  12. Barnsley Council was recognized as “Double Council of the Year in 2023” for its implementation of Microsoft 365 Copilot, which modernized operations and reduced administrative tasks, leading to improved job satisfaction and increased creativity.
  13. BlackRock purchased more than 24,000 Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses spanning all employees, functions and locations, helping improve the Copilot experience, including codeveloping new features and functions.
  14. British Heart Foundation is testing Microsoft 365 Copilot and in its initial test, users estimate that Microsoft 365 Copilot could save them up to 30 minutes per day.
  15. Buckinghamshire Council deployed Microsoft 365 Copilot with staff reporting productivity improvements, quality enhancements and time savings, which are enabling the different teams to do more with less.
  16. Campari Group adopted Microsoft 365 Copilot to help employees integrate it into their workflow, resulting in time savings of about two hours a week from the support of routine activities such as email management, meeting preparation, content creation and skill acquisition.
  17. Capita is using GitHub Copilot for productivity improvements as well as improvements in developer satisfaction, recruitment and retention.
  18. CDW used Microsoft 365 Copilot to improve work quality for 88% of users, enabling 77% to complete tasks faster and increasing productivity for 85% of users.
  19. Chi Mei Medical Center is lightening workloads for doctors, nurses and pharmacists with a generative AI assistant built on Azure OpenAI Service.
  20. E.ON is focused on Germany’s energy transition, leveraging Microsoft 365 Copilot to manage the complex grid in real-time, increasing productivity and efficiency for its workforce.
  21. Enerijisa Uretim has adopted Microsoft 365 Copilot to streamline meeting summaries, reformat documents and compile reports, enabling employees to concentrate on more strategic and fulfilling activities instead of spending six hours in meetings.
  22. EPAM is deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot to consolidate information and generate content and documents.
  23. Farm Credit Canada implemented Microsoft 365 Copilot, which resulted in time savings on routine tasks for 78% of users, with 30% saving 30 to 60 minutes per week and 35% saving over an hour per week, allowing employees to focus on more value-added tasks.
  24. Finastra used Microsoft 365 Copilot to automate tasks, enhance content creation, improve analytics and personalize customer interactions, with employees citing a 20% to 50% time savings.
  25. Four Agency Worldwide increased employee productivity using Microsoft 365 Copilot to generate ideas for creative work and support administrative-heavy processes, data analysis and report generation, allowing staff to focus on outreach and less time doing paperwork.
  26. Goodwill of Orange County developed an AI-powered app using Azure AI capabilities to help more people, including those with developmental, intellectual and physical disabilities, work in unfilled e-commerce positions.
  27. Honeywell employees are saving 92 minutes per week—that’s 74 hours a year! Disclaimer: Statistics are from an internal Honeywell survey of 5,000 employees where 611 employees responded.
  28. Insight employees using Copilot are seeing four hours of productivity gained per week from data summarization and content creation.
  29. Joos uses Microsoft 365 Copilot to grow its brand with worldwide collaboration by streamlining meetings, optimizing presentations and improving communications.
  30. Kantar is harnessing the power of Microsoft 365 Copilot by reducing costly, time-consuming IT processes and boosting productivity for employees.
  31. KPMG Australia is using Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service, Azure AI Search and Microsoft Copilot 365 to perform advanced text analysis of dozens of client source documents to identify full or partial compliance, or noncompliance, in a fraction of the time required for manual assessments.
  32. LGT is launching Microsoft Copilot LGT to improve efficiency, showing users save an average of an hour a week even in the pilot phase.
  33. Lotte Hotels & Resorts has been creating a new work culture that allows employees to work more efficiently and focus on the nature of the work by adopting Microsoft Power Platform for automation.
  34. MAIRE is leveraging Microsoft 365 Copilot to automate routine tasks, saving over 800 working hours per month, freeing up engineers and professionals for strategic activities while supporting MAIRE’s green energy transition by reducing their carbon footprint.
  35. McDonald’s China chose Microsoft Azure AI, GitHub Copilot and Azure AI Search to transform its operations, resulting in a significant increase in AI adoption, consumption and rete