Microsoft HR Pioneers Copilot Adoption with Human-Centered Viva Strategy
Technology is at its best when it empowers people, and Microsoft’s Human Resources department understands this implicitly. When HR began deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot across its global organization, a people-first strategy was a natural fit. Microsoft Viva provided the ideal suite of tools to focus on the human side of technology adoption. This article details how the HR team used the Viva suite to communicate, offer training and development opportunities, and measure their progress in driving Copilot adoption. Through this approach, they have developed effective content, created centralized and peer-led learning opportunities, and meticulously tracked their results.
“As champions for Responsible AI at Microsoft, we have a special duty to learn, experiment, and apply Copilot to the space where we work,” states Liz Friedman, Senior Director of HR AI Transformation. “To support the rest of the company on this journey, we have to understand it ourselves.”
HR’s role in the company-wide Copilot rollout is particularly important because the team is composed of both practitioners who are supporting AI transformation across Microsoft and professionals who rely on the technology in their own work.
A Human-Centered Approach to AI Adoption
Microsoft 365 Copilot offers a transformative solution, and HR is exploring fresh adoption strategies. An important pivot in the rollout concerns the emphasis on guiding excitement to create effective usage and lasting change.
“In some ways, the adoption challenge with Copilot is flipped on its head,” says Caribay Garcia, a principal people scientist on the Microsoft Viva product team. “It’s not as much about building momentum as it is about guiding excitement to create effective usage and long-lasting change.”
To drive AI adoption, Microsoft is channeling employees’ optimism and enthusiasm. Microsoft Viva, with its focus on employee engagement, provides a natural solution for agile adoption efforts.
Leveraging Microsoft Viva Apps:
The following Viva applications were crucial to the HR team’s adoption efforts:
- Viva Connections: Sharing important news and announcements, generating enthusiasm, and connecting Copilot to Microsoft’s culture.
- Viva Amplify: Producing and distributing employee communications to increase awareness and excitement.
- Viva Learning: Providing courses and training content to maximize the value of Copilot, including how to create effective prompts.
- Viva Goals: Establishing and tracking Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) related to Copilot usage and productivity gains.
- Viva Engage: Actively engaging with employees, providing leadership updates, gathering feedback, and enabling the Champs community.
- Viva Insights: Using the Microsoft Copilot Dashboard beta to identify actionable insights and usage trends.
- Viva Pulse: Gathering instant feedback from employees to fine-tune its adoption strategy.
- Viva Glint: Measuring employee sentiment and the overall effectiveness of the Copilot deployment.
With support from Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, the HR team is using Viva to manage the shift. From communication and learning to engagement and feedback, the team appreciates its value at every step of the adoption process.
“Using Viva for our promotion, awareness, skilling, and reinforcement process is tremendously useful,” says Anand Shah, senior business program manager with Microsoft Digital. “It’s critical at scale because it captures so many more people than we could ever manage with just instructor-led trainings or other centralized efforts.”
The Synergy of HR and People Science
Microsoft HR’s Copilot adoption strategy prioritizes Microsoft’s culture and values. With expertise in organizational psychology, behavioral science, data, and employee experience, the people science professionals in the Viva product group offer valuable support. They take a research-based, people-focused approach, integrating insights from their discipline into the Viva suite to ensure each app effectively supports employee needs.
“People science helps us understand what’s important to employees to help them feel happy and successful,” says Carolyn Kalafut, a principal people scientist in the Microsoft Viva product group. “When employees experience rapid changes like AI transformation at work, our research shows that we can ease the process by encouraging them to share their voice, addressing their concerns, keeping them informed with key updates, and providing relevant skilling opportunities.”
Microsoft Digital provides technical and change management expertise to support these efforts. The HR AI Transformation team developed a strategy to address key challenges associated with AI adoption in HR, including questions about responsible AI use and data security.
“We think of our efforts in terms of a cohesive strategy for driving change, from generating awareness and motivation to building knowledge and skills, then applying and tracking the behaviors we’ve enabled,” Friedman says. “Viva apps are really well designed for each of these steps.”
The integrated organizational expertise of HR, people science insights from the product group, and Microsoft Digital’s proven change management processes helped the team develop a successful, multifaceted adoption strategy enhanced by Viva. To help communicate and drive adoption, HR offers a mix of centralized campaigns and localized, intra-departmental efforts.
Effective Communication and Learning Strategies
HR’s internal adoption leaders actively construct employee campaigns specific to their organization’s needs, using Viva Amplify. Change leaders can also deploy the same communications through HR’s Copilot sponsors and champions.
An example of this is the monthly HR AI Roundup, a Viva Amplify campaign. It provides updates on HR’s goals, progress in Copilot adoption, new features and capabilities, and clear steps employees can take. Additionally, HR has implemented various learning paths to meet the needs of how people learn best.
“Everyone can be an effective communicator with Viva Amplify,” says Laura Luethe, a director of communications on the Microsoft HR AI Transformation team. “It combines the capabilities of corporate communicators with the ability to tailor messaging to uniquely relevant audiences.”
Viva Learning offers opportunities for both self-directed and group learning. Content discoverability remains the central upskilling challenge, and Viva Learning’s flexibility is useful for pulling learning material from multiple sources. Moreover, the HR team has created the AI for HR Academy, a set of discipline-specific learning materials.
Community-Based Engagement Boosts Adoption
Change is often community-based and meets people where they are. As an organization as large as Microsoft HR, with many people working hybrid models, a digital solution for community-based engagement is essential.
“There’s no watercooler big enough for our global community to gather around,” says Chris Owen, a senior program manager on the Microsoft HR AI Transformation team. “In that environment, Viva Engage becomes the one and only space where all of HR can meet regularly and exchange ideas.”
Viva Engage, a grassroots employee community app, enables peer-to-peer guidance and communication related to Copilot. Viva Engage’s HR Copilot Champs Community is an essential part of the peer-to-peer change management initiatives. As a result, they share best practices and often use the same platforms to drive adoption within their specific disciplines.
By letting conversations unfold organically, Viva Engage becomes a repository for knowledge-sharing and ongoing discussions about the best ways to use Copilot. The program drives community conversation helping people build valuable, long-lasting connections. In the first nine months, the HR AI Community of Practice had almost 900 new members, generating over 230 new posts with nearly 50,000 views.
Data-Driven Insights and Goal Tracking
Data and the ability to process insights are essential for practical application. The HR team uses employee signals to understand how employees feel and to uncover the “why” behind adoption behavior. The team uses the insights to gauge sentiment and fine-tune their approach. One recent focus has been to correlate results from questions about AI usage and employee thriving metrics.
“It’s all about energy, empowerment, and whether work is meaningful to employees,” says David Spahr, a director on the Microsoft HR AI Transformation team. “We aren’t just trying to understand the productivity and efficiency gains of AI—we want to see the ways it’s helping humans become more human.”
Viva Goals provides clarity around OKRs to help motivate employees and helps with tracking progress. This year, the HR Services team is trying to determine if using Copilot to handle HR inquiries in Dynamics 365 Customer Service correlates with an increase in productivity and job satisfaction. Overall, Viva Goals is essential to their work for providing visible and verifiable insights into the team’s progress.
“We’re very intentional about defining our objectives, anticipating their benefits, and establishing OKRs to track those pieces,” Friedman says. “From there, we can verifiably demonstrate progress.”
Continued Success and Future Plans
HR’s adoption of Microsoft 365 Copilot has delivered positive results thanks to a strong change management approach, cross-organizational collaboration, and Microsoft Viva initiatives that are grounded in people science and tailored to employee needs.
“HR has been a powerful adopter,” says Eric Wand, Head of IT at Microsoft Canada. “This organization has been so committed to their Copilot journey; they’ve achieved many of their end-of-year adoption metrics in just the first few months.”
HR is currently exploring additional ways to incorporate Viva apps. The team plans to use Viva Pulse surveys and the Copilot Dashboard in Viva Insights to track usage. Combined, the quantitative and qualitative data gained will support even more effective change management.
“Our job is to empower the people who empower the planet, and that means changing the way we change,” Friedman says. “The more we can do to meet people where they are and help enhance how they work, the more success we’ll have. So the investments we’ve already made in employee experience areas—communications, skilling, and measurement—have given us a valuable head start at accelerating our own functional AI transformation efforts here in HR.”
