10-20% time savings
With the pressure on all public sector organisations to do more with less, Buckinghamshire Council was very excited about the potential of Microsoft Copilot to help alleviate the pressure on services and staff and to drive productivity and efficiencies.
Tony Ellis, Service Director for IT at Buckinghamshire Council, explains the approach: “As a leading local authority, we wanted to engage sooner rather than later. We knew the support we’d get from Microsoft as an early adopter was very attractive. We started to warm up the business in September 2023, letting them know our plans to buy 300 Microsoft 365 Copilot licences.”
“We took the view that the people who best knew where the potential benefits might be are the people doing the work,” he continues. “To tease out their ideas, we held a ‘Dragons’ Den’ style event in our Resources Directorate. We invited teams from all core council services—the backbone of operations, including HR, business services, finance, digital, and customer service. The most successful pitches would win Copilot licences.”
Peter Parfitt, Head of Digital and AI Programme Lead at Buckinghamshire Council, recalls, “We were in a good position; we had the budget, had leadership buy-in, and we knew we wanted to move fast.”
One of the earliest actions was to create an AI governance board. This ensures all AI, including Copilot, is used appropriately and goes through the full governance process. For example, AI will only ever be a support tool; it is never used to make decisions—there will always be a human in the loop.
Once the council was satisfied the right governance was in place, all the teams which participated in the Dragons’ Den event were awarded Copilot licences.
Tony Ellis explains, “We fully accepted there were some areas where the trial wouldn’t work, where we would take back the licences and recycle them. But in others, we quickly saw the green shoots and we started to hear really good stories.”
There was a great deal of interest in Microsoft Copilot. Knowing it was a safe way to explore the potential of generative AI with all the data security and governance of the existing Microsoft environment sparked a hunger for the solution.
Early training sessions, planned for a Friday afternoon, were well attended, even those who didn’t yet have a licence turned up to learn because interest was so high. Even after 5:00 on the Friday afternoon, attendees lingered so they could ask more questions and try Copilot out for themselves.
The time and investment in exploratory training sessions was appreciated by the early users. Greta Belgrove, Business Support Coordinator at Buckinghamshire Council, says, “I thought the training and introduction to Copilot we received was really helpful. And Microsoft have got so many ideas on their website and on YouTube, so we can continue learning.”
Early feedback has been very positive.
In the specialist support office at Buckinghamshire Council, members of the team are using Microsoft 365 Copilot in a variety of ways: to transcribe meetings, respond to complaint letters, draft reports, and create PowerPoint presentations.
“We always ensure the output is checked and edited by a human, but Copilot makes it easy to get started and get tasks completed faster,” Greta Belgrove reports. “I like to use Copilot to transcribe the one-to-one meetings I have. Copilot takes the notes, so I can concentrate on the person rather than sit there typing. Relationship building has improved because people have my full attention.”
Some of the best results of the Copilot trial have been identified in the council’s customer service centre, which fields telephone enquiries from citizens.
Customer Experience Manager Marie White heads up the customer service centre. “Copilot helps in speeding up a lot of my day-to-day tasks—from prioritising and summarising my emails through to searching for information,” she explains. “One of the best uses I’ve found is creating reports. In this noisy, busy environment, it can be difficult to find the head space to write reports, documentation, and proposals. I used to spend a lot of time in the evenings trying to do some of that work. Copilot has been a gamechanger for me. While I’m in the office, I can dictate what’s in my head and then Copilot will start making sense of it and putting it into the format I need.”
Marie White’s experience highlights some of the wellbeing benefits the Council hopes to realise through its use of Copilot. Reducing the stresses and unpaid overtime of council staff will help with wellbeing and, therefore, productivity. It will also help to alleviate issues around stress, associated absences, and burnout, ultimately saving the council money.
“Perhaps one of the best use cases I’ve found for Copilot is as a temperature checker,” Marie White continues. “I can ask Copilot to give me the highlights of the enquiries that are coming in, so I can understand the current issues. I can prioritise my time better and spend more time with colleagues and customers, rather than on paperwork.”
The agents in the customer service centre have also been trialling Microsoft 365 Copilot. They love how Copilot is integrated into the applications they use every day.
Using Copilot has helped reduce the call “wrap time,” the time spent on admin after each call. Kirsty Stewart works in the council’s customer service centre. She uses Microsoft 365 Copilot to transcribe the calls she takes and to look up the answers to difficult questions. She says, “Copilot definitely helps with my call handling times as well as my wrap times.”
The council has also noticed an improvement in the quality of call notes, states Marie White. She explains, “The quality of notes has especially improved for people who can’t touch type.”
Jane Cleator also works in the customer service centre. She enthuses, “On some calls, Copilot is incredibly helpful. Some calls about adult social care can be lengthy. I have to take down all the information to pass to the social care team. With Copilot transcribing, I can focus completely on what the customer is saying, rather than worrying ‘Did I take that down right?’ Copilot is a gamechanger for being attentive to the customer’s needs during the call. We’re better call-takers because of it.”
Copilot helps us to flex up so we can do more in our day.
Marie White, Head of Customer Experience, Buckinghamshire Council
The technical team have also reported rewarding use cases in their trial of Microsoft 365 Copilot.
Mary Haywood-Ord, Technical Programme Lead at Buckinghamshire Council, explains, “We use Microsoft 365 Copilot for everything to do with project management. From transcribing and taking notes during project calls and briefings to producing documentation for project management. Copilot is a really useful tool that saves our team a lot of time.”
She gives the example of a technical architecture document which she recently used Copilot to help create. “Without Copilot it probably would have taken me hours to produce that document. With Copilot I had a decent draft within ten minutes. I had to go through and edit it, but instead of taking a day to produce, it’s taking less than half of that. Our use of Copilot means we can focus more on delivery and less on admin.”
“It means we can be more efficient and stay on top of things more easily,” Mary Haywood-Ord adds. “You’re able to enjoy your job more.”
Mary Haywood-Ord estimates that the team’s use of Copilot is saving each project manager around five hours per month, per project. She explains, “The time savings from our use of Copilot add up to around 30 hours per month for each individual project manager. That means we can all take on more projects.”
These time savings are reflected through the council’s use cases.
“Using Copilot has saved us time,” confirms Greta Belgrove. “And that means we can use the time saved to support more areas of the council. We’re doing more reports, more presentations, and we can support more HR meetings. From a business support perspective, it’s absolutely amazing that we can do all that we do with the number of staff we have.”
In the customer service centre, Marie White reports, “I’ve taken on a whole new service, the Helping Hands service, which I don’t think I could have done as successfully had I not had Copilot. Copilot helps us to flex up so we can do more in our day.”
The council’s team encourages other councils to experiment with Microsoft Copilot.
“Invest time and effort into sharing prompting tips,” recommends Jane Cleator. “Prompting can be a bit of a dark art. It’s important not to give up if you don’t get the exact answer that you want the first time of asking. Instead, think of another way to ask for what you want.”
Tony Ellis reached out to Microsoft when he felt frustrated about one prompt. “I had a four-line prompt to draft an adult social care assessment, which is quite a complex template and we weren’t getting the results we needed,” he recalls. “Microsoft came back with the mother of all prompts. It was about 15 lines long and very detailed. We learnt we need to be more aggressive with our prompts. We can reuse that and apply some of the key nuggets in there to other requirements.”
“We’ve had fun sharing prompts that encourage people to experiment and use Copilot,” agrees Greta Belgrove. “We’ve generated quizzes, written fairy tales, created shopping lists for Michelin starred meals. This way, people can see the possibilities without worrying that something might go wrong. You can have a lot of fun whilst you encourage people to experiment to see how Copilot works for them.”
Peter Parfitt reflects, “Part of the strength of Microsoft Copilot is it sits on top of the solutions our people use every day—Microsoft Teams, Outlook, Microsoft Word, PowerPoint. It helps us to make even better use of those tools in a familiar way.”
“There’s an out-of-date perception of local government IT that we are slow and behind the times,” states Tony Ellis. “In fact, during COVID, we were spinning up new services digitally in a matter of days. Local government totally transformed. We don’t want to lose that. At Buckinghamshire, we want to continue that agility and fast decision making and to continue to build those skills and capabilities.”
He continues, “People in local government are much more enthusiastic about digital generally. Governance will continue to underpin everything we do, especially with AI. But we must continue to transform and digitalise. We think Microsoft Copilot will be a big part of that future.”
The next challenge for the council will be to put some cost savings to the efficiencies and productivity improvements that the team has achieved through its use of Copilot.
“The ten people using Copilot in business services are reporting 10-20% time savings,” states Peter Parfitt. “We need a deep dive into what that means financially.”
“It’s great to have 300 excited users, but what does that translate into in pounds and pence?” agrees Tony Ellis. “If we can shave just 1% off our social care budget, for example, there’s massive potential savings.”
“This change is comparable to the launch of the internet,” asserts Tony Ellis. “It’s life-changing technology. And that sort of thing doesn’t come along very often. There have been dark clouds over local government in recent years. People are weary with the budgetary situation. But this is the first time we’re hearing from frontline folks that we’ve given them something that is really helping them. The cavalry has arrived!”
He continues, “It’s not difficult to imagine that part of a new-job conversation would be ‘Have I got a Copilot licence?’ It will be up there at that kind of level.”
Tony Ellis and Peter Parfitt also see potential to provide users with Copilot licences as part of the council’s reasonable adjustment’s toolkit. Some of the capabilities of Copilot mesh well with the needs of the neurodiverse workforce and workers with other accessibility needs, such as document editing, email reply drafting, and live transcription during meetings.
“I’ve been really impressed with how Microsoft have supported us,” states Peter Parfitt. “They have been fleet of foot and quick to respond. They’ve stood people up as we’ve needed them and that, in turn, helps our staff.”
Active participation in Microsoft forums is important for the Buckinghamshire Council team. Tony Ellis co-chairs the Copilot subgroup of Microsoft UK's Innovation & Collaboration Forum user group. Today, more than 500 local government digital leaders share knowledge and ideas through the network.
“Everyone is at different stages on their journey,” says Tony Ellis. “Some are just starting out, some have a lot of questions, others want to share their learnings. It’s an innovation collaboration forum. Everyone recognises that if you don’t engage with this technology, you’re going to get left behind. But there is a feel-good factor about this too. This is a technology stack that is going to make people more productive and has a positive health and wellbeing benefit too.”
“Copilot is helping us in everything we do,” states Mary Haywood-Ord. “From a transformation point of view, it’s been really powerful.”
Marie White agrees, “Copilot is exceptionally useful. It’s helping staff to be more productive. It’s helping managers to be better managers.”
While users across the business are delighted with the impact they have achieved through their creative use of Copilot, the council believes there are still more opportunities to be exploited. This may include developing specific Copilots for different departments and tasks using Microsoft Copilot Studio. Peter Parfitt says, “I think we are barely scratching the surface of what’s possible with Copilot at the moment.”
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