With a storied 120-year history and 72,000 employees, dentsu is revered as one of the top creative media companies in the world, with a reputation for being innovation specialists as much as they are marketing and transformation experts. Dentsu’s agency teams are powered by data, tech, and generative AI. One of the big challenges dentsu clients face is demand for content on a growing number of channels, which means dentsu must keep its creativity ahead of this rapid pace of change to build experiences that resonate with its clients and drive brand engagement. Microsoft Copilot is revolutionizing creative workflows, supporting dentsu’s talent, and helping to rethink services. By reducing and removing tactical tasks, dentsu employees can focus on the strategic part of their work – collaborating creatively to build brands and engage consumers.
“Microsoft Copilot is allowing our teams to gain deep insights each day, bringing them together to collaborate in ways not possible before. We believe that technology empowers, not replaces, the vast depth of talent in our teams.”
Hiroshi Igarashi, President & CEO, dentsu
Dentsu helps brands build compelling content through a combination of creative media, data, and technology services. The biggest challenge its clients face is creating content on an ever evolving and increasing number of channels, which means dentsu must keep its creativity ahead of this rapid pace of change to build experiences that resonate with its clients and drive brand engagement. Microsoft Copilot brings value in accelerating the company’s planning and production processes because teams are pressed for time, needing to create more content than ever before, at a fast pace.
Employees are experiencing how Copilot helps them create their best work faster and augments their workflows. “It is a unique opportunity to explore how generative AI and Microsoft Copilot can help optimize workflows and our investments. Also, how we co-create new value, new behaviors, and ultimately new spaces for brands, as an integrated growth partner,” says Angela Tangas, Chief Executive Officer of dentsu UK and Ireland.
“Dentsu is full of curious and creative people at all technical skill levels. We invent on a daily basis, bringing new opportunities to clients. We invest in expanding our capabilities to ensure both creativity and technology are our strengths,” explains Hiroshi Igarashi, President & CEO, dentsu. “Partnerships like this one with Microsoft are incredibly important and led to our trial of Microsoft Copilot.”
“Before, we would sit with a client in a room for an ideation session, we would come up with ideas together, and we’d take that information and days or weeks later, we come back with creative visualizations of these ideas,” says James Thomas, Global Head of Technology, Dentsu Creative. Thomas considers Copilot an important tool because the more creative the idea, the harder it can be to translate for the client. He explains, “With Copilot, we’ve already got visuals and draft ideas of what things could look like with the client in the room, which means we can get to the right idea faster.”
More time to focus on creativity with supercharged ideas
By reducing repetitive tactical tasks, including reviewing emails and attachments, people can focus on the strategic part of their work—creating and collaborating to deliver value to clients. “Copilot is a necessary tool for me every day. I can’t imagine a world without it,” says Emma Land, Global Head of Employee Communications, dentsu.
For dentsu, understanding engagement and behavior are key ingredients for technology adoption, they are seeing the value and productivity impact of Copilot by coupling Viva insights information with employee survey data. “Our recent analysis shows employees are saving at least 15 minutes, if not 30 minutes a day by using Copilot. We are seeing a noticeable shift in how they are using the technology, spending less on meetings, emails, calls, or chats, using the time they get back to focus on deep work without interruptions and to invest in their teams,” according to Kate Slade, Director of Emerging Technology Enablement, dentsu.
“Creatives see Copilot as an important tool in their kits. It’s not there to replace them; it’s just something they can use to supercharge their ideas,” adds Thomas. With Copilot, dentsu employees can spend time with clients, creatively storytelling with them, building strong relationships, and ultimately better serving them.
“It’s more than faster workflows; we are achieving a higher quality. For example, when I’m writing and drafting something, I ask Copilot to make it more concise or change the tone of voice. My communications are better,” says Thomas about his personal experience.
“We are able to bring AI into the day-to-day with Microsoft Copilot,” says Guilherme Gornati, Vice President of Emerging Technologies, dentsu. “We see technology as a way to unburden our talented people so they can do what they do best.”
Accelerating the content and creative lifecycle
Microsoft Teams Premium and Copilot together are accelerating every stage of the content and creative lifecycle. Complex production and technical meetings or creative sessions with lots of discussion points, action items, and next steps previously took a long time and several people to write up and send out. Teams Premium includes intelligent recap, which immediately summarizes meetings and provides captions of meetings, along with real-time translations of meeting transcripts.
From Thomas’s perspective, these intricate workflows with very tight timelines and budget visualizations are now better organized. Adding Copilot, employees can use natural language to get summaries and find information quickly. People can start on priority tasks without any lag time waiting on notes.
Dentsu provides its global employees with Teams Premium for real-time translations to ensure everyone gets the most content out of the meeting. If someone joins a meeting late, they can use Copilot to find out what’s been discussed so far. At the end, Copilot provides a summary and actions list for group review.
Microsoft 365 with Teams Premium and Copilot is changing the dentsu communication experience from beginning to end. The company now attests to a much faster pace and rhythm of communication in an already connected world. “There is always someone online, especially across various countries, which means people can connect with you constantly. It can be a struggle to cope with all that communication, but now I am able to be efficient and spend time doing my deep-thinking work,” says Julie Duvillier, Head of Unified Communications Platforms for Global Technology, dentsu.
Hundreds of thousands of assets at their fingertips
Dentsu’s proprietary production platform, Digital Interact, hosts creative workflows, content, and client resources as its digital asset management system. Through their extensibility, Teams and Copilot interoperate with Digital Interact to create a rich user experience, where assets are found using natural language without the need to go into another application.
“We have hundreds of thousands of assets, and it’s very difficult to search things. Instead of spending hours trying to search for content, it is served up straight away, right into the heart of our workflow,” Thomas explains.
Microsoft Copilot makes it easier to find an asset, whether it’s for a particular client, a certain time period, or other details without users having to leave the app that they are already in. Dentsu is already considering many ways to apply Copilot extensibility features to other applications.
Exploring new ways to be creative with Copilot Studio
Dentsu’s partnership with Microsoft is expanding with Copilot Studio. The IT team is exploring how they can build custom prompts by functions or roles or connect it with proprietary and third-party applications. “I have a lot of ideas, including using it for our onboarding employee experience with prompts that could help new employees find content. HR or Finance’s systems could have custom prompts in those applications,” says Duvillier.
Early access to top-edge technologies, such as Copilot Studio, helps dentsu leverage the wide breadth of knowledge across the company, with hundreds of interconnected teams worldwide, while providing personalized experiences for employees.
Innovation at the heart of what they do
To continue to advance their thought-leadership and talent capabilities, dentsu implemented Microsoft Copilot to remove time-consuming tasks so employees can do what they are best at: human creativity and building brand-differentiating content.
“I depend on Copilot to help me with a first draft of an announcement or employee message, saving me around 30 to 60 minutes each time,” Land states. “We’re a 72,000-person organization. Think about the adaptability of those time savings for everybody—it’s potentially a huge resource savings.”
Adds Land, “With Copilot, our people can get back to what they’re brilliant at, which is driving human connection, the storytelling within brands. We’re using Copilot to get more strategic in our role and less into the day-to-day tactical.”
“We started using Copilot with the hypothesis that it would elevate our people’s potential and bring additional value to our clients. I am delighted our high expectations proved to be accurate based on survey data and insights as we work to broaden access to this and other generative AI technologies,” comments Brian Klochkoff, Executive Vice President, Innovation & Emerging Technologies, dentsu
Dentsu is unlocking its most valuable resource, its employees, by making communicating and collaborating easier, which puts creativity at the forefront of what they do every day.
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“Creatives see Copilot as an important tool in their kits. It’s not there to replace them; it’s just something they can use to supercharge their ideas.”
James Thomas, Global Head of Technology, Dentsu Creative
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