Microsoft is rolling out its Copilot 365 AI assistant to all of Accenture’s roughly 743,000 employees in the biggest enterprise deal for the chatbot. While financial details of the agreement were not disclosed by the companies in a joint statement on Monday.
It has been considered a huge boost for Microsoft as just a little more than 3% of its over 450 million 365 Enterprise users pay for the $30-a-month offering.
“Copilot is a personal digital colleague,” says Tony Leraris, Accenture’s chief information officer. “It changes the way our people work, the way they research, ideate, analyze and execute many daily activities.”
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Accenture began its deployment of Copilot in August 2023, shortly after the tool was unveiled. The rollout started with a pilot involving a few hundred senior leaders and select employees, then scaled up to 20,000 users. At that time, Accenture focused on its data strategy, data governance, access controls and critically, understanding how people were actually using Copilot in tools like Outlook, Teams and Word.
“We were fine-tuning our adoption strategy and developing a blueprint for how it would be used in daily work,” Leraris says.
Accenture says the initial deployment has been successful. About 97% of staff said Copilot helped them complete routine tasks up to 15 times faster, while 53% reported major gains in productivity, according to a self-reported company survey of 200,000 users. “Our teams are already doing higher-value work because of it,” Accenture CEO Julie Sweet said. This comes amid doubts regarding productivity gains linked to AI.
A survey of nearly 6,000 senior executives at the U.S., UK, German and Australian firms, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research in February, found nearly 90% said AI had no impact on employment or productivity over the past three years.
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Meanwhile, Microsoft is dealing with slow Copilot adoption and uneven cloud growth, which have deepened investor worries. Charles Lamanna, who leads Microsoft’s M365 apps and Copilot platform, told Reuters that efforts to offer multiple AI models, including Anthropic and tools such as “Critique” — which uses one model to check another’s output — are aiding demand.
Microsoft has recently been aggressively pushing Anthropic’s technology onto customers, aiming to reduce reliance on OpenAI. A reworked partnership unveiled earlier on Monday ends Microsoft’s exclusive access to OpenAI’s technology, clearing the way for the ChatGPT creator to sell its products across rival cloud platforms.