Microsoft’s Copilot AI was designed from the start to be your on-device companion, boosting productivity and making your PC and software as easy to use as possible. While Copilot’s AI has undoubtedly delivered some time-saving tools that are genuinely worth testing out, not everyone takes advantage.
In the corporate world, where these tools might deliver an edge over the competition, your boss wants to know if, how, and when you’re using them. Your boss also wants to see if you’re keeping up with the competition, both internally and externally.
That corporate dream just became a reality thanks to a new feature rolling out for Microsoft’s Copilot Dashboard in Viva Insights (via ITPro). With this addition, which Microsoft has named Benchmarks, Copilot can now make more sense of relevant data to track AI adoption rates at your company.
Not only can Benchmarks help compare Copilot usage internally at a company, but it can also compare externally against companies it deems to be similar to yours. It sounds like a data privacy nightmare, and you’re not necessarily wrong. But Microsoft has made some promises in that regard that I cover below.
Copilot’s new Benchmarks feature has begun its initial rollout period through the Microsoft Copilot Dashboard in Viva Insights to private preview customers. Microsoft says it’s expecting a full rollout of Benchmarks to all customers “later this month.”
Benchmarks in Copilot Dashboard is watching you use (or not use) AI
The new Benchmarks feature, at least initially, is designed to pull employee data regarding Copilot AI adoption rates and compare it to other employees within or outside your organization.
The internal benchmarks system pulls percentages of active Copilot users, adoption rates by app, and users who continue to return to Copilot’s AI tools. Once harvested, Benchmarks charts the results, making for easy comparisons to employee types, job roles, and geographical regions within your organization.
Microsoft says the “cohort result” pulled via internal benchmarks is given a weighted average based on “matching roles across the tenant.”
The external benchmarks system goes a few steps further. It pulls the data from your organization, then compares it to data pulled from either the top 10% or the top 25% of “companies like yours.” It can also compare to the top 10% or the top 25% of all benchmarks pulled by the new program.
Microsoft states that “companies like yours” may include those “that share the same industry, size tier, and/or headquarters region as your own country.” The external benchmarks data pools use “at least 20 companies” and are “derived from approximations,” which undoubtedly helps reduce the privacy risks.
Further, Microsoft says that its external benchmarks “are calculated using randomized mathematical models” to boost privacy. The company is keeping a close eye on the quality of its external benchmarks, and it says it will “evaluate adding additional benchmarks” as it gathers user feedback.
Employees remain reticent about using AI
The current AI boom is having more than a few side effects on corporate employees.
While the heads of AI firms continue to tout AI’s effectiveness and its potential to completely wipe out white-collar workforces around the world — which has executives and shareholders licking their lips in anticipation — actual employees remain cautious.
A recent MIT study from its NANDA initiative revealed that only about 5% of AI pilot programs actually make it beyond the initial stages. As the study suggests, the other 95% of AI pilot programs come up against the enterprise sector and its inability to adapt to new AI tools compared to other sectors.
This isn’t the first time that Microsoft has added analytics tools to Viva. Microsoft 365 Copilot Analytics is already available to produce “readiness and adoption” reports from data gathered across your organization.
The new Benchmarks tool seems to be designed to make it easier to compare the data internally and externally. If you were worried about your boss knowing that you avoid Copilot at all costs, it’s probably time to say hello to the AI companion.
What is Copilot Dashboard and Viva Insights?
Microsoft introduced Viva in 2021 as a platform designed to ameliorate the employee experience. It’s heavily tied into Microsoft 365 and Teams.
One lane of Viva’s four-pronged approach is Insights. I’ll let Microsoft explain its original vision for Insights:
Personal experiences and insights, visible only to the employee, help individuals protect time for regular breaks, focused work and learning, as well as strengthen relationships with their colleagues. Managers and leaders can see trends at team and organization level, as well as recommendations to better balance productivity and wellbeing. The insights are aggregated and deidentified by default to maintain personal privacy.
Microsoft
This vision for Insights has clearly grown in scope, and the new Benchmarks tools will surely cause panic in some offices as executives and managers see AI adoption rates falling behind the competition.
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