Change Management Best Practices to Drive Value with Agent Builder

Most organizations start in the same place: licenses are provisioned, a handful of enthusiasts begin experimenting, and excitement around AI is high. Yet for most employees, building and using agents remains largely unexplored. The technology is ready, but widespread adoption has yet to follow.

The challenge is rarely technical. More often, it is about driving awareness, building confidence, demonstrating value, and creating the right conditions for new behaviors to take hold. Successful agent adoption requires more than technical readiness. Change management can help organizations build awareness, confidence, and engagement as employees begin creating and using agents.

This guide brings together practical approaches organizations can consider as they scale agent creation and usage.

Whether you are part of an AI Centre of Excellence, Learning and Development team, or Change Management function, you'll find a practical framework for scaling both agent creation and agent usage across your organization.

Included in Microsoft 365 Copilot, Agent Builder makes it easy for users to create agents that support personal and team productivity and enables organizations to democratize agent creation at scale.

In this article, we share best practices for driving change management with Agent Builder and accelerating agent adoption across the enterprise.

Key takeaways

✅ Agent adoption is a change management challenge, not a technical challenge.
✅ Measure both agent makers and agent users.
✅ Champion-led co-build sessions can support stronger engagement than demonstration-only training.
✅ Business unit-specific use cases can help improve activation than generic AI sessions.
✅ Leadership sponsorship is an important enabler of sustained adoption.

What is Agent Builder and Why Does It Matter?

Agent Builder in Microsoft 365 Copilot provides no-code experience for anyone to create an agent. Users can build agents using natural language, configure them manually, or start from prebuilt templates for common business scenarios.

There are 3 ways to build an agent:

• Use natural language to describe your agent, and Copilot builds it for you (recommended).
• Configure your agent manually via the Configure tab.
• Start with a template to create an agent for a specific use case. Under the templates section, you will find some high-value scenarios like Plan my Day, Project Delta Digest, AI Learn Advisor and much more.

Now that you know what Agent Builder is, let’s explore how to drive behavior change for scaled adoption.

Change Management Operating Model

To get started with scaled adoption for Agent Builder, you do not need a bespoke plan for every team. A simple, repeatable three-phase approach can scale effectively across business units and teams.

Plan:

Here are a few checklists that can help you get started:

• Secure executive sponsorship from someone who can influence the extended leadership team, who, in turn, encourages their people to attend. 

• Take a data-driven approach. Segment the user base by intent, then group audiences by license category to simplify delivery. 

• Work with your program lead, AI Center of Excellence, and L&D teams to agree on a campaign name. For example, “Be an Agent Boss,” “AI for All,” or “Agent BUDDY program: Build, Unleash, Deploy, Democratize Yourself.”

• Define success metrics up front. Focus on the Users by creator type metric in the Microsoft 365 Copilot Agents Usage Report in the Microsoft 365 admin center. You can also track attendance to usage conversion and session satisfaction scores. View the usage report documentation. 

You can also track additional metrics such as attendance-to-usage conversion rates and session satisfaction scores.

Prepare:

• Clear access and licensing friction before the session, not during it. A quick readiness check with IT beforehand removes the most common blocker.
• Use the adoption content in the Build agents with Agent Builder guidance to run your sessions. Open the build guidance. 
• Land use cases tied to real work, not feature tours. Show how an agent can support part of someone’s actual job to make the experience relevant to their day-to-day work. The templates and examples gallery is a good place to start. Open the templates gallery. 
• Send a short primer and a reminder before every session so the audience knows what to expect and arrives with some anticipation.

Execute:

• Teach by building, not by presenting. Make every session practical so people leave having created or run a working agent. Start with a horizontal use case that works for everyone, such as the Plan My Day template, and walk through the capabilities. Then show a vertical use case that sits in their daily workflow. Ask people to build alongside you rather than watch. 
• Share ways to keep the momentum going: scheduling a prompt for M365 Copilot licensed users , post session recaps, leaderboards, and certifications where applicable.   

• Encourage people to showcase and share the agents they build and set up a feedback channel, so questions have somewhere to go. 

Your 30-Day Agent Builder Adoption Checklist could look like this:

Plan

• Secure executive sponsorship.
• Identify champions.
• Define success metrics.
• Validate licensing and readiness.

Prepare

• Start with templates available in Agent Builder
• Expand with business-unit-specific use cases.
• Publish campaign branding.
• Run co-build sessions.
• Capture attendance and feedback.

Execute

• Celebrate agent creators.
• Share success stories.
• Review creator and usage metrics.
• Plan the next wave.

 

The following HCLTech customer story shows how the organization approached Agent Builder adoption through a structured change management program.

HCLTech: Driving Agent Adoption at Enterprise Scale

From mid-May’26 to the end of June’26, HCLTech invited 80K+ employees through a structured adoption campaign designed to make agent creation practical, accessible, and relevant to everyday work.

We observed an increase in active agent users increase from 3,056 to 13,727, a 349% rise during the campaign. This included 8,722 active licensed users and 5,005 active unlicensed users. What began as a focused enablement program evolved into a broader organizational movement, showing that enterprise-scale agent adoption can be measurable and repeatable.

Making Adoption Practical

The Agent Buddy Program moved beyond demonstrations by offering hands-on co-build sessions grounded in real work, business-unit priorities, and business challenges.

Employees explored scenarios across research and analysis, enterprise knowledge discovery, planning and productivity, reporting and tracking, employee learning, communications, and development and quality assurance. During this campaign, participants generated more than 1,100 agent ideas, with planning and productivity emerging as the largest category.

The program gave employees opportunities to build and experiment with agents around day-to-day business scenarios.

“This initiative reinforced an important lesson: technology adoption succeeds when organizations focus as much on people and behaviors as they do on the technology itself. By combining Microsoft 365 Copilot innovation with HCLTech's structured change management approach, we demonstrated how organizations can scale agent adoption and accelerate value realization across the enterprise”.

- Carol Criner, Senior Vice President, Strategic Accounts, HCLTech

Building a Creator Ecosystem

HCLTech recorded 36,286 agents, with 27,375 created during the first half of 2026. User-created agents represented 73.9% of total agents used.

By July 2026, user-created agents generated 71.4% of all recorded responses, alongside continued use of agents created by Microsoft and HCLTech teams. Together, these metrics provide a view into how employees were creating and using agents across HCLTech.

Sustaining Momentum

Engagement continued after the formal sessions ended. Employees returned with new use cases, requests for additional hands-on practice, deeper learning content, and opportunities to build more advanced agents.

Post-session follow-up and continued support extended beyond the formal sessions. Employees began sharing ideas, supporting colleagues, and contributing to a broader community of agent creation across the organization.

What Made the Difference

• Leadership sponsorship: Executive support made agent adoption a visible business priority and created credibility at scale.
• Relevant engagement: Business-unit segmentation and role-specific use cases connected agent capabilities directly to employees’ work.
• Hands-on enablement: Co-build sessions gave employees opportunities to build, test, and refine their own agents.

 

HCLTech paired its Agent Builder adoption efforts with a change management approach that incorporated leadership sponsorship, practical enablement, relevant use cases, and sustained engagement.

The outcome was more than increased usage or agent creation. The program combined increased agent creation and usage with continued employee participation in agent-building activities.

“Enterprise AI delivers value when it becomes part of everyday work. This program helped employees create agents for real business needs while establishing a scalable model for adoption.”

— Avishek Chattopadhyay, CVP and CIO, HCLTech

Successful organizations do not start by asking employees to build agents. They start by helping employees solve a real problem with an agent. Agent creation is the outcome of value realization, not the starting point.

What We Learned from Scaling Agent Builder Adoption

One lesson stands out from these adoption efforts: focus less on teaching people about agents in the abstract and more on helping people apply agents to real business problems. Five practical patterns can help shape your approach:

• Give users an opportunity to build an agent during the session so they can gain hands-on experience with Agent Builder.
• Complement horizontal productivity scenarios with business-unit-specific use cases connected to employees’ day-to-day work.
• Build a champion network to complement centralized enablement and help extend adoption efforts across the organization.
• Address access requirements before sessions and set expectations in advance to reduce potential friction for participants.
• Track both agent makers and agent users to build a more complete picture of adoption.

Scaling agent adoption takes more than providing access. It requires thoughtful change management that helps employees connect agents to the way they work. Secure sponsorship, meet teams in the context of their work, address potential friction early, and make sessions hands-on. Start with one team, introduce a prebuilt agent connected to their work, and help them build their own. Then use what you learn to inform the next wave of adoption.

Where to go next 

• Overview and admin controls: Agent Builder in Microsoft 365 Copilot
• Step-by-step build guidance: Build agents with Agent Builder
• Ready-made use cases: Agent templates and examples
• Track adoption: Microsoft 365 Copilot Agents Usage Report