Inside Microsoft: Reimagining HR and IT with Microsoft's Employee Self-Service Agent

In the past year, Microsoft has focused on supporting the success of other enterprises with Microsoft 365 Copilot. I’ve highlighted many great examples of how companies have innovated and created impact in their organization by adopting Copilot and developing agents, which are AI assistants designed to automate and execute business processes. 

Our expertise in supporting successful development and deployment comes from our own experience as the first enterprise to adopt Copilot and line-of-business agents built on the Copilot stack. In fact, our internal IT organization, Microsoft Digital, serves as Customer Zero.  In this post, I’ll share their behind-the-scenes lessons for identifying use cases, implementing AI governance, and configuring our pre-built Employee Self-Service Agent, which enterprises will be able to configure and deploy as well.

I’ll also delve into the early ROI we’ve seen from using the agent within Microsoft, as well as highlighting resources like the Microsoft 365 Dev Center that provide guidance for developing similar agents for your business. 

How Microsoft identified key use cases for agents 

Agents can drive efficiency in countless ways, but a crucial first step is to find the specific scenarios or processes where they can benefit your business most. We prioritize use cases based on the biggest pain points, the largest volume of agent interactions, and feasibility—seeking out the least complex use cases to drive rapid value. Microsoft Digital also created an AI business value framework to align our AI initiatives with business priorities, such as using agents to boost productivity, deliver cost savings, improve the employee experience, and drive risk reduction.  

With that perspective, it was clear that there was an opportunity to deploy an agent to transform the employee experience, while boosting productivity for HR and IT teams. Like any large enterprise, the breadth of our content repositories and internal tools to support employees has grown over time, and that volume can slow the search for information. Employees then often seek a resolution by submitting support tickets, which are handled by our managed services providers. Therefore, any reduction in tickets creates savings for us.  

Next, Microsoft Digital worked with the product team in the Experiences and Devices group to set up the Employee Self-Service Agent and customize it with Copilot Studio, a comprehensive platform for building and configuring custom agents using no-code, low-code, or pro-code. It’s important to connect agents to knowledge sources, so our developers configured the Employee Self-Service Agent to access the relevant tools and content repositories for our HR and IT organizations. This includes SharePoint sites, content in Microsoft Graph, and third-party sources, like ServiceNow, Workday, and SAP SuccessFactors.  

The Employee Self-Service Agent is transforming the employee experience at Microsoft 

Today, the Employee Self-Service Agent provides a single, intelligent access point for retrieving company knowledge and completing self-service tasks using natural language. When a Microsoft employee makes an HR or IT inquiry, the agent pulls from relevant content sources to empower the employee with the answers, resources, and tools they need. Employees can retrieve knowledge and complete tasks like understanding geographic and role-specific HR and IT policy information, requesting parental leave or a leave of absence, getting help with sensitive HR issues, and even troubleshooting IT issues and connecting with a live agent if they are unable to resolve their issue via the Employee Self-Service Agent. 

The Employee Self-Service Agent is already delivering tangible results in both IT and HR. Compared with the prior HR tool, users of the agent are 25% more likely to receive a correct response and 31% less likely to create a support ticket¹.

“When people come to HR, they’re now getting responses that are faster and more personalized,” says Christopher Fernandez, Microsoft corporate vice president in HR. “It’s great to see this positive impact—which is exactly what we are aiming for in enhancing the employee experience.” 

For the IT test group, the self-help success rate has increased 36%, and the self-resolution rate for information discovery grew by 34%. Crucially, user satisfaction with IT improved 18%².

“These agents aren’t just speeding up how our teams help employees get the answers they’re looking for, but they’re also giving employees better answers right from the start,” says Nathalie D’Hers, corporate vice president of Microsoft Digital.  

Overall, employees are submitting fewer support tickets, which lowers costs and drives productivity gains for IT and HR employees. Our vision is that eventually Copilot and agents will handle most requests, with only urgent or complex requests requiring the attention of IT and HR staff. 

Enterprise customers will be able to experience the benefits of the pre-built Employee Self-Service Agent firsthand when it becomes generally available during the second quarter of 2025. 

Best practices: Establishing governance while empowering employees  

Microsoft Digital’s most important advice for deploying agents is to ensure proper governance of your data estates, which include corporate-level data from the likes of HR and ERP systems, as well as Microsoft 365 data in the form of files created by employees. It’s a foundational step, because Copilot uses large language models (LLMs) to interact with data across the entire organization, and its responses will deliver that data directly to employees. 

Microsoft Digital recommends using Microsoft Purview to protect data with sensitivity labels, which Copilot was designed to respect, so that access to content is controlled appropriately. When making decisions about labeling architecture, consider the type of collaboration and access employees will need for your primary use cases. It’s also important to limit the labeling options, which makes the process easier and more intuitive for employees.  

For more in-depth guidance on governance, read this blog post and follow these best practices: 

• Beyond labeling, use Microsoft Purview for rights management and data loss prevention based on measures for data classification, confidential information, and other safeguards. 

• Extend the deployment and governance conversation beyond IT by bringing in relevant security, legal, and compliance stakeholders to create a more holistic approach. 

• Take the opportunity to implement training to expand or refresh employees’ knowledge of data privacy concerns and practices. 

If your enterprise is like Microsoft, with an AI-forward culture and pockets of advanced users, then it’s also important to enable employees to experiment, but to do so in a safe and secure way. We use an approach called “employee empowerment with guardrails.” 

For example, anyone at Microsoft can create agents to help with their daily mundane tasks, but those agents are only available to them. Agents that will be deployed across the enterprise must be developed by engineering teams in collaboration with business partners, not individual users. That approach balances employee innovation against the risks and emphasizes the importance of security and privacy, especially when it comes to agents and AI apps. 

Exploring the possibilities of an agentic world with Microsoft 365 Copilot 

We’re still at the beginning of this journey with AI-powered agents, but we see enormous potential for productivity gains. We envision employees creating their own teams of agents and orchestrating them with Copilot to handle routine tasks, so they can focus more time on higher value work. 

We believe agents will be able to transform work in many ways. Here are just a few examples: 

• Detecting, reporting, remediating, and monitoring network security and connectivity issues 
• Continuously monitoring device health and security, predicting issues, and applying patches  
• Anticipating your needs during travel, clearing your calendar, reconciling scheduling conflicts, and reserving a car or mitigating flight delays. 

We’re excited to lead the way into this agentic world with Copilot, and we look forward to sharing more exciting updates and guidance soon.  

Learn more about Microsoft 365 Copilot, agents, and Microsoft Digital 

For more information about Copilot, developing and deploying agents, governance, and Microsoft Digital, follow the links below.   

• Get started building agents by checking out the Microsoft 365 Dev Center for decision guides, code samples, documentation, and tutorials. 
• Build agents with Microsoft Copilot Studio and Microsoft Visual Studio. 
• Learn how to deploy agents on our instructions page.  
• Read more about our work on the Employee Self-Service Agent and best practices we’ve learned. 
• Review Microsoft Digital’s comprehensive guide for deploying Copilot.  
• Dive deeper into how we’re addressing governance and Copilot. 
• Find out how AI is changing Microsoft’s work from the perspective of our leaders. 
• Check out Inside Track, Microsoft Digital’s site for best practices and insights.