Introduction
AI transformation is not a single launch – it’s a multi‑phase journey that blends strategy, change management, and measurable business outcomes. The Frontier Firm Playbook captures how leading organizations move from AI pilots to pervasive impact by aligning use cases to business value, scaling responsibly, and building momentum with the right metrics. This article shares how to apply that playbook in practice – and how Viva Glint and Viva Pulse together serve as the employee listening and insights backbone of the transformation, capturing signals of readiness, trust, adoption, and impact that usage telemetry alone cannot reveal. Pulse enables rapid, scenario‑specific feedback early and often, while Glint provides the enterprise‑grade analytics, benchmarking, and trend analysis required to govern and scale AI transformation.
Why Follow the Frontier Firm Playbook?
Frontier Firms are those that consistently turn AI’s potential into a durable competitive advantage. What sets them apart is how they manage the transformation:
- Intentional sequencing: They sequence initiatives from foundational readiness to pilot-scenario quick wins, to scaled adoption.
- Measuring what matters: They go beyond raw deployment counts – tracking usage, behavior change, and business outcomes together.
- Building trust & capability: They invest in upskilling, clear communication, and responsible AI guardrails to foster confidence and competence.
- Continuous feedback loops: They continuously listen to employees (and customers), using feedback to refine the program as it evolves.
Crucially, Frontier Firms treat AI adoption as an organization-wide people transformation, not just a tech rollout.
HR: Co-Owner of the Journey
In successful AI transformations, HR is a named co‑owner of the Frontier Firm journey alongside IT and business leadership. That’s because lasting AI-powered change depends on new behaviors, skills, and cultural shifts at scale – domains where HR excels:
- Workforce transformation: AI adoption reshapes roles, skills, incentives, manager routines, and culture. HR functions as the strategic enabler for these workforce changes, ensuring people are prepared and supported.
- Skills and enablement: HR drives role-based training, upskilling, and change communications, so employees feel confident and know why and how to use AI.
- Employee listening & trust: HR uses Viva Glint and Pulse to gauge sentiment, trust, and pain points, giving leaders evidence to steer the change effectively.
Bottom line: AI transformation is as much about people as technology. Empowering HR to co-lead – backed by robust employee insights – greatly increases the odds of success.
Viva Glint & Pulse: A Layered Listening Model
Frontier Firms use a layered listening approach. Viva Pulse captures fast, situational feedback during early rollout and experimentation, while Viva Glint consolidates sentiment, comments, and outcomes into a durable insight layer that leaders use to steer, govern, and scale AI adoption.
Different data sets answer different questions:
- Telemetry (e.g., Copilot usage stats and license dispersion) shows what is happening – who is using AI, how often, in which apps.
- Business outcomes (KPIs like productivity or quality metrics) show what changed as a result of AI.
- Glint and Pulse measure why those results are happening in a way to guide direct action to address the feedback – revealing human factors like confidence, trust, friction points, and enablement gaps.
Simply put, Glint and Pulse track workforce sentiment and adoption motivators throughout the AI journey, allowing organizations to continuously check in with employees and to leverage advanced analytics to uncover key insights. This real-time input highlights challenges or wins that metrics alone can't provide—such as identifying whether low usage stems from inadequate training, apprehension about AI, or workflow mismatch.
By using Glint and Pulse, HR and leaders gain a trusted, central gauge of organizational readiness and sentiment. This allows them to address issues (e.g., low confidence or ethical concerns) proactively and to celebrate successes (e.g., improved productivity and morale) with credible data.
The Frontier Firm Phases & What to Measure
Successful AI transformation follows a deliberate, phased path. Frontier Firms progress through three stages: Foundation, Expansion, and Frontier. Across all phases, Frontier Firms follow a consistent measurement journey: early readiness feedback (Pulse), deep sentiment and trend analysis (Glint), and usage/outcome correlation (Viva Insights + Copilot reports).
Phase 1: Foundation
Goal: Ensure the organization is prepared — strategically and culturally — to adopt AI.
Frontier Firms start by aligning AI scenarios to business priorities and establishing clear guardrails. Just as importantly, they assess whether employees understand why AI matters and feel confident using it.
What to measure:
- Employee confidence and trust in AI
- Enterprise cultural readiness
- Awareness of priority AI scenarios and enablement coverage
- Awareness of strategic mission aligned to AI investments
- Early signals of hesitation, risk, or uneven preparedness
HR’s role: HR co‑owns this phase by shaping the change narrative, segmenting the workforce for targeted enablement, and ensuring managers are equipped to lead adoption.
Phase 2: Expansion
Goal: Prove value quickly in a small number of high‑impact scenarios.
In this phase, Frontier Firms focus on 2–4 pilot scenarios that demonstrate tangible benefits and build confidence across the organization.
What to measure:
- Copilot usage depth and repeat use in pilot groups
- Self‑reported time savings and quality improvements
- Employee feedback on usefulness, accuracy, and friction
HR’s role: HR partners with business leaders to reinforce new habits through role‑based learning, manager routines, and peer sharing.
Phase 3: Frontier
Goal: Embed AI into everyday work and sustain momentum responsibly.
Once value is proven, Frontier Firms scale adoption with consistent enablement, governance, and continuous listening.
What to measure:
- Adoption patterns by role, team, and region
- Links between AI usage, employee experience, and strategic business outcomes
- Ongoing trust, confidence, and enablement effectiveness
HR’s role: HR helps embed AI into role expectations, capability models, and performance conversations, ensuring adoption is sustainable and inclusive.
Why this matters
Across all three phases, telemetry shows what's happening — but employee sentiment explains why. By pairing usage and outcome data with workforce sentiment, Frontier Firms reduce transformation risk, accelerate value realization, and scale AI with confidence.
Your AI Transformation Measurement Stack
To manage an AI transformation, you will draw on multiple sources of data and insights. Viva Glint and Pulse sit at the center of this measurement strategy, complemented by usage analytics and workplace analytics across Viva. The table below summarizes how each tool or signal contributes:
|
Measurement Tool / Signal |
Role in AI Transformation (What It Captures) |
|
Viva Glint and Pulse – Copilot Survey Templates |
Employee sentiment and readiness. Pulse is typically used for early and recurring checks tied to specific Copilot/AI Transformation moments, while Glint is used to aggregate, analyze, and correlate sentiment with usage and outcomes over time. Purpose-built surveys templates for Readiness, Adoption, Impact can be deployed in Viva Glint or Pulse designed to capture baseline and ongoing sentiment on AI: e.g., awareness, confidence, trust, perceived usefulness, and enablement effectiveness. Reveals why people are or are not adopting. |
|
Usage telemetry. Dashboard and admin reports showing who is using Copilot, how often, and in which scenarios (when available). Key metrics include active users, active days per user, and usage trends by team or role. Shows what AI usage looks like across the org. | |
|
Work pattern changes. Analyzes how work habits are shifting as AI is adopted: meeting hours, focus time, after-hours workload, cross-collaboration patterns, etc. Compare teams using Copilot vs. those not using it to see if work is getting streamlined (e.g., fewer meetings, more focus time). | |
|
Experience vs. adoption link. Combines the above data to see if higher AI adoption correlates with improved employee experience. For example, do people who use Copilot feel they “can do my best work” more often? Is workload perception changing? Understanding sentiment with Copilot also helps us uncover: | |
|
Viva Glint + Engage - Ambient Signals report (in development) |
Integrated telemetry + outcomes + sentiment. In development: advanced analytics to link behavioral data with outcomes and sentiment in real time. This can pinpoint moments that matter – e.g., correlating a spike in AI usage with a boost in productivity or identifying where low trust feedback coincides with low adoption. |
|
Viva Glint - Employee Feedback agent (in development) |
Continuous listening at scale. In development: an on-demand, conversational feedback tool enabling quick pulse checks on specific topics. For instance, a manager could ask their team about a new Copilot feature, and an AI-driven summary of responses would feed into the program's next steps. |
Together, these tools provide a 360° view of your AI initiative. But it is the voice of your employees, the qualitative “why” layer as measured by Glint and Pulse, that gives context to the quantitative numbers. It ensures you do not misinterpret raw data and helps HR and leaders make informed adjustments (whether that's more training, tweaking a use case, or communicating success stories to build confidence).
Example 90‑Day Plan
To illustrate how all these pieces come together, here is an example of a 90-day rollout plan that can be piloted with a subset of the employee population before rolling out function –specific or enterprise-wide initiatives for kicking off the Frontier Firm journey:
Weeks 0–4: Awareness & Readiness
- Deploy short readiness and expectation surveys using Viva Pulse to capture early sentiment on AI confidence, trust, and perceived value.
- Use Viva Insights to establish baseline Copilot usage and adoption patterns.
- Segment early adopters to inform a targeted pilot rollout strategy.
- Set clear adoption and experience success metrics and develop enablement materials.
Weeks 5-8: Pilot, Learn, and Adjust
- Launch pilots with defined scenarios and success criteria.
- Continue Pulse check‑ins to monitor usefulness, friction, and enablement gaps.
- Analyze sentiment heatmaps and early resistance signals to refine the pilot approach.
- Begin correlating early sentiment with usage using Copilot Employee Experience Outcomes data where available.
Weeks 9-12: Scale with Confidence
- Conduct Viva Glint engagement or Copilot Impact surveys to measure sustained confidence, trust, and enablement.
- Correlate Glint sentiment insights with usage and Workplace Patterns data to identify what is driving (or blocking) adoption.
- Identify success stories and positive adoption signals to amplify across the organization.
- Establish a recurring measurement rhythm using Glint and Pulse as the systems of record for ongoing governance.
Throughout these 90 days, the insights from Glint, Pulse and other analytics are crucial – they ensure you’re not just checking technical metrics but truly understanding how employees are experiencing the change. Early feedback helps you iterate the program for greater success in subsequent waves.
“What Good Looks Like”: Key Success Signals
How will you know if your AI transformation is on track? Here are some leading indicators that Frontier Firms watch for:
- Adoption: ~60–70% of target users actively using AI at least weekly by the second month, with the average frequency of use per user rising steadily. This shows not only broad uptake but deeper habitual use.
- Employee Experience: Improvement in employee survey ratings on items like “I can do my best work” or “I have the tools and support I need,” indicating that people feel more effective and supported with AI.
- Productivity Gains: Measurable time savings in key workflows – for example, a 10–20% reduction in routine meeting time for pilot teams, faster completion of tasks like document preparation or case notes, etc.
- Quality Improvements: Signs of higher quality output in pilot areas, such as fewer revision cycles required or fewer escalations and errors in AI-assisted processes.
- Confidence & Trust: Increasing user-reported accuracy ratings and confidence in AI recommendations over time, reflecting growing trust as the technology proves its value.
- Sustainability: A growing and active community of champions, an expanding library of shared best-practice prompts, and a visible improvement backlog for the AI program. These all indicate that the initiative is building self-sustaining momentum beyond the initial push.
These metrics should be interpreted in combination. For instance, a jump in usage is encouraging – but if experience or trust scores drop, it flags a risk (perhaps people feel pressure to use AI without support). That's why Glint’s qualitative insights are so vital to pair with quantitative metrics. Frontier Firms watch both, ensuring increased AI adoption also means employees feel more effective and empowered, not frustrated or threatened.
Common Pitfalls (and How to Avoid Them)
Even with a solid plan, there are missteps to guard against. Here are a few common pitfalls in AI transformation – and how Frontier Firms avoid them:
Staying vigilant about these pitfalls will help ensure your AI initiative delivers sustained results. In particular, never underestimate the people side – unaddressed fears or lack of support can derail even the best technology. By measuring and responding to the human signals, you mitigate transformation risks (e.g., catching early signs of fatigue or compliance concerns) and strengthen your case for scaling AI responsibly.
Resources
Embarking on the Frontier Firm journey requires both strategic vision and tactical execution. Here are some resources to help you move forward:
- Frontier Firm Playbook – Detailed guidance on AI transformation patterns, example scenarios, and maturity stages (Microsoft’s playbook)
- Frontier Firm Scenarios – A library of industry-specific AI use cases to spark ideas
By following the Frontier Firm Playbook – and leveraging Glint and Pulse to keep a finger on the pulse of your organization – you can turn AI from a promising experiment into a sustainable, enterprise-wide capability. The result is not just successful AI adoption, but a more engaged, empowered workforce ready to innovate continuously.
Good luck on your journey to becoming a Frontier Firm!
Microsoft