New ways Microsoft Copilot and Viva are transforming the employee experience

Seth Patton · ‎Nov 15 2023

The rapidly evolving promise of AI can enable individuals to be more productive. But it can also make navigating work life in the moments that matter much easier than before – improving overall employee engagement and building a high-performance organization to drive towards better business outcomes.

Today at Ignite, we announced new innovations in Copilot for Microsoft 365—combining the power of large language models, web search, your data in the Microsoft Graph and the Microsoft 365 apps, to help you unlock productivity and unleash creativity every day.

Amongst these innovations we unveiled are exciting new connected experiences and insights between Copilot for Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Viva – applying AI to positively transform the employee experience.

Here are some highlights of the new Viva value coming to Copilot:

Microsoft Viva is the measurement and transformation platform for the AI-powered, high-performance organization. Today we announced the Microsoft Copilot Dashboard, powered by Viva, to help Copilot customers across every stage of the transformation journey: readiness, adoption, and measurement. The dashboard will show how many employees are eligible and ready to benefit from Copilot based on Microsoft 365 app usage, break down Copilot usage across apps, and deliver early signals on Copilot impact on productivity based on meetings, chat, email, and documents. This dashboard rolls out in public preview starting today. In early 2024, the dashboard will add more advanced capabilities for customers with a Viva Insights license. These include Copilot adoption and usage metrics combined with collaboration data, out-of-the box reports for organizational leaders, before and after behavioral data and even insights from employee surveys.
Copilot for Microsoft 365 enhanced with Viva will provide AI-powered assistance for employee experience. Copilot will work across Viva data and applications as a single interface to guide employees, managers, and HR leaders with self-service insights and experiences like understanding team health, setting new priorities with OKRs, or upskilling for career growth. This new integration will be available to customers who have deployed Copilot for Microsoft 365 and the Viva suite and will be available in private preview in early 2024.
Our newest experience, Copilot in Viva Insights, enables leaders and their delegates to use natural language prompts to easily query data from Viva Insights and generate personalized, dynamic reports that answer questions about their teams and organization. This will be in private preview in January 2024.
Additionally, there are also updates to Copilot experiences in Viva Goals, Viva Engage, Viva Learning and Viva Glint, plus new capabilities coming to Viva Learning, Viva Engage and Viva Amplify.

Learn more about all these innovations below.

Microsoft Copilot Dashboard

Eight months ago, we announced that Copilot would be integrated into Microsoft 365 to reduce the drudgery of work, but what everyone wants to know now is will Copilot be worth it? Will it really transform work? And how quickly?

Our newest Work Trend Index data shows that productivity gains with Copilot are real. 77% of people who've worked with Copilot said they don’t want to give it up. Overall, in experiments that we ran, users were 29% faster across a series of tasks when working with Copilot. 70% said Copilot makes them feel more productive; 68% said it improved the quality of their work. And Copilot helped people catch up on meetings nearly 4x faster.

Now, business and IT leaders looking to plan their organization’s AI readiness, to drive adoption, and to measure the impact of their Copilot for Microsoft 365 investment, can use the new Microsoft Copilot Dashboard powered by Viva. The dashboard will begin rolling out in preview this month to all customers with a Microsoft 365 license. The insights available from the dashboard will allow business and IT leaders to do the following:

Ensure technical eligibility of users and review current Microsoft 365 app usage to determine how many users are ready to benefit from Copilot.

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Microsoft Copilot Dashboard, Readiness tab

Understand how people are using Copilot across Microsoft 365 apps to save time and augment their work.

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Microsoft Copilot Dashboard, Adoption tab

Understand potential time savings across your Copilot users and leverage helpful resources as you continue on your AI journey.

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Microsoft Copilot Dashboard, Impact tab

Explore employee feedback about the value and benefits Copilot provides.

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Microsoft Copilot Dashboard, Sentiment tab

In early 2024, the dashboard will have more advanced capabilities for customers with a Viva Insights license. This enhanced experience will allow analysts to dig deeper into the data, while including out-of-the-box reports that will enable organizational leaders, for example, to do the following:

Measure the impact of Copilot deployment as behaviors change and work is transformed.

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Microsoft Copilot Dashboard, Copilot usage data combined with collaboration data

Analyze user sentiment from surveys vis-à-vis Copilot usage patterns

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Microsoft Copilot Dashboard, employee survey data combined with collaboration data

Read the Viva Insights blog for more details about the Microsoft Copilot Dashboard and other new features and capabilities.

Copilot in Microsoft 365 enhanced with Viva

Copilot for Microsoft 365 is your everyday AI assistant, working alongside Microsoft 365 apps (Word, Excel, PPT, Outlook, Teams and more, to help you navigate any task and boost day-to-day productivity. Copilot goes far beyond simple questions and answers. It combs across your entire universe of data—all your emails, meetings, chats, documents, and more, plus the web—to solve your most complex problems at work. Microsoft Viva is an employee experience platform that brings together the tools and applications you need to keep employees informed and aligned, enable them with the right knowledge and skills, and continuously measure and improve workforce engagement, productivity, and performance at every level.

Now, we are introducing Microsoft Copilot enhanced with Viva – AI-powered assistance for the employee experience – to enable new ways for Copilot to boost employee self-service at work. Copilot will work across Viva data, insights, and applications to guide employees, empower managers, and help HR and business leaders create a high-performance organization.

Customers using both Copilot for Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Viva will have the benefit of interfacing with a single natural language conversational interface within the productivity tools they use every day, while being able to prompt Copilot to access data and intelligence from Viva that supports key employee experience needs or initiatives — whether it’s understanding team health, setting new priorities with OKRs, or upskilling on new areas for career growth. Our vision is to make the employee experience simpler and more productive.

For example, since Microsoft Copilot understands Viva employee experience data from your organization, it can surface a trending topic for you to explore and then respond with a rich summary coming from multiple Viva data sources such as social communities, results from an employee survey and a workplace analytics report.

In this scenario, Microsoft Copilot enhanced with Viva, can help you with crafting goals based on a document containing a new set of initiatives launched within your organization.

We’ll be releasing pre-configured integrations between Microsoft Copilot and Viva Glint, Viva Insights and Viva Goals in private preview early 2024 with additional integrations across other Viva applications in late 2024.

New experiences coming to Copilot in Viva Apps

Microsoft has been integrating AI-powered copilots into its popular products, such as GitHub, Microsoft 365, and Bing, to improve efficiency and productivity. This journey has continued with the introduction of Copilot in Microsoft Viva, which offers organization leaders a new way of working by providing the insights needed to make effective decisions.

In April, we announced the first set of experiences for Copilot in Microsoft Viva. Additionally, there are new experiences coming to Copilot in Viva apps to help organizations better understand and engage with their workforce to improve performance. These include:

Copilot in Viva Insights enables leaders and their delegates to use natural language prompts to generate personalized, dynamic reports that answer questions about their teams and organization and simplifies the query building process for analysts. This will be in preview early next year. Read the Viva Insights blog for more details about Copilot in Viva Insights and other new features and capabilities.

Copilot in Viva Goals enables users to easily generate and refine goals with conversational AI and from existing strategy documents, as well as summarize goal progress to share with and across teams. This will be available to all current Viva Goals customers in public preview December 2023, and GA early next year.

Copilot in Viva Engage helps inspire leaders and employees to post using AI-created conversation starters, prompts, and images; gives leaders insight into employee sentiment; cultivates an environment of trust by tailoring and refining message tone; and enhances the quality of questions being asked with suggested prompts. Copilot in Viva Engage will be in public preview in January 2024.

Copilot in Viva Learning allows users to easily create structured learning collections, find the right learning resources, and summarize learning content using conversational AI. This will be in private preview for joint Viva and SAP SuccessFactors customers by the end of 2023.

Copilot in Viva Glint enables leaders to summarize and analyze thousands of employee comments from employee engagement surveys and provide a fresh way to explore feedback by asking questions through natural language. This will be available for private preview in January 2024.

New capabilities coming to Viva Engage, Viva Amplify and Viva Learning

Viva Engage and Viva Amplify are tools to allow organizations to connect everyone through employee communities and conversations to build meaningful relationships and give company messages needed volume. Apart from capabilities announced last month, here are additional updates to both platforms:

Multi-tenant organization (MTO) communication: Viva Engage now supports cross-tenant communication to make it easier for leaders to communicate at scale to build community and drive engagement across tenant boundaries – designed specifically for organizations with complex tenant makeups.. Leaders can send a storyline announcement across tenants to share the same story to all stakeholders. Responding, reacting, and analytics will also be supported for cross-tenant posts. This is now generally available.

Publish from Viva Amplify to Viva Engage: This integration allows for publishing from Viva Amplify to Viva Engage communities and storylines. It will also incorporate content shared to Engage within reports in Viva Amplify. This will be available in private preview early next year.

Viva Goals and Viva Engage integration: As companies set their strategy and priorities, this integration bring their mission, alignment and results directly into communities, making it easier to build communities around goals and view goal progress from Viva Goals directly in Viva Engage.

AI assisted knowledge in Answers: Use AI to generate questions and answers from existing files and import them into Answers. Also, AI will automatically route open questions to people who might have the answer. Users can identify the right topics for a question, see top similar responses before publishing, and aid in routing to experts. This will start rolling out later this year.

Viva Amplify updates: Viva Amplify now includes publication templates for campaigns, adds localization in 50+ languages, and will include better reporting from system data to incorporate custom data from HR tools and Viva Insights into filtering and reports. This will be generally available in December.

Go deeper on these announcements and learn what is coming to Viva.

Viva Learning helps organizations build a culture of learning by simplifying the learning experience, creating a single front door for resources, and delivering it all from the apps and services employees already use throughout the workday. Today we are sharing updates on newly available features and features coming soon.

Newly available features: Learning academies to enable targeted role and line-of-business learning across your organization, web endpoint access to build your culture of learning even without using Microsoft Teams, feature access management to delegate important admin functions, advanced language configuration, and admin reporting to track progress against engagement, adoption, and social learning goals.
Features coming soon: We’re bringing AI-powered skills to Viva Learning to help understand and empower your workforce, we’re extending the recommend function to utilize existing Microsoft 365 user groups, we’re enhancing permission capabilities to set at the provider level, and we’re building advanced admin reporting dashboards to provide deep visibility into learning across your organization.

In the same way that the innovations we announced today between Microsoft Viva and Copilot for Microsoft 365 dramatically increase the value for the organization, leaders, and employees, we have new capabilities and scenarios being enabled across the Microsoft Viva apps that reinforce the flywheel of driving mission and alignment, enabling a high-performance workforce and measuring engagement and productivity.

Microsoft Viva — the measurement and transformation platform for the AI-powered, high-performance organization

We are excited about the impact that AI can have on transforming the employee experience for your organization. Copilot for Microsoft 365 utilizes the power of large language models (LLMs) with your data in the Microsoft Graph, the Microsoft 365 apps, and the web, to turn your words into the most powerful productivity tool on the planet. When you have Copilot with Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Viva, you can use those words as well, to transform your employee experience — managing through all the phases of readiness, adoption and measurement as you accelerate workforce insights and boost employee engagement to help you build a high-performance organization.

Learn more and get started

Check out Copilot in Microsoft Viva to see the latest on how Microsoft Copilot and Viva can help transform your employee experience.
Read the High-Performance Organization (HPO) Guide containing our latest research findings on high-performance organizations in the new era of work. And learn how a focus on workforce engagement and productivity can help your organization exceed expectations.
Join the Viva Community, your destination for best-practice guidance, conversations with experts, and peer-to-peer learning.
Explore the full value of Microsoft Viva and consider suite subscription licenses in our plans and pricing.
Reach out to your Microsoft representative to know more about taking the next steps in your employee experience transformation journey.

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