Welcome back to Grow Your Business with Microsoft 365 Copilot, your monthly resource for actionable insights to harness the power of AI at small and medium sized business. In this edition, we look through the lens of a startup construction company using Copilot to revolutionize their operations. Did you know there are nearly half a million small and medium-sized trade contractor businesses, in the United States alone, with most firms having fewer than five employees? Limited resources can make completing administrative, project, and operational tasks a challenge, especially for small teams. But what if AI can take the pressure off by handling routine tasks, freeing up time to take on more projects and complete them faster?
How Copilot helps the construction industry scale for growth
We spoke with Nick Masci, principal and co-founder of the Boston-based startup, Industrialized Construction Group (ICG), about the hurdles they faced and the wins gained after incorporating Microsoft 365 Copilot into their daily workflow.
In the dynamic world of construction, ICG stands out by blending traditional methods with advanced manufacturing techniques. This innovative approach not only speeds up construction timelines but also enhances safety and efficiency. ICG’s top challenge was scaling for growth, when growth requires time spent out in the field, talking with customers, and orchestrating complex projects. ICG found that they were bogged down with inefficiencies in extensive documentation and high-volume data management, making accuracy difficult to achieve. Ensuring effective communication and collaboration among team members, especially in a hybrid work environment, was tricky and often resulted in miscommunication and project delays.
To ease these pains and transform business operations, ICG now leverages Microsoft 365 Copilot to speed creating customer proposals, reduce time on reporting, and more effectively manage projects.
Simplified customer proposals
Creating customer proposals was time-consuming and inefficient, often requiring extensive manual effort and coordination. Manual effort also impacted the quality and consistency.. Using Copilot for customer proposals in construction projects has proven to be highly beneficial for ICG. Copilot can assist in generating comprehensive and professional content in apps like Word and PowerPoint, reference files and content like past engagements and proposals, as well as bring in information from the web to add context to its responses and the content that it creates. With Copilot in Excel, Copilot can help interpret the data and create visuals and analyses to help employees get insights quickly and focus on ensuring that proposals are thorough and polished. Microsoft 365 Copilot has helped speed up the proposal process (up to six times faster) and improved their quality and professionalism.
Accelerated customer reporting
Generating customer reports was another lengthy process—with a single report sometimes taking up to eight hours and involving three people. Managing and compiling data from various sources led to inconsistencies and errors, affecting report quality and diverting resources from critical tasks. ICG to simplify reporting by. Business Chat can find and analyze the many sources of customer data, across work content, chats, emails, and files, and create first drafts of reports. Microsoft 365 Copilot helped reduce the time of customer reporting (up to half), thereby increasing ICG’s responsiveness and quality of customer service.
A screenshot of Microsoft 365 Copilot Business Chat
Improving project management
ICG faced frequent project delays due to inefficient communication and coordination among teams. The lack of real-time updates and fragmented communication channels led to misunderstandings and slowed down decision-making processes. Collaboration across different departments and project sites was challenging, with teams often working in silos, making it difficult to share information and collaborate effectively. With Copilot in Teams, you can pull insights from project huddles so you can quickly get key decisions and action items. With Copilot in Outlook, you can summarize long project email threads, helping you get right to what you need to respond to.
A screenshot of Copilot in Teams showing a meeting recap and answering questions about the meeting
By leveraging Microsoft 365 Copilot, ICG has significantly transformed their business operations with streamlined processes, enhanced productivity, and improved communication. “Our work must scale to an audience and customer base that is 1,000 times larger than it is today,” says Masci. “We want the suite of Microsoft products to not only grow with us, but to also anticipate our needs.”
We are thrilled to see ICG and other companies revolutionize the construction industry with AI. By integrating Microsoft 365 Copilot, ICG has set a new standard for productivity and innovation. As the industry evolves, AI will be key to competitive advantage and growth.
Tune in next month for another example of how Copilot helps unlock more value and opportunity. If your company has used Copilot for Microsoft 365 to grow and you’d like to share your story, we’d love to feature you! Comment below to let us know you're interested and a member from our team will get in touch!
Take action! Try out some of the ways ICG used Microsoft 365 Copilot:
- Maximize the full power of Copilot in Word
- Learn how to leverage Copilot to generate customer proposals and more sales-related activities.
- Read the full ICG case study on Microsoft.com
Become a power user of Microsoft 365 Copilot:
- (New every week) Try a new proven Copilot productivity tip to get time back for more important work.
- (new) Get your one-stop guide to successfully deploy Copilot with the Copilot Success Kit.
- (new) Check out the new Mechanics video that goes over simple steps to check your data permissions are in place
- Join the SMB Copilot Community to learn directly from Microsoft experts and your peers.
Here's the latest news on how Microsoft 365 Copilot can accelerate your business
Earlier this week, Satya Nadella and Jared Spataro launched Wave Two of Copilot. Powered by customer feedback, we’re bringing together web + work + Pages as a completely new design system for work. Here is a rundown of key new features announced for every SMB:
- Microsoft 365 Copilot Business Chat combines the latest information on the web and your data in the Microsoft Graph to find you the answers you need. The newly introduced Copilot Pages provides a new canvas for you to retain Copilot responses to simplify sharing, editing, and collaborating with them.
- Copilot in Excel is now generally available. Additionally, Copilot in Excel with Python was introduced as a no-code way for you to perform advanced analysis with Copilot.
- Narrative Builder in Copilot in PowerPoint helps you create first drafts, also being able to use your company templates to keep things on-brand.
- Copilot in Teams will soon be able to reason over both the meeting transcript and meeting chat, so you never miss a note or action item from your meetings.
- “Prioritize my inbox” feature coming to Copilot in Outlook helps you stay on top of your most important emails by prioritizing them based on your organizational context and content.
- Copilot agents are here to help you coordinate line of business tools and orchestrate your business from a single place. They help you integrate your third-party tools, so Copilot respond based on that external data.
Check out the full details of the announcement and launch event.
Angela Byers
Microsoft
Senior Director, Copilot & Growth Marketing for SMB
Let's connect on LinkedIn
Meet the team
The monthly series, Grow Your Business with Copilot for Microsoft 365, is brought to you by the SMB Copilot marketing team at Microsoft. From entrepreneurs to coffee connoisseurs, they work passionately behind the scenes, sharing the magic of Copilot products with small and medium businesses everywhere. Always ready with a smile, a helping hand, and a clever campaign, they're passionate about helping YOUR business grow!
From left to right: An image of the SMB Copilot team at Microsoft, with Angela Byers, Mariana Prudencio, Elif Algedik, Kayla Patterson, Briana Taylor, and Gabe Ho.
About the blog
Welcome to "Grow Your Business with Microsoft 365 Copilot," where we aim to inspire and delight you with insights and stories on how AI is changing the game for business. This monthly series is designed to empower small and mid-sized businesses to harness the power of AI at work. Each month, we feature scenarios where an SMB is using AI to transform, scale, and grow.
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