Bytes employees increase productivity with Microsoft's AI tool

Bytes are a leading provider of world-class IT solutions. Established in 1982, Bytes has grown rapidly and now employs 750 people in the UK and Ireland, with a long-term growth strategy that's focussed on doubling profitability every five years. 

We have a long-standing partnership with Microsoft, further exemplified by our Microsoft Partner of the Year for Operational Excellence award in 2022, and our certification as a Microsoft Solutions Partner for Microsoft Cloud.  

Bytes have long achieved recognition for our corporate social responsibility and working environment. In 2024, we were proud to maintain our ‘Great Place to Work’ certification. In addition, we believe in giving back to the community, via charity work and our commitment to reducing our environmental impact. 

Leveraging the full potential of AI

Bytes’ company motto, "we grow great people to deliver amazing things", reflects our commitment to supporting and developing our employees and their professional growth. By implementing Microsoft 365 Copilot, we have provided our team with cutting-edge tools that enhance their capabilities, help them learn, and collaborate more efficiently. 

AI technology, being relatively new and evolving rapidly, presents both opportunities and challenges. Our customers depend on us to guide them through the integration and optimisation of Microsoft Copilot. By becoming early adopters of Copilot, we have ensured that our employees have gained familiarity through daily use, thereby enhancing their expertise and confidence. This proactive approach allows us to provide robust support and insightful guidance to our clients, ensuring they can leverage the full potential of AI in their operations. 

Bytes adopt Microsoft 365 Copilot

In November 2023 Bytes made significant investments in Microsoft 365 Copilot purchasing 50 Copilot licenses pre-release. We now have 455 licenses in total with 100% coverage for all sales and marketing teams, and additional access rolled out across other teams within the business. Plus, we have enabled Microsoft 365 Chat across the entire organisation. 

Our investment in Copilot reflects our commitment to streamlining workflows, improving collaboration, and driving innovation. Building on our strategic relationship with Microsoft, we’re dedicated to utilising and understanding revolutionary AI technology to optimise internal processes and deliver outstanding levels of customer service. 

To ensure our team could fully leverage AI, we initially focused on training our employees to use Copilot effectively. This foundational training covered the “Art of Prompting,” enabling all employees to become proficient, even if they had access to Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat and did not have immediate access to Microsoft 365 Copilot.  

As the rollout numbers increased, we provided specific training through a blended learning approach to streamline the adoption process. This comprehensive training strategy combined in-person sessions, online webinars, and self-paced learning modules, ensuring all employees could adapt to the new tools at their own pace and according to their individual learning preferences. Additionally, we established a Microsoft Teams channel to facilitate collaboration and sharing among users. In support of this, we also rolled out Microsoft Copilot Prompt Buddy on the Teams site to aid in prompt sharing. Through this approach, we aimed to minimise disruptions and facilitate a smooth transition, allowing our teams to fully leverage the capabilities of Copilot. 

As our implementation continued to progress, we integrated Copilot Agents and various AI models into our workflows, allowing employees to utilise natural language processing capabilities to ask questions about company benefits and policies. This seamless integration facilitated improved access to information, thereby streamlining processes and enhancing overall employee productivity. 

The adoption process brought a range of challenges, both technical and human. Technically, ensuring data security was a critical concern, as was maintaining data quality and governance. Validating the security of AI tools was essential to protect sensitive information and to comply with regulatory standards.  

On the people side, there was resistance to change, as team members were wary of new technologies that could disrupt their established routines or feared that their roles might be diminished. Training was essential but time-consuming and required a tailored approach to meet varying levels of tech proficiency within our teams. Additionally, fostering a culture of continuous learning and adaptation was crucial to ensure that our employees not only adopted but effectively utilised Copilot's features to enhance productivity and achieve our objectives at Bytes. 

The expected and unexpected benefits of Copilot

Some examples of the benefits we’ve experienced since using Copilot: 

• Meeting preparation: Copilot has assisted across the business in preparing for presentations and customer meetings by providing relevant information, talking points, and relevant agendas based on previous sessions. It also recaps key points from previous meetings to follow up with and captures next steps to share post-meeting.
• Email support: Copilot has helped teams by offering email reply to options, helping them write messages, and supporting with prompt follow ups. This has saved countless hours and enhanced the efficiency of email communications – both internally and externally. 
• Data analysis and reporting: Copilot is being used to analyse data to identify patterns, trends, and insights that can inform strategy and decision-making. It has generated reports, charts, and visualisations to communicate key findings ready to action. 
• Collaboration and project management: Copilot has streamlined collaboration among teams by facilitating document sharing, task assignment, and project management within Microsoft 365 applications like Teams and SharePoint. It helps teams stay organised and aligned on goals and deadlines. 
• Personal development and learning new skills: Copilot empowers individuals by offering personalised guidance and resources for skill acquisition and personal growth. Whether it's learning a new software language, mastering software tools, or enhancing professional competencies, Copilot provides tailored support and feedback, enabling users to achieve their development goals more efficiently. 
• Supporting neurodiverse individuals: Copilot offers significant benefits for neurodiverse individuals by providing personalised learning experiences tailored to their unique needs. It can adapt educational materials, offer customised feedback, and create an inclusive learning environment that maximises their potential. By leveraging Copilot’s capabilities, neurodiverse users can access resources and tools designed to support their growth and development, helping them achieve their goals with greater ease and confidence. 
• Boosting creativity and innovation: By automating routine tasks and providing intelligent insights, Copilot frees up time for creative thinking and innovation. It can suggest new approaches to problem-solving, inspire brainstorming sessions, and help teams develop out-of-the-box solutions, thus driving creativity and innovation within the organisation. 
• Expanding and challenging thinking: Copilot assists individuals in questioning their assumptions and expanding their horizons. By offering fresh perspectives and encouraging the exploration of new ideas, Copilot challenges users to think outside the box. It can provide alternative approaches and innovative solutions that push boundaries and stimulate intellectual growth. This dynamic interaction fosters a mindset open to continuous learning and adaptation, essential for personal and professional advancement. 
• Strengthening remote teamwork: Copilot can enhance remote work experiences by fostering a sense of connection among team members. It can facilitate virtual team-building activities, ensure effective communication through AI-driven meeting summaries, and provide tools that help remote workers feel more engaged and connected despite physical distances. 

Maria Singleton, Head of Software Optimisation Services, at Bytes says, “Adopting Copilot has revolutionised our workflow at Bytes. By summarising meetings, creating blogs from webinar transcripts, designing flyers and brochures, and consolidating content from multiple documents, Copilot has significantly reduced the time and effort required for these tasks. This has allowed our team to focus on more strategic initiatives, enhancing our productivity and efficiency.”

The proof is in the stats:

Bytes' Microsoft Copilot Dashboard (over the last 4 weeks)

• Copilot Adoption rate: 94% 
• Meetings (Copilot helps users summarise key takeaways and action items): 879 Teams meeting users 
• Chats (Copilot synthesises key points and tasks from long chat threads): 882 Teams chat users 
• Documents (Copilot kick-starts the creative process by drafting documents and presentations): 859 Office app users 
• Emails (Copilot helps users write more effective emails and quickly digest long threads): 1184 Outlook email users 
• Usage intensity: 208 users are active every week this month 
• Returning users: 399 users from the prior month are also active this month 

What are Bytes considering for the future? 

Bytes are already utilising Microsoft Copilot Agents across various departments, enabling quick retrieval of company data and enhancing productivity. These agents streamline workflows, allowing our team members to focus on higher-value activities. 

We're also incorporating Copilot into our process automation efforts, using advanced AI models to optimise operations and drive efficiency. By embedding AI-driven solutions into different workflows, we reduce manual intervention, minimise errors, and accelerate decision-making processes. 

This aligns with our company motto, ensuring that Bytes continues to deliver exceptional value to our clients, enabling them to unlock the full potential of Microsoft Copilot. 

How Bytes are helping customers with Copilot

We have been supporting organisations of all kinds to harness the power of this AI technology. As one of only twenty Microsoft Copilot Jumpstart Partners, and the number one CSP Copilot Partner and Copilot Partner in SMB in the UK, we’re best suited to support both public and private sectors in becoming technically ready, and deploying, securing, and adopting Microsoft Copilot. 

We’re also one of few partners globally with the capabilities to deliver a range of both fully funded and chargeable Copilot workshops. Whether you’re looking at the art of the possible, building business cases or looking for assistance with deployment or facilitation of the adoption of Copilot, we can help. 

When it comes to rolling out Copilot, there are some common challenges we are seeing across all industries. Let's discuss these areas and how you can overcome them. 

Legacy Infrastructure – Copilot works best when it's integrated into your data. Copilot Agents can take autonomous actions based on your organisation's best practices, standard operating procedures, emails, Teams meetings, and document templates. This means leveraging Microsoft 365 services like Exchange, Teams, and SharePoint. Bytes can use standard methodology to migrate your data and remove the legacy infrastructure from your environment and adopt modern technologies.  

Legacy Applications – M365 Copilot is integrated into the Microsoft 365 applications that your users are already familiar with like Word, Excel, and Outlook, and is constantly being updated with new features. This means you need to use Microsoft 365 applications, and you must be on the monthly enterprise channel release to ensure apps can be easily updated with the latest AI features. Office 2016 and Office 2019 are not supported so make sure you have a plan to update users office applications to Microsoft 365 monthly releases.  

Large quantity of file data to migrate – If you have modernised your infrastructure and migrated your emails to Exchange online and you look at your on premises file servers to find you have terabytes of data that need to be migrated, you may also know that some of this data hasn’t been touched in years and needs to be archived. There are tools that will identify your cold storage and hot storage. Bytes can work with you to create a plan and help you migrate departments to Copilot in phases and monitor the adoption progress. The recommended approach is to apply Copilot licenses by department so users can share data, prompts, and responses they get to learn from each other and improve.  

Data Security and Oversharing – If you’ve got data in SharePoint that’s been there for years, you might be concerned about whether all the right permissions are set, and whether your data is secure. Copilot respects your existing SharePoint permissions, so if you didn’t have access to something before, you still won’t with Copilot. 

Microsoft has introduced two handy tools to tackle this: SharePoint Advanced Management for better site management and content governance, and Microsoft Purview for security, compliance, and governance over your data and files. Restricted Content Discovery (RCD) lets you set policies to prevent Copilot and organisation-wide searches from accessing specific data sites, even though the site access remains unchanged. This feature can be controlled in detail for both Team and Communication site types. 

Scoped permission reports, which will be available in preview in December 2025, give detailed insights into who has access to what across SharePoint sites. These reports help you spot over-permissioned content, ensuring only the right people see sensitive information. By using these reports, you can boost your security, manage access better, and keep in line with company policies. 

The oversharing assessment in Data Security Posture Management for AI (DSPM for AI), now in public preview, helps you find data at risk of being overshared. It scans for sensitive information types and flag's locations where data might be overshared based on user access patterns. With a few clicks, it provides recommendations to tighten up security, like applying a sensitivity label or starting a new site access review. Admins can run this assessment before deploying Copilot to identify and fix potential risks, such as unlabelled files accessed by users. After deployment, the assessment will help spot risks like sensitive data referenced in Copilot responses. 

Adoption – Adoption and Change Management is critical to the success of AI technologies; you need to train users on how to use these new AI technologies properly. Training sessions, Prompt-a-thons, art of the possibles and regular café style check-ins all help with getting users up to speed with prompting and have proven to be popular and successful in moving the needle on Adoption.  

To find out more about our adoption experience, or how we can support you, email [email protected] or contact your Bytes Account Manager today.