Accenture has been trialling Microsoft Copilot since 2023 – now it’s rolling out the AI tool to all 743,000 staff

Microsoft has revealed Accenture will equip its entire workforce with Copilot in a deal that marks its biggest to date.

The professional services company ranks among one of the early adopters of Microsoft’s flagship AI service, having slowly rolled out its use across the consultancy over the last three years.

The roll-out initially saw just a few hundred select employees and senior leaders given access to Copilot, the company noted in a blog post.

That was then scaled up to around 20,000 users, with Accenture focusing on data strategy, governance, and access controls, as well as understanding how staff actually made use of the tools.

“We were fine-tuning our adoption strategy and developing a blueprint for how it would be used in daily work,” said Tony Leraris, Accenture’s chief information officer (CIO).

“You can’t take a one-size-fits-all message into adoption. We really had to demonstrate to certain people, especially leaders, how to use the tool and what the value would be specifically for them,” he added.

As the company scaled up to 200,000 by the end of last year, it focused on change management, including making use of Viva Engage, a social networking app built into Microsoft 365.

Now, Accenture aims to cover the vast majority of its workforce, some 743,000 people across 120 countries – equivalent to the population of Denver, Colorado.

Accenture touts Copilot gains

In a company survey last year, 97% of Accenture employees said they completed routine tasks 15 times faster thanks to the AI tool, with 53% reporting significant productivity and efficiency improvements.

Accenture said one set of 200,000 licenses had monthly usage of 89%, with a survey showing 84% of staff would "deeply miss" the tool if it was removed.

"If Microsoft 365 Copilot weren’t delivering real value, our people simply wouldn’t be using it – our high adoption rate is what shows us that there is value," Leraris said. “That’s what led us to continue deploying Copilot to more people."

The Accenture deal marks a significant milestone for Microsoft as it ramps up efforts to roll-out AI tools to a wider audience – a strategy that some reports last year suggested was floundering.

Reports from The Information in December noted that the tech giant lowered sales growth targets for agentic AI products after salespeople missed quotas.

Microsoft has also announced a number of deals aimed at attracting wider appeal for core product ranges, including agreements to integrate Anthropic’s Claude AI within Copilot, and most recently with Claude Cowork features.

In March, the tech giant unveiled Copilot Cowork, a fusion of Anthropic’s agentic AI offering with its own in-house chatbot.

Not everyone is sold on AI

While Accenture has recorded marked success with Copilot, not everyone has seen similarly positive results. A survey by the National Bureau of Economic Research, for example, revealed AI's impact remains limited in terms of productivity.

Notably, Accenture’s own recent Generating Impact report highlighted a “widening gap” in terms of AI’s effectiveness in enterprise settings.

Many staff are using the technology for basic tasks, but its broader impact on organizational change and performance is often limited.

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