How Welsh councils are improving services with Microsoft Copilot

Microsoft 365 Copilot is becoming widespread, as the go-to generative AI service at firms already invested in the M365 productivity suite. The AI tool is the first port of call many organizations will have with generative AI and in the right hands, can drive meaningful increases in productivity.

Some standout examples of benefits can be found in the public sector, where pioneering councils are already using Copilot to the benefit of their staff.

ITPro spoke to representatives to three such councils in Wales, who have led the charge on AI adoption in their respective roles: Mari Ropstad, head of service at Rhondda Cynon Taf County Borough Council; Ness Young, director of Corporate Service, City & County of Swansea; and Georgia Sweet, digital transformation project officer, Carmarthenshire County Council.

Concrete benefits

Microsoft figures show that across the councils are already saving time and improving processes using Copilot.

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Swansea County Council estimates that it saved 5,400 staff hours in just four weeks, as a direct effect of AI usage.

In Rhondda Cynon Taf County Borough Council, leaders have noted marked improvements in core tasks such as assessments, which Copilot has allowed to be created almost four times faster. After adopting the tool, 75% of staff say they feel more positive about their role, with 86% also reporting the quality of their work has improved.

At Carmarthenshire County Council, Sweet explains her team has developed a Copilot agent that responds to customer enquiries with FAQs drawn from the website. The deployment has helped the council to meet its ten-day target for complaints.

In addition to improving the customer-facing experience for Carmarthenshire County Council, Copilot has also brought benefits for workers inside the organization.

“We've seen a lot of feedback from neurodiverse colleagues, particularly those with ADHD and dyslexia, where they're finding that Copilot is transforming the way that they work,” Sweet says.

“So they're finding it easy to process information, it's really helping with their written communication and the tools like rewrite or summarizing large documents, that's really helping them and improving their experience at work.”

Sweet adds that Copilot can be used without technical experience, with options to take it further depending on the user’s skill level.

Teething difficulties

Despite Copilot’s relative ease of access, users do need a basic understanding of Microsoft and AI systems to make the most of the tool – and for some staff, this was an initial stumbling block.

Young says that adoption of Copilot has revealed that some staff are less digitally literate than expected, necessitating additional time for training.

“We've got about 3,500 people using Copilot in Swansea, and some of the feedback that we've had from those providing training and engagement is that digital literacy can be an obstacle to initial use,” Young tells ITPro.

“Not necessarily just in a technical sense, but also in terms of confidence. And so we have invested heavily, we've got a support partner working with us to train people and we also have an engagement officer who provides one to one support particularly for those who have full licenses.”

Ropstad’s experience has been similar, with her team having found that users need “concrete use cases” for AI tools beyond basic training, including suggested prompts for generating forms or summarizing notes.

“So we use a lot of our own practitioners to teach other practitioners,” Ropstad explains. “And for us, it's always about trying to bring people into this middle band. You know, we are a council we can't afford for quality to be haphazard, it has to be a standard of quality. And so in order to get everybody to a middle band of Copilot use, we have to be able to bring everybody up to that level.”

All three councils benefited from first providing Copilot to a small group of ‘hero’ users, those most enthusiastic about AI and with the greatest technical experience, who helped to identify the most promising avenues for the technology and down the line to share their expertise with colleagues.

At Swansea Council, Young says 100 licenses were initially assigned, with 75 given to workers on pilot projects identified through discussions with Microsoft and other Welsh councils. The remaining 25 were assigned to the council’s senior leadership team, to make it a “leadership opportunity and really drive it from the top of the organization”, Young adds.

Carmarthenshire County Council started with a similarly small group, who later shared their learnings with the wider organization. Internally, employees are now sharing prompts via Teams, as well as ideas for AI use.

“I think people are so keen to share their learnings and if they found an amazing prompt, or if they've got a new process they're using Copilot for, and I think that's quite rare with new technology, to have that kind of buzz and excitement,” Sweet says.

“It’s as though the product sort of sells itself,” Young adds.

At Rhondda Cynon Taf County Borough Council, around 350 staff are now using Microsoft 365 Copilot. Initial concerns at the council centered around the ethical concerns of using AI for assessment, and whether it would affect workers’ registrations as social workers.

“So we kind of approached it very much in a sort of we'll have a volunteer from every team, and they are our champions for that team, knowing that social workers work very much in teams,” Ropstad says, adding that workers are now reassured that their jobs aren’t at risk because of Copilot.

All three councils are collaborating and continue to work with Microsoft on furthering their use of Copilot and getting the most out of the tool.