Is Microsoft Copilot Earning Its Place? How to Measure a Useful Pilot

The licences are assigned, people have had some training and your Microsoft Copilot pilot is under way. A few colleagues are enthusiastic. Others have gone quiet. Now someone wants to know whether you should roll it out more widely.

You can check the usage reports. But knowing that someone used Copilot in Word won’t tell you whether their proposal was better, finished sooner or needed rewriting by their manager.

That’s a tricky gap in the metrics if IT is expected to make the case for further investment.

Our view is that evaluating Microsoft Copilot needs to be a shared responsibility. IT brings the usage data, costs and support picture. The departments involved bring evidence of what changed in the work. Agree how those pieces come together, and you can make a much more useful decision than “people seem to like it”.

For the Microsoft 365 pilot we’re discussing here, this is how we’d approach it.

Decide What Would Make It Worth Continuing

Pick two or three tasks the pilot is meant to improve. Preparing customer reviews, drafting project updates or producing a first version of a proposal are specific enough to evaluate.

For each task, agree a business owner, a baseline and what would count as a worthwhile improvement. Microsoft recommends defining goals, use cases and success measures before selecting users or buying licences in its rollout guidance.

If you’ve already started without a baseline, don’t panic. Use recent comparable work where reliable records exist, or measure a small sample of similar tasks completed with and without Copilot. Label people’s recollections as estimates. You can still learn something useful; just be honest about the strength of the comparison.

An example target might be: “Reduce the time spent preparing a customer review by 20%, with no increase in factual corrections and support (e.g. the amount of time IT spent responding to user requests) staying within the agreed allowance.” That’s an illustrative target, not a benchmark. Relevant departments or business leaders needs to decide what improvement would matter.

Keep the scorecard short:

Choose metrics that fit the task. Nobody needs a twelve-tab workbook to discover that a weekly report is taking longer to check than before.

Use the Reporting You Already Have

Start in the Microsoft 365 admin centre under Reports → Usage → Microsoft Copilot. The Copilot usage report shows licensed and active users, adoption by application, usage trends and Copilot Chat prompt counts. You can export data for analysis.

Be careful with the definitions. An “active user” can be someone who tried a qualifying feature during the reporting period. That doesn’t necessarily mean Copilot has become a useful habit. Look at patterns across comparable periods and keep your pilot group separate from the wider organisation. Allow for reporting delays rather than treating the latest day as complete.

These figures help you decide where to ask questions. Low usage could mean someone needs help, has been on leave or simply hasn’t found a worthwhile use. A high prompt count could reflect valuable work or repeated attempts to get a usable answer. The number alone won’t settle it.

The Copilot Dashboard in Viva Insights adds adoption and impact views. Available features depend on licensing and access, and privacy thresholds can suppress results for small groups. Check what your tenant provides before designing your review around a particular dashboard view.

There’s another distinction worth taking into the management meeting. Microsoft’s “Copilot assisted hours” uses activity data and research-based multipliers to estimate assistance. “Assisted value” applies an hourly rate to that estimate. These are useful indicators, but they aren’t a timesheet or evidence of money saved. Microsoft explains the calculation in its impact report guidance.

Use those estimates to prompt investigation. Validate the work you care about with the people doing it.

Ask the Business for Evidence It Can Easily Provide

“Please send IT your Copilot feedback” is unlikely to give you a consistent picture. Some people will send an enthusiastic paragraph, some will send a complaint and others will forget.

Give each participating department a named owner and agree a short weekly check-in. A simple form linked from the Teams space people already use is a reasonable starting point. Use the same questions and deadline each week, and make completion part of participation in the pilot.

We’d ask for:

• The agreed task: choose from a short list, including “not used this week”.
• A recent example: what did you try, and did you use the result?
• Time taken: for a sampled task, minutes without Copilot and with it, including checking and corrections. Mark whether these were measured or estimated.
• Quality: better, similar or worse, with a brief explanation of any significant rework.
• Help needed: what got in the way, and approximately how much support did you need?

Allow “don’t know”. An honest gap is more useful than a number someone invented to finish the form.

Keep the routine check-in to a couple of minutes. Ask for detailed timings on a small agreed sample, rather than expecting everyone to record every interaction. The departmental owner should check the responses, add relevant business figures and submit a short weekly summary. They also follow up missing feedback. IT shouldn’t have to chase everyone across the entire pilot.

Make the arrangement concrete: participants respond by Thursday, department owners update one shared scorecard on Friday, and IT adds usage and support figures before the review. Agree access to that scorecard and explain what information you’re collecting and why. Evaluate the tool and the workflow; avoid turning prompt counts into a staff league table.

Then close the loop. Tell people what you changed because of their feedback. If they’ve highlighted a recurring problem, showing that it led to better guidance or a configuration fix makes the next request for feedback much more credible.

Check Whether the Improvement Survives Contact With Real Work

Suppose a participant says a report took 15 minutes instead of 40. That sounds promising. Ask whether the 15 minutes includes finding the source material, prompting, checking facts and making corrections. Ask the person receiving the report whether it was useful.

For repeated tasks, compare several similar examples and use a typical result, such as the median, rather than the most impressive one. Note changes in complexity, workload or staffing that might explain a difference. If practical, compare with a similar team not using Copilot, without pretending that two teams are identical.

Keep an eye on who is responding, too. Feedback from five enthusiasts in a twenty-person pilot tells you about those five people. Include the response rate and seek out those who stopped using it.

A short pilot may give you good evidence about task time and quality while telling you very little about revenue or long-term capacity. That’s fine. Report what you can support and identify what still needs testing.

Put the Full Cost Beside the Benefit

Licence costs are easy to see. Preparation, training, permission reviews, troubleshooting and the time department champions spend helping colleagues can be less visible. Include them.

Separate the initial investment from the likely ongoing cost. An unusually busy first week shouldn’t automatically rule out a useful tool, but persistent support demands shouldn’t disappear from the business case either.

For a simple illustration, suppose a validated sample suggests a task is ten minutes quicker, including checking, and the department completes 120 comparable tasks a month. That suggests 20 hours of capacity released each month. It doesn’t automatically mean 20 hours of payroll savings.

Ask the manager what that capacity would allow: faster responses, less overtime, a smaller backlog or more time with customers. Finance can help value the benefit where there’s a credible basis for doing so.

If you calculate ROI, use benefits and costs over the same period: (financial benefit minus total cost) ÷ total cost × 100. State the assumptions and keep measured results separate from projections. Don’t add dashboard-assisted value to task-level savings if they describe the same work.

And retain the IT support limit you agreed at the start. A benefit in one department needs to justify the effort it creates elsewhere.

Finish With a Decision Someone Owns

Bring the evidence into a short review with IT, the departmental owners and whoever owns the budget. For each use case, show the baseline, result, costs, support requirement and remaining uncertainties.

Then choose a next step:

• Expand where the improvement is repeatable, quality is acceptable and support is manageable.
• Adapt and retest where there’s potential but a specific training, data or workflow issue needs resolving. Give the retest an owner and an end date.
• Pause or stop where the benefit doesn’t justify the cost, risks or ongoing effort. Check contractual terms before assuming licence spend can end immediately.

You don’t have to make the same decision for every department. Copilot may earn its place in one workflow while adding very little to another. That’s a useful outcome. The point of the pilot is to make the next investment decision better informed.

If you’ve introduced Copilot but the evidence is still mostly usage charts and anecdotes, let’s talk. We can help you work through what to measure, what to ask the business and how to reach a decision without making reporting another major job for your IT team.