Your Copilot Preseason Playbook - 13 Wins

The #SummerOfCopilot series rolls on – now in week eleven on LinkedIn. I  summarize my daily posts in my weekly Copilot Navigator newsletter, and offer a deeper dive here on the Insights blog.

Over the past weeks, we’ve unpacked some of the myriad cases of how we use Copilot  in the real world - let's recap and look forward. 

#SummerOfCopilot Week 11 Blog Posts

Week 1:  Trends and Insights from Microsoft’s Latest AI Innovations 

Week 2:  First Encounters with Microsoft’s Copilot Researcher & Analyst 

Week 3: From Tacit Knowledge to Talking Agents: Navigating Copilot’s Next Evolution 

Week 4: Copilot Goes Ubiquitous – Agents plus Copilot training resources

Week 5: Co-Piloting the Future – Custom AI Agents with Enterprise Control

Week 6: AI in Action: How New Copilot Features are Changing Content Management and Productivity

Week 7: The Future of Copilot – The Magnificent Seven

Week 8: Driving Productivity: Copilot from Driver’s Seat to Board Seat

Week 9: Copilot for Every Leader: How AI is Empowering the C-Suite

Week 10: GPT-5 Meets Microsoft 365 Copilot

Our next posts:

Week 12: User Tips, Tricks and Best Practices

Week 13: Copilot State of The Union – Looking Backward, Looking Forward

This week, we translate 13 recent Copilot wins — from Estée Lauder to Hidden Valley Ranch — into a playbook you can apply now. 

Start where knowledge hides: centralize, then reason 

Decisions stall when facts live in PDFs, decks, and tribal memory. Estée Lauder attacked that by connecting decades of research with Copilot Studio, giving product teams a 24/7 “insights assistant.” Ask “What’s trending in night creams?” and get grounded answers in seconds—no scavenger hunt.  ³⁴For AI‑native firms, the pattern holds. Perplexity doubled throughput and reduced cost by standardizing on Azure AI Studio to orchestrate models and data—showing that even AI companies benefit from Copilot‑grade scaffolding. 

Free up capacity without headcount 

Two stories stand out. ICG slashed proposal time by 80% by letting Copilot draft outlines and first responses, then human‑editing for fit.  And Newman’s Own uses Copilot across briefs, research and comms to run leaner—reinvesting time and savings into its mission for kids. At scale, PG&E shows the compounding effect of democratization: 4,300 makers built 300+ solutions saving 527,000 hours/year (~$75M). That’s not one killer app—it’s hundreds

Upgrade service with AI front doors—without losing your voice 

Virgin Money consolidated multiple bots into one Copilot Studio assistant, trained for its tone and integrated with banking systems—driving 97% completion on customer journeys and strong outbound engagement.  ⁴² Eneco swapped a “black‑box” bot for Copilot Studio and now handles 70% more chats without live hand‑offs—freeing agents for complex care. Air India went further, using a Teams plugin to surface punctuality and operational signals in chat, while Azure OpenAI powers a consumer assistant handling millions of queries with high automation.

Modernize public services and legal ops 

City of Kelowna is streamlining permits with AI—plain‑language guidance and status checks that reduce “what’s my status?” calls and move projects sooner.  ILUNION’s legal team built “Litigator,” a Copilot agent that shrinks first‑pass case analysis to ~40 seconds and saves 7,000+ hours a year, while advancing accessibility for a workforce where many employees have disabilities.

Industry‑specific momentum 

Lumen pairs Copilot with Fabric to unify data and save 10,000 hours of manual work; sales leaders cite hours reclaimed per seller. Amgen uses Copilot to reduce administrative drag so scientists and teams focus on precision and breakthroughs. Even Hidden Valley Ranch is experimenting with gen‑AI for ideation and marketing—some ideas land, others don’t—a healthy reminder that humans curate.  

The 30‑Day Copilot Activation Plan (leader’s checklist) 

1. Pick 3 business outcomes: e.g., faster investment decisions; 1‑day proposals; 24×7 self‑serve. Tie each to a KPI (cycle time, win rate, call deflection). 

2. Stand up Pages as sources of truth → generate PowerPoint from Copilot Page to accelerate exec storytelling.

3. Instrument usage with the Copilot dashboard; set department budgets if you’re using pay‑as‑you‑go agents. 

4. Train two agents in Copilot Studio: one internal (knowledge + actions) and one external (customer self‑service). Ship with guardrails. 

5. Remove friction: enable email attachment summary in Copilot Chat; publish Teams recaps to SharePoint News; enable voice where it helps.

6. Tell the story: measure before/after; publish wins weekly; re‑invest reclaimed hours into customer work.