Microsoft says 97% of Accenture's employees are now completing routine tasks up to 15 times faster with Microsoft 365 Copilot, and 53% more report "significant improvements" in their productivity. SiliconANGLE reported on 27 April 2026 that Microsoft describes the rollout, to a global workforce of more than 743,000 people, as the largest-ever deployment of the tool. These are vendor-reported figures.
Chief information officer Tony Leraris said his team monitored the rollout intensively. "You can't take a one-size-fits-all message into adoption," he said. "We really had to demonstrate to certain people, especially leaders, how to use the tool and what the value would be specifically for them."
Accenture has close to 800,000 employees spread across 120 countries, so the rollout progressed in phases. It began in August 2023, shortly after Copilot launched, with just a few hundred senior leaders, then reached other select employees, and within a few months had scaled to around 20,000 users. While watching how people used the tool, the team also adapted its data strategy, data governance and access controls to support adoption, and developed a blueprint for how Copilot would be used in daily work.
A customised change management and adoption program accompanied the technology. It included one-on-one training sessions with senior leaders, regular communications about new features, and group training on Viva Engage, which let employees share the new ways they were using Copilot with colleagues. Haley Rosowsky, a Microsoft ecosystem partner marketing lead, said this sharing inspired people to experiment on their own.
Accenture then checked results by survey. Among around 200,000 users, monthly active Copilot usage reached 89%, and 84% of respondents said they would "deeply miss" the tool if it disappeared. Marketing and communications teams use Copilot as their standard way to check new content against historic marketing materials for brand consistency, and to draft storyboards and new marketing concepts, work that previously needed specialised design teams. Sales teams use D3, an internal tool developed by Avanade, a joint venture of Accenture and Microsoft, which uses Copilot to aggregate 8-K and 10-K reports and other data; Accenture reports it helps salespeople generate an average of 43% more sales opportunities.
More recently, employees have begun using the latest Copilot capabilities to build AI agents that automate their workflows, and many of them have no coding skills. Accenture says it is not done with Copilot and aims to become one of the world's first AI-native organizations, where every employee supervises an expanding digital workforce.
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