Teams Insider

Scaling Microsoft Copilot Adoption 22,000 Diverse Users at Centrica

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Who should listen: Microsoft 365 service owners, adoption and change managers, and IT leaders rolling out Copilot across large, mixed workforces — especially those with frontline, field or contact centre populations and small central adoption teams.

Guest: Bill Compton — Head of Digital Adoption, Centrica

Bill Compton, Head of Digital Adoption at Centrica, has spent nearly 30 years at the energy group and now runs adoption for a 22,000-strong workforce split roughly evenly between knowledge workers, call centre agents and field engineers. He walks through building a 535-strong digital champions network, scaling Microsoft 365 Copilot from 25 to 2,000 licences, and running a hybrid Copilot event that reached over 3,000 employees.

Many thanks to Luware, sponsor of this episode.

Key insights

Centrica's workforce splits roughly into thirds — knowledge workers, call centre agents and field engineers — and the hard-to-reach groups need booked time slots, not corridor conversations. Call centres are protected environments you cannot simply walk into, so champions embedded in those areas (including on North Sea oil platforms) are the only realistic reach. ▶ 3:37
Champions must volunteer, not be 'voluntold'. Centrica inherited 80 champions from its Windows 10/OneDrive migration and grew to 535 by applying ADKAR to champion recruitment itself — building awareness and desire with gamification such as pizza parties for completed activities. ▶ 6:40
A flat champions network becomes a victim of its own success. Compton is adding two new tiers — 'Ambassadors for Change' to lead specific change programmes and 'Digital Educators' requested by L&D — so a subset does the heavy lifting while the wider network provides support. ▶ 12:17
Copilot rollout was deliberately measured: Copilot Chat enabled for all 22,000 employees and second-party contractors in December 2023, a 25-licence pilot around October/November, roughly 800 paid Microsoft 365 Copilot licences by April 2025, then a step up to about 2,000. ▶ 16:54
Early Copilot immaturity — particularly in Excel, where finance-heavy teams found it clunky — burned bridges and some users handed licences back. Compton's view is that Microsoft marketed too hard too early, and adoption teams now have to go back and ask those communities to retry with agent mode. ▶ 18:29
'Copilot Live 25' ran as a single four-hour Teams webinar (10:00–14:00, the maximum recording length) with eight 20-minute sessions starting at five past the hour and 10-minute gaps, plus 12 in-person stands at the Windsor office. 1,300 registered, ~780 attended live, and a time-spliced 2h20m recording on Stream has since been watched by around 3,000 people — licence usage doubled to ~1,800 within four weeks. ▶ 21:02
Pitch the included Copilot Chat, not just the paid licence. Focusing a roadshow on the premium SKU immediately limits the audience to people who must persuade their manager; the first three sessions were 'what is Copilot', prompt craft and Copilot Chat so every viewer could act on it from their own desktop that day. ▶ 20:31
A 'Great Copilot Black Friday deal' prize draw collected prompts from 312 people in five days, with users self-reporting minutes saved per month — a workable alternative to digging into Purview, and it identifies which business areas the value is coming from so those people can be lifted up as Copilot champions. ▶ 27:37
Be sceptical of 'hours saved'. Compton prefers Viva Insights' 'assisted hours' framing (21,000 in four weeks at Centrica) over vendors' 'saved' or 'recovered' hours, and notes the value case is far easier when it comes from the free Copilot Chat tier rather than a $30 per-user uplift. ▶ 25:06