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There are six main forces shaping the case for AI transformation that decision-makers across every industry are navigating, and those organisations that respond early are positioning themselves to lead, not react.
Take our AI assessment to understand where your organisation sits on its AI transformation journey and identify the next steps for greater organisational value.
This AI Assessment is designed around three key areas:
Evaluating readiness – a broad-based baseline and a prioritised roadmap.
Exploring a use case – your highest-impact opportunity and the path to prove its value.
Looking to scale – a risk-posture review and plan to move safely beyond a pilot.
*Takes approximately 3–4 minutes.
The AI transformation journey looks different for every organisation. We've structured our capabilities around six areas that reflect the priorities and outcomes we hear most from enterprise leaders.
Turning AI potential into reliable, scalable value – without sacrificing trust or control – remains a critical challenge for enterprises. Transformation isn't a single event. It's a deliberate progression through five stages, each building the capability and confidence for the next.
We've built our five-stage pathway, proven inside Datacom as Customer Zero, around the reasons transformations fail: poor data foundations, no governance, low adoption and no way to prove return on investment. We are now ready to share it with our customers.
We provide the pathway, whilst Microsoft provides the platform. The goal isn't to buy more technology, but to progress from productivity to secure scale to AI-enhanced transformation.
E3 enables how people work. It provides the digital workplace foundation through Microsoft 365 applications such as Teams, Outlook, SharePoint, OneDrive and Office apps.
At this stage, organisations focus on employee productivity, collaboration and information sharing. AI is typically used as a personal assistant, helping employees create content, summarise information and work more efficiently.
E3 includes:
Productivity foundation – Office apps, Teams, Exchange, SharePoint and OneDrive.
Core identity and device management – Entra ID P1 and Intune.
AI access – Copilot Chat included; full Copilot available as an add-on.
E5 enables organisations to work securely. It adds the security, identity, compliance and analytics required to scale AI safely. Features such as Entra, Defender and Purview help organisations understand who can access information, manage risk and establish the foundations needed for AI readiness.
Our Customer Zero experience highlights that data readiness, permissions and governance become critical as organisations move beyond experimentation. The advanced security, compliance and data governance controls in E5 are what make that progression possible, enabling three outcomes we consistently see:
Early wins and adoption momentum – accelerate initial use cases with E5's information protection and compliance controls in place, building confidence that AI can be deployed responsibly and at pace.
Prioritised use cases – use E5's advanced security insights and analytics to support high-impact scenarios where AI delivers clear, provable outcomes with acceptable risk.
Confidence to scale investment – give boards assurance through E5's governance, audit and insider risk controls that right foundation is place for the organisation to invest further.
Three products, one foundation. Secure work, AI in the flow of work and a control plane for agents, all grounded by Work IQ. This is where organisations transition from isolated productivity gains to connected, AI-enhanced operations. AI can access organisational knowledge, understand context, connect to enterprise systems and help coordinate workflows through agents. Instead of helping one person complete a task, AI starts helping teams achieve outcomes across entire processes.
Data integration through Advanced Purview, including sensitivity labels, DLP, insider risk and audit – the work that makes data AI-ready.
Entra ID Governance and ID Protection for least-privilege access with real-time, risk-based decisions so the right people access the right information at the right time.
Researcher and analyst agents. Multi-step reasoning over your work data and the web, with cited output.
Create and Cowork. Brand-aware content generation and agent-assisted execution of everyday tasks.
Agent building. Use Copilot Studio for Low-code agents your own people can build, share and improve.
Registry. A single inventory of every agent in the tenant: Microsoft, partner and custom-built.
Observability. Telemetry on agent usage, performance, behaviour and risk before it hits the organisation.
Agent 365 SDK. Make agents from any framework or vendor enterprise-ready.
A live, semantic understanding of your people, data, tools and workflows across Microsoft 365 and connected systems, permission-aware by design.
We became Customer Zero so our customers start with the lessons learnt, not repeat the learning curve. Our internal transformation story is one of our strongest differentiators and the foundation of the advice we give to our customers.
Most organisations want to see real results before committing to AI. So before we started advising our customers, we became Customer Zero by applying AI across our own operations and measuring what happened.
Rather than building a theoretical framework, we put AI tools to work in our own teams, such as finance, procurement, executive support, consulting, infrastructure products pre-sales and bid and commercial, and tracked the outcomes. Four practical lessons emerged along the way covering connections, cost measurement, data foundations and adoption. This now shapes the guidance we offer our customers.
We share the detail behind the lessons we learned, including which use cases worked, where we had to adjust and what we'd recommend to any organisation looking to move AI from ambition to measurable outcomes. The experience we've built internally means the advice we offer isn't theoretical, it's tested.
If you're weighing up where AI can make a genuine difference in your organisation, our experience is a practical place to start.
Our executive support team uses scheduled Microsoft Cowork prompts to prepare daily and weekly briefings from Outlook, calendars and Teams. The briefings bring together outstanding actions and upcoming commitments, helping leaders stay informed and prepared. Weekly preparation that previously consumed most of Friday now takes about an hour of review. Cowork prepares the drafts automatically – a person reviews and releases every briefing, so human judgement's always part of the process.
The integration of the Datacom Endeavour Design System with Microsoft Copilot Studio fundamentally changed how teams approached both design and AI.
With a focus on people, security and scale, Joe Thornley, Associate Director in Enterprise Application Services and Automation (EASA) and his team are showing how AI adoption happens — case by case.
Our Enterprise Application Services team connected AI to workforce, operational and financial datasets, allowing people across the organisation to ask questions in plain language and receive joined-up insights. Analysis helped deliver an estimated 12x return, bringing insight closer to the people making operational decisions
Our Product Solutions Group has connected Microsoft Copilot to its everyday systems, letting the team find answers for service requests, quotes, stock and suppliers in a single conversation. Information gathering that used to take hours now takes around 10 minutes. With less time spent switching between systems, the team can focus on customer needs and identifying new opportunities.
Our Design Helper has transformed how we bring the brand to life. We can now create, test and scale high-quality creative faster while maintaining consistency across every customer touchpoint.
Our Infrastructure Products pre-sales team uses Microsoft Copilot and AI automation to assess campaign requests against defined criteria and prepare supporting evidence for management review. Assessment and approval-pack preparation that could take weeks now takes around 15–30 minutes. Automated scoring and validation give decision-makers a more consistent and transparent basis for evaluating requests, while reducing time spent on proposals that don't qualify. Management retains responsibility for every approval.
Our Bid and Commercial team uses Microsoft Copilot to streamline complex bid pricing, matching customer roles to industry skills standards and benchmarking rates against the market. Pricing analysis that previously took three to four days now takes under two hours. That time saving's freed our specialists to focus on commercial strategy and validate recommendations, making better use of their expertise where it matters most.
Our Consulting team uses Microsoft Cowork to accelerate complex consulting engagements, supporting workshop facilitation and adapting approaches in real time. By bringing together workshop recordings, Miro boards and customer documentation, the team can turn diverse information into tailored analysis tools – cutting turnaround from days to hours while maintaining the accuracy a regulated workflow demands.
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Many organisations are still experimenting with AI. We've applied it across our own organisation, learning first-hand what drives value, what creates risk and what it takes to move from productivity gains to enterprise transformation.
As Customer Zero, we've tested the technology, refined the operating model and developed the governance, skills and adoption approaches needed to scale AI successfully.
Microsoft 365 Copilot works as a users personal AI assistant within the tools your people already use, helping them create content, summarise information and draw insights from your work data, with sources cited. Agentic AI goes further. Agents can access organisational knowledge, connect to enterprise systems and coordinate workflows across entire processes, working with human input or autonomously. In the Microsoft E7 stack, Copilot and agents work together on a shared foundation, with a control plane (Microsoft Agent 365) providing registry, observability and governance across every agent in the tenant.
Readiness isn't about having everything in place before you start. It's about understanding where you are so you can progress with confidence. We've structured our approach around five stages, each building the capability and foundations for the next. Common readiness factors include data quality, permissions, security posture and governance maturity. Our Customer Zero experience showed us that these areas need active attention, not assumptions.
At a minimum, organisations need identity and access management, data classification, sensitivity labels and data loss prevention controls. Microsoft E5 provides these through Entra, Defender and Purview. Our own transformation taught us that permissions, classification and information architecture move from background hygiene to deployment-critical work as soon as AI is introduced. We help organisations embed security and governance into operations from the ground up, not bolt it on afterwards.
There's no single timeline. It depends on your starting point, data maturity and organisational readiness. Transformation isn't a single event – it's a deliberate progression through five stages, each building confidence and capability for the next. We've built and proven this pathway inside Datacom as Customer Zero, so our customers benefit from a structured approach that avoids the most common points of failure.
In our finance function, AI-enhanced tools, dashboards and agents reduced reconciliation preparation time by 50% saving 12 hours per person per month-end cycle. Across our Product Solutions Group (PSG) teams, connecting Copilot to core platforms created a single AI-enhanced operating experience, reducing time spent searching for information and accelerating decision-making. We also have teams who have delivered an estimated 12x return by connecting AI to workforce, operational and financial datasets.
You can start with Microsoft E3, which provides the productivity foundation (Office apps, Teams, SharePoint and OneDrive), plus Copilot Chat, with full Copilot available as an add-on. E5 adds the security, identity, compliance and governance controls needed to scale AI safely, including Entra, Defender and Purview. E7 brings together Microsoft 365 E5, Copilot and Microsoft Agent 365 on a single foundation, enabling connected, AI-enhanced operations with a control plane for agents and Work IQ as the intelligence layer.
One of the clearest lessons from our Customer Zero experience is that one rollout can't serve every user. Champions, mainstream, low-use and resistant users all require different support, learning and reinforcement. We build adoption and change management into every stage of the transformation pathway, because sustainable value comes from enabling people to adopt new ways of working, not just deploying new tools.
You can absolutely start small. Our pathway is designed as a staged progression – five stages, each building on the last. Many organisations begin with prioritised use cases that deliver early wins and adoption momentum, then scale investment as confidence and governance maturity grow. We bring proven assets, frameworks and operating models so you don't have to learn everything through trial and error before you can move forward.
We approach AI by understanding the challenges that your organisation is facing and the outcomes you are working towards. You can choose to focus on one approach at a time – or all of them can work in harmony.
