Genie in Action: How Cancer Council NSW Put Trusted Policy Answers in Teams with a Copilot Studio Agent

Cancer Council is Australia’s leading non-profit cancer charity, dedicated to a cancer-free future through research, prevention, and support. As the only national organisation working across every aspect of cancer, it operates through eight state and territory member bodies, offering services like the 13 11 20 support line, research funding, and public education campaigns. 

Challenge

Staff and people managers at Cancer Council NSW frequently needed guidance on policies and procedures. Accessing these policies were part of routine queries, as well as in sensitive or urgent situations. 

Some challenges faced included the time required for employees to locate the right documents in SharePoint, frequent repeat questions directed to subject matter experts, and some inconsistency in the guidance provided. There was also limited ability to deliver clear, consistent, and auditable policy guidance within everyday workflows. 

One example highlighted the challenge. After a customer service call, a staff member spent several hours locating the appropriate response process. While the policy was available, it was difficult to find and not easy to interpret in a time‑pressured situation. 

Their goal in creating an agent was to help improve this process, including: 

• Have one place where staff could go for knowledge and support 

• A conversational way to retrieve trusted information 

• Clear next steps and escalation pathways 

• Confidence that answers were sourced from approved documents 

• Governance and auditability 

• A foundation that could scale in the future
   

Cancer Council NSW wanted to create an experience that gave staff confidence in the moment. A tool that one that could surface trusted answers quickly, provide clear next steps, and create a stronger foundation for consistency across teams. 

Building capability and empowering staff to ask questions 

Cancer Council NSW also recognised the importance of certainty when it comes to policy guidance. While tools like Microsoft 365 Copilot are powerful for discovery and productivity, policy requires confidence that answers are coming from approved sources and not drafts, working documents, or incomplete information. Genie was designed to meet that need. It gives staff a clear place to ask questions and get the right answer, grounded in trusted, approved policy content. Much like its namesake, Genie is about making things possible in the moment. You ask, and it helps . 

From the outset, the vision for Genie extended beyond a single policy use case.  Embedded directly in Microsoft Teams, Genie has been positioned as an accessible, organisation-wide entry point for AI and something available within the flow of everyday work, rather than separate from it. This matters because successful AI adoption is not only about capability; it is about meeting people where they already are, in tools they already use, with experiences they can trust. 

That vision also gives Genie strategic importance. By starting with a governed, high-trust policy experience, Cancer Council NSW is creating the foundations for Genie to evolve over time into an orchestrator for future team-based and domain-specific agents. In this model, Genie can become the front door to a broader ecosystem of AI support, connecting people to the right knowledge, process, or specialised agent as needs expand across the business.

Solution 

The project began with a focused validation and design phase to define success metrics and establish clear functional and non-functional requirements. Through collaborative workshops, Engage Squared and Cancer Council NSW prioritised a delivery backlog that balanced ambition with practical implementation timeframes. 

A key part of this early work was governance. Ownership, operational responsibility, and the long-term sustainability of the solution were considered from the start, rather than being treated as a later step. This helped ensure that the AI experience was not only useful, but also manageable and trustworthy once live.

Another important principle was knowledge readiness. Cancer Council NSW prepared and validated policy and procedure content upfront so Genie could draw from accurate, approved sources from day one. That foundation helped create a stronger AI experience, one that was grounded in trusted information rather than disconnected from it. 

With a designated content manager in place and approved policy content forming the source of truth, Genie was designed to deliver answers people could rely on, while also supporting the governance and upkeep required for AI to remain useful over time 

Requirements for the solution included: 

• Direct connection to policy and procedure documents stored in SharePoint 

• Conversational responses to natural language queries 

• Answers with citations referencing source documents 

• A feedback mechanism so users could rate or flag responses 

• Being transparent when it did not know the answer 

• Analytics to monitor usage and performance over time 

• Escalation of complex or unanswered queries through email notification or SharePoint logging 

Results 

Genie is helping Cancer Council NSW make trusted policy and procedure guidance easier to access when staff need it. By grounding responses in approved documentation, providing escalation pathways, and giving the team visibility through analytics, the organisation now has a practical model for delivering AI in a way that is useful, governed and easy to build on. 

Since launch, Genie has seen positive early results. Staff are finding trusted answers faster, working with greater confidence, and relying less on informal workarounds or repeated questions to subject matter experts. Its success is also creating interest across the organisation, with other areas beginning to see how the same approach could support their teams. 

While still in its early stages, Genie is expected to significantly reduce time spent searching for policy information and improve confidence in decision-making. 

Key policy impacts include: 

• Faster access to approved policy and procedure guidance  

• Greater confidence in answers through citations and approved source content 

• More consistent guidance across teams and practices 

• Clearer next steps and escalation pathways for more complex or sensitive queries 

• Reduced dependence on informal knowledge-sharing or repeated questions to subject matter experts  

For an organisation focused on helping people through some of life’s most difficult moments, that matters. The right AI experience does more than save time. It helps people act with greater confidence, clarity, and consistency, so they can stay focused on working toward a cancer-free future through research, prevention, advocacy, and support. 

Final thoughts 

Genie is not just answering questions. It is improving consistency, reducing friction, and supporting staff to focus on what matters most – their mission to reduce the impact of cancer across NSW because it’s all of us against cancer. 

Finally, the architecture of Genie lays the groundwork for future scalability, enabling additional agents, new data sources, and deeper automation over time.