From Scepticism to Advocacy: Microsoft 365 Copilot Adoption at One of Australia’s Leading Regional Banks

Our client is one of Australia’s leading regional banks, with a strong reputation for innovation and technology adoption. Guided by its mission to become “Australia’s most loved bank,” it is actively investing in future-focused technologies such as Robotics Process Automation (RPA), machine learning, and artificial intelligence.

Challenge

Our client was committed to exploring how artificial intelligence could enhance operational efficiency and support high-value work. While initial use revealed challenges, such as high expectations around automation, time constraints, and limited confidence in Copilot’s capabilities, these surfaced valuable opportunities to refine how the tool could be integrated into specialised workflows.

Early experimentation showed that some users found Copilot slower than manual execution, particularly when use cases were complex or undefined. This led to hesitation in further adoption. However, they remained focused on unlocking Copilot’s full potential and established a clear set of qualitative goals to guide their enablement strategy:

• Accelerate adoption across the FCO team, targeting 80 seats to ensure consistent engagement and usage across key roles.

• Identify and embed high-value, role-specific use cases into daily workflows, ensuring Copilot was actively contributing to meaningful outcomes.

• Build user confidence and capability through targeted training on prompting, use case design, and best practice guidance.

• Measure and demonstrate tangible ROI, using performance insights to support broader rollout and reinforce Copilot’s value as a strategic asset.

These goals reflected our client’s commitment to innovation and continuous improvement. Rather than viewing Copilot as a fully automated solution, the organisation embraced it as a collaborative tool, one that supports complex workflows and empowers staff to focus on higher-value tasks. This mindset shift was critical in driving adoption and positioning Copilot as a catalyst for operational efficiency and a culture of advocacy within the FCO division.

Solution

Engage Squared partnered with our client to accelerate the deployment and adoption of Microsoft 365 Copilot across four departments within the FCO division. The engagement focused on identifying high-impact use cases, building awareness of Copilot’s functionality, and embedding it into daily workflows. Through structured workshops, targeted training, and scenario-based demonstrations, the initiative delivered measurable improvements in productivity and user confidence.

A key challenge was a fundamental misunderstanding of Copilot’s functionality, which prevented users from realising its full potential. To address this, we designed a tailored enablement program that combined strategic discovery with hands-on training:

• Discovery workshops with FCO leaders to identify pain points, priority workflows, and opportunities for Copilot integration
• One-on-one deep dives into specific work scenarios and templates, ensuring training addressed real-world needs
• Tailored enablement sessions on best-practice prompting, use case design, and scenario-based demonstrations
• Prompt engineering training to show users how to replicate Copilot Agent outcomes by breaking tasks into smaller steps

With over 1,000 Microsoft 365 Copilot licences already deployed, the focus was on maximising efficiency and building confidence. We demonstrated how rich context and clearly defined prompts enable Copilot to deliver stronger results, helping the FCO division and other teams navigate complex scenarios more effectively.

In the absence of Copilot Agents, we equipped users with practical techniques to stitch together Copilot outputs across multiple steps. This approach not only replicated Agent-like functionality but also reinforced Copilot’s role as a collaborative tool that supports, rather than replaces, human expertise.

Results

Our engagement with the FCO division successfully delivered a tailored Microsoft Copilot 365 enablement program. Through initial discovery workshops and follow-up one-on-ones with FCO team leads, Engage Squared identified key challenges, opportunities, and usage trends. These critical insights directly informed the development of targeted training and enablement activities, ensuring the program was highly relevant to daily operations and real-world needs.

We enabled leaders from a time-poor and strategic area of their business to overcome resistance to Copilot, becoming advocates for Copilot within their teams. By embedding strategy into our methodology, our client shifted from viewing Copilot as a fully automated solution to understanding it as a collaborative tool, designed to support specific components of complex workflows. This mindset shift proved essential, driving widespread adoption and unlocking measurable productivity gains critical to realising long-term benefits from Copilot.

Over the course of the program, the initiative recorded:

• 344+ hours saved across the FCO division

• A 4.2:1 benefit-to-cost ratio, demonstrating clear ROI

• 326 average daily Copilot actions, indicating consistent and embedded usage
• 3.9 hours saved per user on average

Copilot was successfully adopted across the division, supported by strong leadership and a structured enablement approach. The initiative helped shift user perception from expecting full automation to understanding Copilot as a collaborative tool that supports specific components of complex workflows.

A total of 62 Copilot use cases were identified across Outlook, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Teams, and Copilot Chat. Six of these were deep dived into step-by-step scenarios that mapped directly to operational templates and workflows:

• Investigation report: Capture and communicate findings from suspected fraud or scam incidents

• Amend a procedure document: Update processes following legislative or technical changes

• Create awareness after a change: Repurpose content into FAQs, PowerPoint packs, and communications

• Prepare governance packs: Collate and analyse data for monthly reporting committees

• Report on performance: Query and visualise data to communicate performance across channels

• Generate customer outcome letters: Summarise and refine information for customer communications

This project highlighted broader opportunities for AI integration, particularly through Copilot agents, to address complex business challenges and integrations with third-party systems not fully supported by M365 Copilot alone.