Welcome back to Grow Your Business with Copilot for Microsoft 365, a monthly series designed to empower small and midsized businesses to harness the power of AI at work. 

My team works with a wide range of small and midsized businesses. And while each is unique in their own way, we’ve found that regardless of size, industry, or market, they basically want the same thing: to grow. To attract more customers. To boost revenue. To scale efficiently. 

Make sure to also check out our weekly Copilot productivity series that just launched, as well as the new Copilot Success Kit, your one-stop shop for getting ready and implementing Copilot.

PKSHA Technology – Embracing AI

Staying on the cutting edge – PKSHA Technology is doing just that by using the power Copilot for Microsoft 365 to grow their business and evangelize AI to their customers so they can do the same.  

PKSHA Technology is a midsized company based in Tokyo, Japan. PKSHA develops algorithmic solutions and AI technologies that help companies become more efficient and improve their processes – they believe algorithms can solve some of the world’s biggest challenges. With effective roll out techniques, PKSHA leveraged Copilot to create new hire shortcuts, improve their customer management, and shorten the process from product roadmap to feature enhancements.

An image of PKSHA’s business sign

Onboarding Shortcuts with AI 

As PKSHA experienced rapid growth and hired new employees, and like most businesses, they found pain points in the onboarding process. It was difficult to ensure new hires had access or could find the information they needed. Onboarding new employees and getting them up to speed can also be a very demanding process for your current employees.  
 
With the help of Copilot, PKSHA employees task Copilot to search for the information they need. This ultimately shortens the time for new hires between their first day on the job to making a true impact! It also frees up time for those tasked with onboarding them into role, taking advantage of the fact that much of the company internal intel is now at their fingertips with Copilot.  
 
There are many ways that Copilot can help accelerate onboarding. For example, while attending a team meeting, using Copilot to ask clarifying questions. The “personal chat” with Copilot allows you ask questions about the meeting while not interrupting the flow of the meeting. As a new hire, creating documents, proposals, or paper can be hard as you are still learning the tone, voice, and preferred format of your new company. Using Copilot in Word, you can reference other documents to get to your first draft faster. Managers are also able to use Copilot to create onboarding documents and processes much faster to help employees orientate themselves to their new organization.

A screenshot of Copilot in Teams Meeting personal chat

Customer Management 

High–touch customer service can be a very time-consuming task that requires thorough preparation and detailed follow–up communications. Prior to Copilot, PKSHA Customer Success specialist, Ms. Takeuchi, would spend hours preparing information prior to calls and afterwards transcribing notes and documenting follow-up actions. Now, she uses Copilot to quickly assemble materials in advance, organizes to-dos and shares action tasks with customers immediately after the meetings. With her administrative workload considerably reduced with Copilot in Teams, Ms. Takeuchi is able to dedicate more time focusing on her customers and activities that matter the most, maximizing care, attention, and service quality.

A screenshot of Copilot in Teams

Product Development 

A streamlined customer feedback loop that feeds into an issues list and ultimately product enhancements… sounds like an operational dream. With Copilot, PKSHA is making that dream closer to a reality. The PKSHA team leverages Copilot in Teams and Excel for gathering customer intel and feedback. By using Copilot in Teams to summarize and organize product feedback they receive to easily surface product needs and create a centralized log of possible product improvements. This process creates a shared knowledge base that team members across their product groups can reference, instead of disparate information silos, resulting in greater coordination and faster delivery of product enhancements. In parallel, the customer success team also uses Copilot in Excel to identify trends in the customer data. These trends help the team create meaningful recommendations for their customers. With Copilot, the team overall saves up to 4 hours of time spent on data analysis.

A screenshot of Copilot in Excel

Creating AI Champions 

When introducing any new technology tools in the workplace, it’s crucial to have the right adoption plan in place. Often a pilot group is part of any successful roll out plan.  The pilot approach is baked into PKSHA’s vision for their company. PKSHA utilizes new AI solutions internally first to better evaluate how they can solve client needs with those AI solutions. In order to both test and drive the internal adoption of AI, PKSHA created their Future Work Black Belt Team. Creating an AI leadership team is a best practice that Microsoft has witnessed across its Copilot customer base. Read more details about how to stand up your own AI Council here.  

A quote from Mr. Kensuke Yamamoto, Executive Office & Head of Development at PKSHA Technology: “Copilot is a tool that supports our main mission of defining and shaping the software of the future. Copilot is part of our own future way of working so we can lead our customers to the right future workplace.”

Accelerating AI innovation with Copilot 

The productivity and collaboration benefits of Copilot enable the team at PKSHA to focus more on their core mission of creating better AI solutions and technologies. Just like PKSHA is all about harnessing the power of algorithms to solve some of the world’s biggest challenges, Copilot gives them the power to fuel their innovation, creativity and efficiency amidst their AI development. 

We are so excited to see PKSHA and other small and medium companies harness the power of Copilot to grow! Tune in next month for another example of how Copilot helps unlock more value and opportunity. If your company has used Copilot for Microsoft 365 to grow and you’d like to share your story, we’d love to feature you! Comment below to let us know you’re interested and a member from our team will get in touch!

Want to try out some of the ways PKSHA used Copilot for Microsoft 365? Check out the following resources: 

Get started with Copilot in Teams or learn how to identify insights with Copilot in Excel 

Visit Scenario Library use case on using Copilot in onboarding 

Check out the new SMB Success Kit and accelerate your Copilot adoption today 

Read the full PKSHA story here 

For adoption content visit Microsoft 365 Adoption – Get Started 

For the latest SMB AI insights follow Microsoft 365 blog 

Angela Byers

Microsoft

Senior Director, Copilot & Growth Marketing for SMB

An image of the SMB Copilot team at Microsoft, with Angela Byers, Elif Algedik, Kayla Patterson, Briana Taylor, and Gabe Ho

Meet the team 

The monthly series, Grow Your Business with Copilot for Microsoft 365, is brought to you by the SMB Copilot marketing team at Microsoft. From entrepreneurs to coffee connoisseurs, they work passionately behind the scenes, sharing the magic of Copilot products with small and medium businesses everywhere. Always ready with a smile, a helping hand, and a clever campaign, they’re passionate about helping YOUR business grow!  

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