All about the Employee Self-Service Agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot
Hello everyone. Welcome to our webinar all about the employee self-service agent. I'm Lucy Hitz. I'm the product marketer. On this on this really exciting new agent.
And I will be, have joined here today by some of my partners across product and HR tech in Microsoft. So it's going to be an exciting session. And I'm going to share my screen and, and kick us off and get started.
A question we often get at this point is will this session be recorded and will I have access to it afterwards? It will be recorded, and yes, you will have, access to it afterwards. And we will be answering questions in the chat. So please use the chat today to, ask any questions you have as we go along. And our speakers will respond to those questions as we, as we go along.
And we may even, just verbally ask them, you know, as they, as they enter their sections. So before we dive in today, just a quick reminder. Employee self-service agent is still in private. Preview. Some of the things we're going to talk to today are very much works in progress are confidential.
Please do not share this information you know, outside or across your organization. Unless that's necessary to have, you know, conversations about how you're going to bring the employee self-service agent onboard in your organization. And please, of course, be respectful of one another and of our speakers today. So we're lucky today to be joined, by some, some experts.
We have Sylvie now, who is our senior director of IT Service management. Welcome, Silvina. Yeah, I'm great to be here. Craig Foster, our director of HR Digital Transformation, who really leads a lot of the work to show the impact, in place of service agent in our organization already. And of course, this will grow.
So excited to have you here, Craig. Hey. Good to be here. Thanks. I'm Lucy, I introduced myself earlier and we have Miriam, who is going to walk you through a very exciting demo and piece of the product as it relates to, support and diagnostics for Microsoft. 365 products and services. So welcome, Miriam.
Hi everyone. Thanks, Lucy. so first I'm going to level set with the group and talk to you about the employee services delivery landscape. We'll talk about the, employee self-service agent and the scenarios it will support at a very high level. We'll dive into some scenarios, and use cases, and then Mairin will give us sort of a deep overview and demo experience of the IT help desk support for Microsoft products and services.
I'll give a full demo of, what the kind of, you know, total experience will be like from both a user experience, your employees experience of the product, and then also, your configuration experience and Copilot studio. We'll talk about some internal Microsoft early results. This is where we will pull in Craig. And then we'll talk about roadmap and really what you can expect at public preview. And GA so a lot of exciting, exciting content here today. So jumping in you know, we know that I, for AI sake is really not going to, help anybody.
But when we apply it to real world problems, we have a great capacity to, to, to, to transform, you know, for this use case, the employee experience, and one of our biggest goals at Microsoft with all of our technology is including AI to create this daily habit and deliver experiences that are transformative, use daily. And we know key pain point in the employee journey revolves around just basic HR and IT support. These are day to day problems that employees encounter that matter to them. And our latest research and efforts to understand where I can better meet employees needs at work. It turns out that the majority of employees find it difficult to even quickly access company resources and guidelines. End to end struggle to locate regularly needed workplace tools and services.
From an IT perspective, which is something that, Marion will touch on in a little while. And these days, they problems the most acute that we find are in the air and it services space. But there are also facilities finance learning and development and upskilling all of those areas. Are kind of areas of our access.
And then of course, you know, being able to actually take action, are real problems for employees that that we think that, hey, AI is really well positioned to solve. I'm gonna pass it over to Craig just to take us through, you know, our own evolution at Microsoft and provide a little color about that because I think it will, echo and maybe look familiar to many of the folks on this call. Thanks. Listening, everybody.
This is a bit of a, you know, I journey through high self service as of all the at HR at Microsoft. And I know we're not unique, but, we, you know, our starting point of com we get a single canvas for discovery. Of policies and tools and essentially collating, navigation to, to make it easier for employees. And the reality at Microsoft is we have over 100 line of business apps in HR. So this idea of, of making discovery easier, was the first part of how we thought through self-service as time moved on.
So we click again here to see, what we find is employees continued to search for an easier path, an easier path to get the information they needed, an easier path for that piece of data that they really needed to understand their pay or understand what's next for them. And having to go to an internet site, find a link, then go to a portal they go to infrequently to then find that information was really one of those areas of feedback that we started on this, this journey of of conversation and chat in 2021 is before really the AI. We've, we focused on curating Q&A. The most common queries. We got to a, fairly high success rate on those common Q&A is because we knew the patterns right twice and curated responses. So if you click again, let's see.
You'll see we we did have a relatively strong success rate is about 56%. So you started to get that ease on that bird. And so 20% less employees needing help after they engage with the internet. So we've seen a 20% reduction in tickets. But the reality is it's still only 2000 questions of the most common scenarios. And there is a very long tail after that. So
right now what we're investing in and what we've been investing in with our colleagues, developing employee self-service is really trying to meet employees whether or not. And today they're there in this, this conversational, interaction, that habit is being built within Microsoft Copilot or externally with chatbot ChatGPT or Claude or others and really building on that pattern and building on that habit is really where we focused our our front door of employee experience. And our goal with with yes is really to to have that entry point, that single single conversation where employees can find their policy information, it can be in their AI context for them when they need it. They can retrieve information from databases or tools that they infrequently visit in an easier pattern and where possible, complete those tasks in line so they can get in and out.
Effectively and efficiently. And, and that really helps us build that pattern for how we then extend into other values, as Lucy mentioned, whether that's into learning in the career or in the other areas, this this idea of building a habit around. Yes, employee self-service is the front door.
Back to you, Lizzie. Thanks, Craig. And we know that, you know, I kind of bringing the AI experience and the air experience together for the employee, in this sort of employee facing chat bot, although I don't love that term is a, number one use case for, Jen, AI for HR leaders. So I think a lot of organizations are going through and from many conversations with customers as well, are going through what Craig has talked about, which is understanding.
Okay, so now the technology has kind of caught up to our fundamental goals around employee services delivery. And we want to we want to be there, to take advantage of that and deliver that value to our employees. So, to do that at ignite, we introduce an employee self-service agent, which is our new set of capabilities to answer policy related questions and simplify HR and IT related tasks for faster resolution, helping to improve this employee experience. So the agent will make it easy for employees to retrieve information from authoritative sources, and and deliver personalized responses based on their context. So an example of this being I'm not just going to get a, you know, regurgitation of what might be on my HR web or my SharePoint site.
The agent is going to understand context about me as an employee, such as my hire date, how long I've been with the company, my role type, my geographic region, and it's going to incorporate that in its conversational response while also footnoting me to the source material for the policy information so that, you know, if I want to go deeper, I can. And then it's also going to make it easier to take action on essential HR 19 tasks in line, without having to navigate to multiple tools and workspaces. And this is, as you'll see in a little bit, going to include help in running diagnostics on Microsoft products and services. And of course this is very important because we know that usually when you ask a policy question or you ask a question about a problem you're having when it comes to HR, it issues you don't just abstractly want to know an answer, you probably are then going to want to take action.
So usually after an employee asks, hey, how much PTO do I have left? They want to be able to request PTO or from employee says, you know, this thing on my devices and working like, how do I make it work? You don't just abstractly want to know how to make it work. They want it to be solved and move on with their day. Right? And then the third, key area here to emphasize is while the employee self-service agent is going to be, configured and customizable in the copilot studio, with preconfigured no code templates for key workflows, and then your connectors to your third party HR IT systems so you get that faster time to value because that's all pre-built for you. So all you have to do is connect and configure.
I'm going to show a video here, which is, I think, a really nice, just high level overview, certainly doesn't get all the functionality and capabilities that the employee self-service agent will have, but I think it's a really nice, clean overview of of what it, what it does. If you can hear it, please give a thumbs up. And if you can't, please let me know in chat. In the new era of AI, copilot and agents have the potential to reimagine the employee experience. Introducing the employee Self-service Agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot, the agent delivers fast, accurate answers to policy questions and simplifies workplace tasks. Starting with HR and IT support, it works with you and even for you.
Get personalized information based on employee profile data and easily delegate tasks like updating profiles, checking tickets, status, and requesting leave all in one place. The employee self-service agent is tailored to your company's policies, benefits, and documentation. Drawing on data in the Microsoft Graph, Knowledge, resources, and connected HR and its employees, Self-service agent makes your Microsoft 365 Copilot experience work better for you and in Copilot studio HR and IT teams can further customize, configure, and enhance the agent. This means fewer support tickets, time back for HR and IT teams, and higher employee efficiency and satisfaction. Empower users and streamline processes with a single starting point for employee answers and actions, from planning parental leave to resolving technical issues.
Ensure a seamless, supportive employee experience with the employee self-service Agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot now in private preview. Hopefully that was helpful. And I'll just go a little deeper, in each of these kind of key areas of, retrieving information, the task completion and the configuration on the back end. And then I'll go a little, then we'll go a little bit more specific into, some of the scenarios that will, that we'll be lighting up. So for retrieving information, you'll be able to find answers to common workplace policy questions, as I mentioned. And you'll get those tailored responses based on employee data.
So for example, your location, uncensored topics. And I'll go a little bit more into the configuration there, because we do know that while, teams want, you know, the they don't want to manually create answers to every question. There are certainly workflows that they do want to be able to tailor for employees due to compliance, due to sensitive topics.
And of course, I'll talk about that a little bit more later. So the other thing that you will be able to do when it comes to retrieve information is personalized data from any third party system. So your workday or successfactors is your service now that you set up, so you'll get that kind of completeness. So, you know, as an example here, if I am a U.S employee and I am only, I only qualify for parental leave through my company after a certain amount of time. With my company.
And I've only been with my company for three months, but I have to be with my company for a year to to qualify for their paid parental leave. If I go into the agent and say, hey, what's my parental leave? It's not just going to kind of dump for me a huge long, you know, response with the general policy. It's going to tell me, hey, you need to be with the company for a year to qualify for the parental leave. Here's what that will come with at that time. And go here to learn more. Right?
As opposed to saying, here's all the information about leave, which is not personalized or relevant to me. And then when we go to take action, this is where you'll be able to start to complete those support related tasks. So I'll be able to log my PTO hours, start a leave of absence requests, submit my IT helpdesk ticket or my HR help desk to get, retrieve status updates on tasks. This is where you really start to kind of bring you bring everything together in this single starting point, which we hear again and again from customers. It's important important to note, note here, though, that we've also heard from customers that while they want, a single starting point to kind of envision as a single starting point for HR and IT issues and of course, expanding to more scenarios as well.
They want different experiences on the back end when it comes to customizing and connecting and configuring. And so that's important to note that there will be separate experiences in the copilot to experience for the HR admin and the IT admin so that you'll be able to, kind of control that experience. And the, you know, like vendors that you, that you that you manage. So getting getting to the copilot studio experience, this is where you'll be able to configure the agent. But the team is doing a ton of work to make sure that you're not starting from scratch. So that it will be a matter of simply, you know, approve ING and customizing workflows that are pre-built.
And I'll show you with that, that will kind of look like, and connecting your systems of record. And then, you know, tailoring those responses to sensitive topics that are important to your organization. I'm going to talk about these key HR scenarios, and then I'm going to pass over Silvina to talk a little bit about not only, some of the key IT scenarios that we're lighting up, but also what our kind of C0 approach is. That means internal Microsoft approach is, our own roll out and what our goals have been, around that. And I think that what kind of help bring it to life a little bit and kind of pull it together in terms of what does a rollout actually look like? Of of the employee self-service agent in a, you know, global, enterprise.
But first I'll just talk about this cross areas and then I'll pass it over to the be there to to talk about the it once. So here you're going to see knowledge retrieval and task completion. We've kind of broken down these scenarios by those types. So you know knowledge retrieval just to give some specifics. Things like you know can I a10 moment can I extend my maternity leave. What are my company holidays.
Do I have training do task completion. Like help me transfer my direct report, update my name, update my home address, I need to take a sick day, etc. and then you'll see the Microsoft build connectors that we're prioritizing. For our, public preview in GA on the on the right. There will of course extend beyond that.
And I'll talk a little bit about roadmap, towards the end. But those are sort of the primary ones because we've talked to many, many customers. And you know, these are the ones that are the must haves, for a successful product. Okay. Well, that's I mean, I'll pass it over to you. Thanks.
Love say so very similarly to H.R. You know, the focus is on knowledge retrieval and task completion. You can see, you know, the, the different scenarios we are focusing on, for private preview and beyond, you know, lots of different scenarios, mainly focus on, on IP, like, top issues in a layer at center. I'll just connectivity. How do I set up or fix my, phone out integration? You know, one that we kind of, receive a lot of, requests for is when people cannot connect to, to the VPN.
So we already have, similarly to H.R building connectors with, alchemy, SharePoint, Intune, and ServiceNow. One thing to remark is that that's part of serial configuration. Alchemy self-help content for windows. And any Microsoft product will be, there out of the box. But certainly you have the ability to augment it with, your own internal, contact, content sources.
As part of our task completion, we offer integration, with ITSM solutions. In our case, we use, ServiceNow. So a user can, log a ticket, ask for the status of a ticket, get, you know, updates, update, a ticket. Also one, troubleshooter that we use a lot is about device compliance, making sure that we have that context. What are the devices that our employees, have, as part of their assets, and we can provide, information on whether those devices are compliant on my be affecting, you know, other issues they are experiencing.
So let's say if you want to move to the, To the next, slide. So I mentioned, you know, I won't go through all the details, but this is to give you a sense of, our deployment approach. So internally within Microsoft, customer series, taking a phased approach to roll out employee self-service across, the company.
So right now we are focusing on H.R. And it with a gradual, ramp up with the target of completing, the deployment for our, Microsoft employees, before the end of the first half of 2025. One important things to highlight is with, each rollout, we are reviewing the feedback, that our users are providing, and we make adjustments in our based on that, we are putting a lot of focus on measuring the impact for our employees. Looking at, productivity gains, satisfaction, the quality of service. But we are also looking at the, delivery and operational, side, you know, measuring, ticket elimination, whether we are improving, you know, the assisted experience or not.
And also looking into, cost reduction as a result of, you know, ticket elimination as well as, being able to resolve, issues, faster. We are also exploring, diagnostics on travel insurance, integration to post, productivity, reviews, I.T support tickets and, you know, my, my, partner here will explain this farther. So passing it to you, Mariam.
Thank you so much, Sylvie. Now, let me just take control and move to the next slide. All right.
I, Sylvana mentioned I will be talking about AI to help this support for Microsoft products and services in employee self-service. So you are going to get this embedded experience, that will help you support Microsoft products and services more efficiently as part of the core package of employee self-service. Obviously you have a chance to customize or disable it if you choose to, but the reason that we are bringing this is that in many conversations with our customers, we heard that, a good portion of the questions that they are getting in their helpdesk are related to supporting Microsoft products like teams, outlook, Windows.
So we are bringing a set of self-help solution and diagnostic right away to you, with zero configuration effort, because we want to make sure that your users are going to get the most out of this product with least maintain maintenance, safe word and configuration, effort and cost for your IT helpdesk. So in terms of the, our goal is to really increase their productivity satisfaction by leveraging these products more often, but also for your help desk, reducing the tickets associated with supporting these products, reducing their maintenance, and creation effort in creating so many of those KB articles for these products. And also in Microsoft, we follow a very agile model. So many of these products are getting updated frequently, so you don't have to spend time to updating those KB article associated, but rather just take what Microsoft has to offer right away. As part of this solutions, there will be various type of solutions we are enabling.
There are lots of how to solutions based on Microsoft, knowledge based repositories. Examples like how to set up Windows Hello, how to create out of office, message for outlook, and so on. We also bringing a lot of diagnostic and troubleshooters, and these were built by Microsoft product teams. So you will know that there are very well adjusted for the product, and your users can leverage them right away to, solve many problems with less effort.
So we'll look at one of this example of one of this troubleshooter. I have a little bit of a demo able to, walk through it. So let's say if the user is asking how to troubleshoot Windows Update in employee self-service.
And again, this will be just available. And you don't have to do any sort of configuration to get this. The user will get some solutions. That is indicating what to do if it is Windows 11, what to do if it's Windows 10.
But in addition to that, you will see that the user get this option that they can. It is asking for their permission to run their windows app that will try to diagnose and fix the issue on behalf of the user. So if the user gives that permission, the windows app starts running. I recorded this demo actually two days ago, so this is a feature that is already live as part of the core package. That's where you will see some of these delays, but I think the users prefer to just sit back instead of following many of those things. Here we're asking one clarifying question so the user can be more specific in the issue.
So we run the run right diagnostic then giving more information to the user. What this diagnostic does. It is trying to scan for needed Windows Update and try to install them. If the user gives that permission, it goes ahead with trying to do so.
Yeah. So as you will see, will conclude. But I want to take this time, to say that Anna kindly is going to, post one poll. It would be really helpful for us to, just kind of answer and help us how valuable you find this set of features. This was only one of the example of the Troubleshooters, but in general, having that embedded support for Microsoft products in your help desk, it would really help us make sure that we are following the right direction. And, also how much more we want to invest in this feature.
If your feedback would be super valuable for us to understand how valuable this set of features will be for your help, this so really appreciate if you take a couple of second to answer the poll question, but also if there is any immediate question or anything that comes up to your mind, I'll be happy to either, you raise your hand or we can just kind of take it off on the chat, just giving it a few second. All right. Thank you so much. I see the answers coming in. Thank you for filling out the form. Let's move to the next section. So in addition to the self-help and, other diagnostic that we are bringing, we are also, looking to bring some of the tools that really helped us reduce cost in our own helpdesk and drive a much more efficient helpdesk over the years for our customers, as well as for internal and external customers.
To employee self, employee self-service. So one of the tools that has been super helpful for us was detecting outages and managing the notification around outages, and also measuring the cost of outages. Outages in helpdesk is inevitable. At some point it's kind of bound to happen, but it's about how we can actually detect them much earlier.
Post the right notification to the user. Manage the cost, in terms of both money and also the productivity impacts to the employees in helpdesk. So one of the tools that we are planning to bring, and this hasn't been, implemented yet, but it is in our vision to bring this, to you is detecting those spikes much earlier and allowing, i.t.
Helpdesk to know. And board is not just my t helpdesk is actually for, employee self-service in general. It can be leveraged by HMRC as well to let them know that okay, we think these are some of the potential outages. And if the admin actually verified that's an outage, they can post some notification to the employee.
That will help the employee to know that, okay, this issue that they're facing is not just, for them, it's actually a much broader outage. So that information will be super helpful for the employee. But in addition, admins to be on top of those outages much faster will help them reduce their support cost associated with many tickets that are being created by this outages. And also, getting the right resources to address those outages and reduce the productivity impact of those outages. And also managing the communication around this outage is much better. But also for the leadership, it would really help to know after the post the outage, what was the impact in terms of cost and productivity so that they can take, measures to reduce that cost and productivity impact for the future.
Outages? There are some mocks that I'm going to just walk you through it as how we are planning to do this, for example. And by the way, the way that we're doing this is we are monitoring all the questions that are being asked, for example, in this case, in employee self-service, if we see that, a good group of questions, questions or a good, group of people are asking questions exactly about the same topic, we detect that, okay, those topics might be because of an outage. In this example, you can see, users were reporting that they're unable to use the meeting room devices for online meetings. They were creating tickets related to that, and they were also marking those tickets as impacting them, greatly. That's why this outage alert was created with a critical severity. And it actually also has the number of the tickets and the tickets associated with it.
So it is telling the admins, review this, notifications, validate if this is someone an actual outage, then admins can post a message for that outage to the users. So admins can post this message to tell the next user, okay, we're aware of this outage, we know this is happening and this is the impact of the outage. When you can expect this outage to be addressed. This notification will help the user to not create tickets anymore regarding those outages, but also is still indicating that it was impacted, it impact them. So they would be receiving some updates once those outages are resolved. And also you would know how many users actually were impacted by this outages.
And also those type of detection will help the admins to get the right resources to resolve these issues much faster. And post outage, there will be some analytics for leadership for admins to understand. Okay, how many users were impacted? How many users? We those notification didn't end up creating a ticket. That's the, cost that was saved for your help desk. And also in general, how many tickets were created. So you're not really also bombarding your agents with so many tickets when you are able to detect those outages in a few hours and getting the right resources up to it.
But this post analysis will be super helpful for to help us to plan better for the next outages. Understanding the scope and impact of those outages, both in terms of, as I mentioned, cost and productivity to the user. So managing the next one better. So again, this was one of the feature that is one of the features that we would like to bring for you. There will be a poll question that and I kindly will post in the chat.
Greatly appreciate if you let us know how valuable you would find this feature for your help. This. So it would really help us to make sure that we would put the right priority to it and help us understand if you're on the right direction. I'll take a few minute or a few second pause, and if there is any question, I'll be happy to answer, either by raising your hand or we can also take it into chat. Thank you so much. I'll pass it back to Lucy for the next section and I'll be in the chat.
If there's any question for me. Thank you. So valuable. Please, please ask any questions you have in the chat while we have Miriam here. And also, even if there are any suggestions for, for the products, and it help desk space, that would be great to hear. In the chat as well.
Okay. I'm going to take us through a demo of really what the full experience, will be once we get to public preview in GA and sort of give you a flavor for what this looks like within employees life cycle. And also, from the admin experience in, in copilot studio.
And to control here. Okay. So with Microsoft, with the, with the Microsoft 365 copilot, everyone has their kind of personal AI system, deeply embedded, integrated in their work. And so now, you know, we're augmenting with these employee self-service agent skills.
So you see employee self-service agent pre-print here on the right rail. Something I just want to note because we get this question from customers quite a bit, it's yes, you will be able to customize the name of your employee self-service agent. We're going to get a glimpse of an employee self-service agent through the eyes of Cat Larson, a real cloud employee, ensuring she has a supportive experience at Relic Cloud before starting her new family all the way through. Adjusting to life back at work with the right devices, benefits, and resources in place. So that's planning to go on parental leave soon. You've just seen her ask the agent, how many vacation days do I have left this year? And it's going to reveal that balance for her.
It's going to, you know, add it, layer in and its response to her, as I mentioned a little bit earlier, additional resources and personalized geography based suggestions about PTO policy, especially important, of course, to organizations with, you know, global global reach. And so the intelligent prompts at the bottom of screen are going to, are going to kind of understand, hey, she might have this question that so she's going to ask about parental leave policy. To learn more. And she finds out that role cloud offers 12 weeks of parental leave for her employee type, with added flexibility to extend her time off using her available paid leave. Something also to note here, as you'll see, that based on official sources, kind of tag.
And that's something that will be available to configure in the back end and Copilot studio, so that employee really knows they can rely on this content as the official source for really core and important scenarios to their HR, and and and IT services experience. So now because all that information she's ready to apply for parental leave, she doesn't know how she's going to ask the agent. The agent returns a response here. Here's what you need to do.
Again, it's based on official sources. And then it's going to say, hey, but do you want me to help you just apply for this parental leave right here? So Cat is going to click Start Request. There. And the agent is going to return to her.
A reminder of, you know, her policy and also the form she can submit. She says she can have film star an end date. She's going to click submit, receive confirmation. Her request has been submitted.
Here. And that's going to include a case ID number so she can make adjustments and ask the agent for updates, you know, on the request later. Another thing I usually like to highlight here is if you if this is connected to your system of record. So your workday or wherever someone today completes a request for parental leave or for anything HR related. If your system that you use today or your HR I.T system triggers a confirmation email, that same confirmation
email is going to be triggered for, you know, Cat in this case. And bring that up because sometimes employees really want to see that kind of like official I got the email. So I know I did it, you know, and that well, you know, anything you already have set up will be reflected. Still in that respect. So now Cat has returned from parental leave and she knows she can turn to the employee self-service agent, for trouble. She's having access in company resources on her phone.
And since this is a common query, with changing security requirements that are all out, it's going to show up as that pre-configured prompt on her home screen. She clicks in and submits her question. It's going to return these steps that she needs to take. Of course, you know, for Microsoft products and services, it will also do things like diagnostics and troubleshooting, as Marion kind of showed us. But in this case, Cat still needs more help.
She does not have to navigate away from her employee self-service experience to go to another site. She's going to ask the agent for help right here. And she's going to be prompted to start helpdesk ticket directly from from the agent. So Kat's going to take the agent up on its offer. She clicks create helpdesk ticket, and she can complete her to get, right here. Powered by ServiceNow in the employee self-service agent.
It will pre-filled for her based on what's come previous in the chat, and then she'll have the ability to sort of customize. And this demo doesn't show that, but it will. So captures all IT issues now that she's back at work. But she's having a she's having trouble kind of adjusting and navigating hybrid work challenges with her manager. So she turns to agent for help.
So this is, sort of an example of that sensitive topic handling, that I think someone brought up in the chat a bit earlier. So the employee self-service agent uses it's fine tuned LM to identify this is a task which requires human intervention. Recognizing the sensitivity of an agent identifies a need for human assistance and connects directly to air support. For further help, you'll be able to customize as I'll show you in topic workflows, what this response looks like, exactly what you want this experience to be like. Do you want to be passed off to a live agent? You want to be create a help ticket or create a HR ticket? Do you want it to be email this person or this alias in particular? You know you can customize the text of the response to to meet kind of your company, brand and tone and any compliance guidelines you have. That's all, that you'll all be able to do all that in the, in the back end.
And you'll also be able to identify if there are specific words, terms just from a compliance perspective, that you need to make sure that the agent is going to pick up on, and not kind of leave it to the model. You can also identify those in your topic workflows, so that you kind of can rest assured. So now we're going to take a look at the copilot studio experience for the agent.
So as you know Copilot Studios are low-code no code platform for extending Microsoft 365 Copilot building agents with ease. You're going to see the employee self-service agent kind of laid up on your main page here as, as an option. And then you'll be able to configure. So here I'm going to go in and configure and go to my overview page here. And this is where I'll be able to use our new preconfigured template tool connectors to the right authoritative knowledge source like SharePoint, your HR 93rd party systems like ServiceNow, workday. So as an occasion IT admin role kind of overview screen I click on customize.
And now I can connect my ServiceNow. Connector which stores my organizations of my organization's employee HR data. So I install the ServiceNow connector and begin, to set up the connection. To answer the question in the chat, the workday integration will work the same as this.
The same. The connector works the same as this one, which is connected. And then you'll be able to see, That. Be able to see it as your, you know, you need to see everything, all the data that will be revealed and all the scenarios.
You can kind of light up from that connector, from the data coming from that connector. So you'll be able to go and you see these toggles, you'll be able to toggle on and off the data and the scenarios that you are going to light up. So for example, you know, maybe you don't want an employee to be able to see their compensation details and say, hey, what's my compensation? I don't know, I'm just making that up. But that would be, you know, some data that, that you can bring in from your connector and you can just toggle that on and off. That's an example of where we kind of give you as much, capability as we can for the agent, via these connectors. And then you get to decide what you're going to, get to light up for your employees.
So I'm good in this example with the preconfigured enablement settings. So I click knowledge and I'm taken to kind of this list of all of my knowledge sources. So my any connectors I have connected to my external sources like my ServiceNow or my workday or my Successfactors and then any, anything else a public site, a, you know, PDF, something from my graph, my SharePoint sites. That's all all knowledge sources. I'll be able to add something to add a new knowledge source here. For my internal SharePoint sites, I'm going to add to the cloud HR core, SharePoint site.
Here. Great. Now it's added I'm going to see it show up, but I want to make sure that only certain information from the cloud H.R site is revealed. And answers to kind of create the best experience for employees. So I click Real Cloud H.R web, head over to Advanced Settings, and I'm going to make sure here that only information added from January 1st, 2024 on, it's going to be retrieved for employees to ensure that they're not receiving outdated information. Now, there are other, settings that that will have I think it's, created like it's created on date.
It's it's, created by date. Who who was created by, modified by you can kind of set all those settings for anything that you add here. Why is that important? Because we know that a lot of our customers have vast knowledge bases, have vast amounts of pages and SharePoint sites and, you know, repositories where all of this knowledge slips, right, and beyond scenarios beyond for employee services. And they're not always up to date and they're not always relevant.
And that's okay. I think we're all in that boat together. So we allow use filters here so that we're only going to as the agent.
It's kind of reasoning over everything it has access to. We're only going to allow it to, you know, get certain information from what you've added. And I think that should hopefully help with the, some kind of content cleanup or like content audit that, that you might have to do internally. So now I'm going to return to the overview screen.
Oh, sorry. Now I'm going to go to the topics, so the topics here are will be pre-configured. You'll be able to enable them or disable them and they will be connected to the connectors that bring in the relevant data for you. So I want to show you just for the sensitive interruption example, one of these topic workflows.
So for example, you know, if there are any kind of trigger words use these will be pre-populated based on what we're hearing from customers as like the most important terms to include. And you'll be able to add, edit, customize. Of course, here's what we think should come next as a message. And then as a step.
This will all be pre-built for you, but you will then get to decide, hey, do we need to add a step? Do I want to pass off to a live agent? All those things that I mentioned as I was going through the kind of user experience, you'll be able to customize it, but you're not going to have to start from scratch. And it should be, you know, a much cleaner experience than, and less complex than maybe what you've, you've had to do in the past when you're, you know, building something custom. So going back here to our topics page, I also just wanted to highlight, another example.
So manage to dependents. So I click on workday add dependents. And so this is like a kind of designated workflow which is a scenario that an employee like Kat from earlier in the demo, a new mom might be interested in doing directly from creation experience.
So here I'm going to be taken to this existing topic workflows, pre-built and editable for me so I don't have to start from scratch. But if there are is a certain process that you want employee to go down, in the agent, you'll be able to kind of, you know, add that logic or just say, hey, this looks good to me, and it brings in the right data and we're good to go. And so that means that when Kat is then, you know, it goes back to the agent to say, hey, I need to add a dependent. She's going to be taken down this designated path. That you've decided now, you don't have to do that. If you have connected all of your systems and you have the right knowledge sources and you have, the right, you know, you know, ticketing set up, you won't have to you shouldn't have to designate this one.
But you can if you want it to be very prescribed. So here we're trying to balance, you know, the, reasoning powers and capacity of AI and the agent with the customizations and kind of due diligence that we know you will need to, you'll need to you'll need to have in your organization, okay. So I'm going to, now, I think take us through in the last, few minutes here. The roadmap and just some forward thinking roadmap even beyond what we're currently working on. But before I do, I want to just to pass it back to, Craig, just to talk about some early results from our customer zero, internal Microsoft roll out. And just like some thoughts, Craig, on on the future of this and also been that kind of touched on our, rollout plan across the organization.
But any like extra color and sort of what you're expecting to see. In addition to what you're going to share here. So I'll just take you to the early results and then just let me know I can be the Vanna White. Just let me know when you want to click onto share and maybe contacts for these numbers. So, I think there was a question in the chat earlier about how we were measuring ROI.
You know, our early studies was essentially to say we believe employee self-service as an agent and m365 copilot will be easier. Well, understand context and provide more robust answers. And through the connectivity to our knowledge sources and systems of records, we'll provide more help. First time than our current suite of, support. Right. So so in order to get to those results as we've deployed, we went through a B testing, with our employee base to understand things like when you're going through these core scenarios, similar to what Lizzie showed on understanding what you're eligible for on a leave and how to submit a leave.
Are you getting a more robust, more accurate, more complete response when using AI and Copilot across all of our policies or in the highly curated 2000, responses that we have on our current instance of a chatbot. And that's that first number, right? Where we're seeing already on our initial deployment for, 10,000 users. We're seeing that it's more likely to get a correct response, and that's due to that longer tail, right. It's inferencing over more knowledge. And then this, this middle part is also then saying due to the context understanding and the natural language processing that is really aligning to the context of what you're asking for and giving a more complete response, they're less likely to then raise their hand and create a support ticket. And that is a similar pattern that we saw in the I.T helpdesk, right?
Where we're seeing self-help success rate increased by 36% compared to using traditional search or traditional kind of Q&A pairs in a in a chat bot. Where we are now, we've just deployed to we're a 40,000, users across the company, across it, HR for knowledge data retrieval and for things like get help. Right. Asking an expert and really, what our goal is, is to deploy to every employee at Microsoft by the end of this fiscal year. So by the end of June.
And really, what these patterns tell us is we really want this to be the front door support. So today, in HR, a lot of people still use email. It's easier to email for help than it is to go and try and find find, the right path. This is the first signal we've had that's easier than email.
It is easier to get people engaged, copilot into this agent than it is to try to get them to install a separate app or go to a separate site compared to using their inbox. So that is one of those signals that we're really building on to say, is it easier than email? And then the other part is, on our HR intranet today, we get 8 million, visits a year. It should be easier to find the right information that you need at the right time than it is to open that web page. And then you should have trust that you're getting the right curated response and the right link to go discover more. So there are the two patterns that we're really we're really trying to solve for as we extend these early signals, which are, really strong for us to say it's, it's easier than email is giving more complete responses, and it is doing a better job than some of our current, support and intake that we have across HR 90. I think we're good to move on.
And, and this is, really the framing we've got on our strategy. So on the left, Chris Fernandez is, one of our H.R. Leaders that looks after our technology strategy, our, our, our employee experience strategy. And then Natalie, who who leads? All right.
And our, our digital experience function, really investing in that technology and managing support. And this idea of how do you get out of navigating across 100 apps and tools to get to a a single interaction layer that is familiar and is personal to you, understand your context and helps you navigate where you need to navigate. That's that's this idea that we're really focused on now. And then similarly on it, how do we get to this, focus on high complexity, scenarios that then really help reduce support incident time and increase focus in our support teams on those higher complexity areas? And both of those are giving us really good traction to say, any strategy for investing in new technology or new scenarios is employee self-service. First, all right. So in HR we're we're going through deploying a new applicant tracking system, a new career platform. On both of those scenarios we're looking to say, well, what is the story with employee self-service.
How do we connect it to where employees are versus trying to ship something new? So that's a little bit about how we're measuring the ROI and where we see, employee services, self-service take us internally. I think this is it's back over to to you. Great. Thank you, thank you. Craig. Any questions for Craig and how to think about an internal roll out? And those impact areas? Please, please put them in the chat. I'm going to go through the roadmap in our last couple minutes here.
Just to, kind of I think this should hopefully provide some clarity and answers for what we're what we're seeing in the chat. So this is not, I'm just zooming in a little bit from my own own eyesight. This is not, conclusive of everything that we're building, but this is sort of our minimum viable product. As we move to towards public preview in GA, you're going to see the four, categories of knowledge retrieval, task completion, configuration, and then analytics, telemetry, because we hear a lot from customers, hey, we need to be able to, you know, see, how employees are using this and get, get data around that.
So in the knowledge retrieval area you're going to see these three columns there C0. So that's what we refer to as our internal Microsoft rollout public preview. And then GA so for for knowledge retrieval we'll have SharePoint knowledge retrieval. So across all your SharePoint sites M365 Self-Help.
So all the work that Mariam talked with us about today, workday and SAP Successfactors, connectors, you know, ready to go and to bring in your information service to our knowledge base. And then Oracle coming a bit later at the GA timeframe, when it comes to task completion, again, workday successfactors ServiceNow D 365 ticketing. Windows troubleshooter Intune device diagnostics. And then again a little later, towards the GA timeframe, Oracle Jira and ADP moving over to the configuration area. And again not conclusive of everything we're building.
Just really like the minimum bar. But we know we need to make available to customers. Obviously being able to configure your HR in IT knowledge sources. And to do that separately for HR teams and IT teams, agent topic workflow.
Pre-Install. So this is those type of workflows I showed you, having those available and lined up and also having that agent kind of, you know, kind of evident and available for you on that main screen in your copilot studio experience and then official source tagging. Which is what I talked about when we went through. Hey, you know, your response from the agent will have an official source so that the employee knows they can really rely on that. And then moving down to analytics and telemetry, we have vertical based analytics. So this is going to be things like, hey, what are the themes bubbling up for employees around the HR IT topics? You know, where are they.
Like where is their experience kind of breaking? Where do we clearly have some knowledge sources that are not up to date and, and helping the agent retreat retrieve the right response? Those kinds of, those kinds of analytics. And then, of course, the adoption in that bottom row, the, the adoption analytics of, hey, is this being used? What is it being used for? You know, is this helping build our, AI muscle in our organization and drive the impact that we're looking for? Yes. Calendar year. See what a calendar year? Yes, this is Oracle HCM. What does getting access to public preview look like? Public preview will be available to, anyone who wants to have access to it. And you know the space between public preview and GA is when we're really kind of fine tuning everything that we've released a public preview, cost in GA. So this will be free.
So M365 Copilot licensed users for non licensed users, they will be able to access it through Copilot chat, which if you're aware of our latest announcement around that, is our free version. And they will be you will be charged on a consumption billing basis. So on a pay as you go basis.
And I can provide more collateral on, on that. As well as a follow up. It's helpful. Will there be any I believe I answered that last question in my, In my. Okay. Go. Okay. Okay, good. Okay.
So we're at time. Exactly. We didn't have time for some of the polls, that we wanted to feel, but that is okay, because I really want to make sure that I could leave you with these three resources. So, number one, be the first access public preview.
And GA, you're going to want to click or scan the QR code in that first rectangle. And there's a form there. So we will notify you and say hey this is available. Have at it. And of course with resources there as well.
Second thing, you can do is sign up for our best practices to prepare for for s implementation. Webinars is taking place on March 19th, 9 a.m. PT. And this is really going to be a kind of step by step guide on how to prepare your organization for smooth, successful rollout. You're going to learn the key actions to take before implementation best practices for readiness. How to ensure a seamless transition for your employee. These are all questions we're getting from customers.
As we talk to them around, hey, like how do I make sure I have all my ducks in a row to light something like this up in my organization? And then finally you can request, a customer engagement if you're looking if you're part of an EBC or organization for any and you want, you know, to request some employee self-service agent content in that you can always do that. You know, by letting us know, and I think we'll provide some links in the chat here. And if you're Microsoft 365 copilot licenses are active and deployed, and you're looking to learn more about how Microsoft H.R. As approach has approached leveraging Copilot and agent internally. You can also, request time as well.
And we'll provide that link as well, maybe in the follow up. When you ask me your form, you should be willing to share content. What do you mean? Either customer interest form. Let me here, let me just to I just want to make sure I'm.
I'm looking, I'm answering your question and kind of seeing what you're talking about here. I'm not. See what you mean? But I will take a look and I will respond to the chat. I'll respond to Scott.
Okay. So I first I want to thank all of our amazing presenters. Thank you so much to Mariam. Silvina Craig, for kind of walking us through this great, content.
And we will see you next time hopefully at the implementation webinar. And in the meantime, please leave any questions in the chat. You'll receive an email if you registered with a follow up with the recording. And yes, again, thank you to our speakers and we will. We'll see you next time. Thanks everybody here. Thank you all.
2025-03-27 00:39
