SHI improves efficiency and creativity by adopting Microsoft Copilot

Microsoft Copilot helps teams at SHI save significant time on routine tasks.

Challenge:

SHI is an IT solutions provider with more than 6,000 employees worldwide. We provide highly personalized service to over 17,000 customers, learning the intricacies of their organizations and connecting them with the right vendors and solutions to solve what’s next.

As part of our ongoing growth and expansion, SHI is committed to providing the most value to our customers, leading to an increase in workload across our teams. Our sales and business development teams are now managing larger volumes of data, balancing current customer relationships while attracting new prospects. In the marketing department, when faced with doing more with less, production teams routinely found themselves running up against tight deadlines, leaving little room for creativity or innovation. The events team was similarly strained, with a packed calendar of educational summits for customers and internal employees.

SHI needed a solution to streamline workflows, reduce time spent on mundane tasks, and improve overall productivity. With a desire to be at the forefront of the AI boom and a close relationship with Microsoft, the solution emerged: Microsoft Copilot.

Solution:

Microsoft Copilot is a generative AI assistant that can handle complex requests, generate content, and provide insights and analyses. Once enabled, Copilot becomes available across the Microsoft user environment, embedded directly into the applications employees use every day, like Excel, Word, Outlook, and Teams. Like a true assistant, Copilot helps employees quickly summarize meeting transcripts, create detailed notes with action items, create rough drafts for emails, documents, and other content like YouTube video descriptions, and generate ideas for brainstorming sessions.

To start, a pilot group of 300 users was selected to test Copilot, including users from service delivery organizations and sellers who had already been using other AI tools to develop leads. The value of having a robust AI assistant available across the daily apps was clear, and the implementation rapidly expanded to 2,000 licenses.

Outcome:

Microsoft Copilot has proven to be a game-changer for SHI, enabling employees to save significant time on routine tasks. Lane Shelton, Vice President of Business Development, needed to create a series of one-page summaries of information that spanned over 400 pages of meeting transcripts, PowerPoint slides, and other documents. Copilot was able to summarize the information and create the drafts in minutes, a task that may have taken weeks otherwise.

Copilot’s ability to summarize Teams meetings and provide action items allows employees to be more present on calls rather than focusing on notetaking. This is especially important on customer-facing calls where a sales rep or account executive is leading the discussion and is unable to take notes. Lane was able to quickly find details discussed in a four-hour call with nearly 40 participants using Copilot. “It basically gives you photographic memory,” Lane said.

For creative teams, Copilot has helped ramp up projects more quickly, allowing the team to execute at a high level despite increasing demand. Niki Nelson, Head of Creative Services, said, “The benefit is to use it as an accelerator to be able to scale capacity while reducing burnout for our talent.”

Michael Miraftab, Microsoft Solutions Specialist, uses Copilot to answer repetitive general questions about the company for RFI and RFP documents. He estimates this approach saves him one to two hours per response.

The implementation of Microsoft Copilot at SHI has been transformative, streamlining processes and improving efficiency. Tasks that once required extensive time and effort are now completed in a fraction of the time, freeing employees to focus on higher-value activities.