Summary Bullets:

• Vodafone’s multi-country rollout of Microsoft 365 Copilot yielded quantifiable results in terms of productivity and efficiency.

• Eventually, generative AI (genAI) will not just deliver productivity improvements but corporate efficiencies – i.e., lower employee numbers.

Vodafone has extended its strategic agreement with Microsoft to roll out Microsoft 365 Copilot AI to up to 68,000 Vodafone employees across several countries. The goal is to further improve productivity, innovation, and digital efficiency. By freeing up time normally spent on monotonous tasks, employees will be allowed to focus on more varied and interesting work, enhancing services, and supporting Vodafone’s 350 million customers worldwide.

This announcement follows on from a 10-year strategic partnership announced in January 2024 (please see Partner or Do – a Telco Technology Dilemma – IT Connection at currentanalysis.com), to exploit genAI and to scale Vodafone’s IoT business to target over 300 million customers across its footprint in Europe and Africa, with Vodafone investing $1.5 billion over that period in cloud and customer-focused AI in conjunction with Microsoft. This included ‘supercharging’ TOBi, Vodafone’s online chatbot in 13 countries using 15 languages.

This latest announcement will see Vodafone integrate Microsoft 365 Copilot into areas of its business ranging from customer service to product development, network management, and sales and marketing. It will cover Microsoft applications including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, OneNote, and OneDrive.

Initial trials found that genAI usage saved time for:

• Drafting e-mails, meeting agendas, and documents;

• Summarizing meetings and identifying action points;

• Searching for information.

On average, the enhanced app functionality has saved users around three hours per week. Ninety percent (90%) of users say they have benefited from using Microsoft 365 Copilot and want to keep using it, and 60% say it has improved the quality of their work. Notably, it has been welcomed by users with neurodiversity such as dyslexia.

These early use cases are as expected – a rocket boost to existing tasks. This is not trivial. With enterprises and organizations struggling to improve productivity, they will embrace every tool available. And this is still early days for the impact of genAI on how enterprises work. In the future, solutions will be developed that address particular needs by horizontal activity such as accounting to vertical activities specific to individual sectors.

Vodafone’s leverage of Microsoft 365 Copilot is one of the benefits of its strategic focus on partnerships for delivery. However, other service providers will offer the same suite of enhanced Microsoft 365 services over time – the obvious overall winner being Microsoft – especially as it has been reported that the enterprise version will cost $30 a month per license (justified by the three hours a week time saving).

What many service providers, enterprises, and public sector organizations are shying away from, however, is the flipside to greater productivity: greater efficiency. This usually means reduced headcount. They talk about enhanced employee satisfaction as they move from the mundane to value-added. But it is day one in this market, and all established service providers are looking to reduce headcount. There is no way that genAI will not play a part in these efficiency plans.