Integrating AI technologies such as Microsoft Copilots into business and organizational operations is becoming routine, making it crucial to understand their impact on productivity, efficiency and overall return on investment. However, the effectiveness of AI Copilots can vary significantly across industries, requiring businesses to analyze usage patterns, engagement levels and adoption metrics specific to their sector., engagement levels and adoption metrics specific to their sector.
For instance, in healthcare, Copilot usage reports can highlight how AI assists with patient documentation, reducing administrative burdens on physicians, and improving accuracy in medical records. In financial services, analytics can track how AI enhances risk assessments, automates compliance reporting, and accelerates client interactions. Copilot insights might measure efficiency gains in supply chain coordination and production planning in manufacturing. Meanwhile, in retail, reports can reveal how AI improves personalized customer interactions, optimizes inventory management, and streamlines order fulfillment. These industry-specific Copilot analytics allow organizations to identify areas where Copilot drives the most value and where further refinement is needed.
Microsoft Copilot usage dashboards and analytics, combined with insights produced via Microsoft Viva, provide organizations with the tools to assess adoption, measure impact, and refine AI implementation strategies tailored to their industry’s unique demands. By leveraging these reports, businesses can ensure their AI investments align with operational goals, improve workforce productivity, and enhance decision-making capabilities across various departments.
Why tracking Copilot adoption is key to ROI
Adopting AI assistants within an organization isn’t just about deploying the technology—it’s about ensuring employees can effectively integrate it into their workflows to drive desirable ROI, support digital transformation and inform strategic decision making. By measuring Microsoft Copilot adoption, leadership can identify opportunities for process improvements, resource optimization, and long-term AI-driven innovation. Copilot usage data enables organizations to refine their approach and explore new applications for AI, particularly in research and development.
Measuring Copilot usage brings the following to fruition:
- Enhance strategic planning: Identify trends in AI adoption that inform leadership’s approach to digital transformation and operational efficiency.
- Optimize research and development: Leverage Copilot data to explore new ways AI can accelerate innovation, improve data analysis, and streamline workflows for R&D teams.
- Improve employee productivity: Determine how Copilot assists employees in completing tasks faster and more efficiently, identifying areas for further AI-driven enhancements.
- Assess engagement and adoption trends: Track onboarding progress and pinpoint departments or roles with high or low usage, enabling targeted training and optimization efforts.
- Justify and maximize investment: Use data-driven insights to validate the return on investment (ROI) for AI Copilot implementation and ensure alignment with business goals.
How Copilot usage is measured
Microsoft leverages Copilot usage analytics and adoption reporting to help leadership identify engagement levels across different teams and business functions. The following are metrics that should be followed closely:
- Active users: The number of employees actively engaging with Copilot over a defined period. A typical benchmark for Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption is achieving 70-80% active user rates among enabled users over a six-month monitoring period.
- Interaction frequency: The rate at which employees engage with Copilot to complete tasks, seek assistance, or gain insights. Ideally, organizations should aim for 30-50% of users to interact with Copilot consistently for these purposes.
- Feature utilization: Breakdown of capabilities—such as summarization, data analysis, content creation, or automation—are most frequently used across the organization. These insights can guide Copilot optimization efforts and further alignment with user needs.
- Task completion rates: The percentage of users who successfully complete workflows or actions using Copilot assistance, offering a direct measure of AI-driven productivity gains.
Prominent findings from Microsoft’s AI Data Drop report, which assessed the habits of approximately 6,300 employees across 58 organizations, highlight the industry-specific impact of AI Copilots. The report revealed:
- A 31% reduction in time spent managing emails
- A 16% decrease in meeting durations through Copilot-powered insights
- A 58% increase in content co-creation in Microsoft Word
These results demonstrate how measuring Copilot engagement and outcomes can help organizations tailor their AI strategies by department, function, or industry—ultimately ensuring that AI investments drive meaningful and measurable business value.
Analyzing Copilot readiness and early adoption with Viva Insights
Viva Insights is integral to analyzing Microsoft Copilot usage, providing comprehensive, data-driven reports on workforce behaviors and AI adoption trends. These insights help organizations evaluate Copilot's effectiveness, inform rollout strategies, and support continuous improvement.
Before full deployment, businesses can leverage Viva Insights to:
- Benchmark current workflows: Analyze existing processes and identify inefficiencies that Copilot could improve.
- Predict adoption readiness: Assess collaboration patterns, meeting loads, and task complexity to determine Copilot’s potential impact.
- Monitor initial usage trends: Evaluate early-stage engagement to understand which teams or roles benefit the most from Copilot integrations.
- Gather feedback for optimization: Collect user sentiment data to refine Copilot’s functionalities and improve training programs.
In addition, you can easily generate a Microsoft 365 Copilot Impact report in Power BI directly within Vivia Insights using a predefined query. This report offers a high-level view of Copilot’s effect on collaboration, productivity, and engagement. It provides detailed metrics on:
- Adoption trends
- Active user counts
- Copilot interactions and commands used
- Total time employees received AI assistance
Organizations can also analyze usage across collaboration channels—meetings, Teams chats, emails, documents, and Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat—and compare performance between users and non-users. This helps leadership better understand behavioral shifts, productivity gains, and change enablement requirements.
Using Copilot reports for continuous improvement
A strong Copilot adoption strategy includes continuous monitoring and refinement. Organizations can leverage Copilot usage reports and insights to:
- Identify training needs: If adoption rates are less than desirable, further training or onboarding support may be required to support areas of deficiency.
- Optimize AI prompts and workflows: Understanding common usage patterns helps businesses fine-tune Copilot interactions for better efficiency.
- Enhance AI governance: Ensure compliance, security, and responsible AI usage based on engagement trends.
- Demonstrate business value: Use data-backed reports to showcase how Copilot improves productivity and decision making.
Maximizing Copilot success with data-driven insights
To fully realize the potential of AI Copilots, organizations must go beyond deployment and actively track adoption metrics, usage trends, and overall performance. Each industry benefits from Copilot in unique ways, making it essential to measure usage patterns and analyze AI's impact on productivity and collaboration.
By leveraging Copilot usage reports through Microsoft Viva Insights, organizations gain valuable visibility into adoption trends, optimize AI strategies, and maximize overall business impact. This data-driven approach ensures that AI Copilots evolve beyond mere workplace tools, becoming catalysts for long-term innovation and efficiency.
With over 30 years of experience in digital transformation and change enablement, Alithya is a trusted partner in helping organizations turn their Copilot initiatives into measurable success. By identifying key usage metrics and aligning them with strategic business goals, Alithya ensures a seamless AI implementation process. Our cross-functional expertise empowers organizations to enhance productivity, streamline operations, and drive meaningful business outcomes with Dynamics 365 Copilot for customer service and sales.
Contact us today to explore how your organization can unlock the full potential of AI-powered Copilots and turn insight into impact.