Why Virgin Atlantic is using Microsoft Copilot

to increase efficiency

 

 

The airline’s meeting and email summaries have sparked employee interest, but the developer advantages may produce the greatest outcomes.

When companies try to use generative AI to drive new productivity levels, it can be challenging for the typical IT decision-maker (ITDM) to figure out exactly how to incorporate the technology into their workflow.
Virgin Atlantic, a British airline, chose Microsoft Copilot as its preferred AI tool and set out to address this issue by implementing the platform top-down and gradually.

The initial 250–300 Copilot licenses issued by Virgin Atlantic were overseen by Richard Masters, vice president of data and artificial intelligence.

“I believe we were among the first 50 companies in the UK to participate in this trial,” he adds, adding that his team’s initial step was giving Copilot to senior leadership personnel to give them an idea of how the tool may fit into their daily routine.
“It went really well, as evidenced by the various team feedback, surveys, and conversations with those members.”
Now that Virgin Atlantic has fully integrated the generative AI assistant, several departments are starting to witness AI-driven enhancements. Masters walks through the adoption phases and the locations where generative AI is producing the most value.

Increasing productivity in both administration and programming

Masters explains to ITPro how Copilot is used in two main areas at Virgin Atlantic. The first of these is the more structured aspect of the company, where it primarily assists in reducing laborious tasks by summarizing and classifying content.

Masters notes that although these are merely isolated examples of minor improvements, Copilot has, on a bigger scale, been able to support the work being done in this area by Virgin Atlantic employees. The company has tracked increases in efficiency based on time savings and improved communication.

According to Masters, Copilot “cuts through a lot of the noise” when it comes to helping Teams summarise meetings and hold members accountable for action items. Rates of tool adoption at Virgin Atlantic Atlantic stand at 81%, with 70% of those adopting using the tool within Teams to assist with driving efficiencies in the context of meetings.

In contrast, Outlook accounts for half of all adoption usage when it comes to email summary. Together, these figures demonstrate the significant need for summarizing skills across the board for the organization.

With Copilot, employees are presently saving one to two hours per week, which allows them to concentrate on more important tasks. However, Masters notes that “more code doesn’t mean better code, necessarily” and that it is more challenging to evaluate precise efficiency benefits on the development side of the equation. Instead, Virgin Atlantic‘s developers benefit from Copilot’s wide range and high caliber of programming languages.

What’s happening is that a development team’s capacity to work with a wider range of languages and code types is growing not be so familiar with.

“For instance, putting that in the back end of Copilot and saying, ‘Look, you turn this into some Python code, for me,’ is transformational. Or, I have this PDF document with all of my schema in it, which is unstructured, but I want to turn it into a nice, structured piece of code.”
Masters points out that advances from Microsoft provide new opportunities for Copilot adoption at Virgin Atlantic, beyond only code and text handling. His group is looking into software-specific solutions that might benefit employees who use Microsoft Dynamics, for instance.

Data access headaches caused a few issues

An initial barrier to adopting Copilot was deciding on the level of access the tool would be given, a problem Masters described as common for these sorts of projects.

“Just understanding what kind of data it would have access to, right, and making sure we’re comfortable with that as an organization, and that people would understand and trust that it was on their data and follow the access rules that they were used to,” he says.
The other issue Masters says the firm ran into concerned staff’s sense of “relevance for certain tasks,” and the extent to which employees “got it”.

“It’s like with Googling, you look at whether someone wants to hold information in their head and learn that rather than think about the problem and how they can solve that with extra tooling because they are quite different mindsets,” Master says, adding that this is only a temporary problem.

There will be something that grabs someone’s interest or attention, whether it’s a different application or they see someone else use it, we see people come on board over time as well.

“So if you didn’t get it originally, you couldn’t see the initial application, we’re seeing that start to come in as they’ve either joined that Teams meeting, or they’ve suddenly seen something useful within Word, or Outlook, or PowerPoint, especially as new features come in.”

In addition, he cited recent innovations like Copilot Studio which allows Microsoft clients to design unique Copilot assistants for particular discussions, divisions, or industries as game-changers in Virgin Atlantic‘s effort to deploy Copilot role-by-role.

Masters said the company will keep looking into what artificial intelligence (AI) can achieve for Virgin Atlantic in terms of cost reductions and customer service. He is optimistic that in the future, AI technologies will be able to perform duties with greater autonomy and responsibility than just answering user questions.