Productivity Tech Is Revolutionizing Work with Help from Generative AI

Endo, a diversified pharmaceutical company that embraces technology and runs Microsoft 365 on most of its devices, is taking advantage.

Its tech team developed a training program called Digital Ask Me Anything, in which IT leaders visit with different business teams and review features and best practices for the technologies they use every day.

“We’ve used DAMA to familiarize teams with Microsoft Copilot,” says Cheryl Stouch, Endo’s CIO and senior vice president of IT. “We started with some unstructured DAMA sessions to create a safe space for exploring generative AI, with tips for developing prompts and encouragement for playing around with Copilot.”

Focused on improving processes and helping teams work smarter, DAMA has been a great success for the Malvern, Pa.-based company, supporting employees in adopting generative AI along with other Microsoft productivity technologies, including OneDrive and SharePoint.

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How Companies Are Experimenting with Generative AI

With generative AI tools now directly available through productivity suites, one challenge for many companies is getting employees to use them in order to reap their productivity gains. Endo is not alone in finding creative ways for workers to try new tools, says Chris Marsh, research director for S&P Global Market Intelligence.

“We are seeing basic use cases and then more advanced use cases maturing, such as predictive summarization,” Marsh says. “Generative AI is being used for productivity and workflow management. It can give you a summary, recognize where you are in your workflow and proactively surface suggestions for what you should be thinking about at that point in the process.”

In addition to summarization, Marsh notes, additional use cases include interrogation (asking generative AI questions, engaging in sequential brainstorming), authoring or formatting (creating communications or spreadsheets through prompts), and task management (building action steps based on given data).

“Generative AI allows for synthesis of information,” Marsh says. “It is multimodal, not just text-focused. It can also include images and video. And it can summarize across applications, data sets and a variety of systems. That’s where vendors are now focusing their efforts.”

How to Help Workers Get Comfortable with Generative AI

Endo’s IT team is currently rolling out four classes throughout the enterprise on using generative AI effectively. One of the goals of the classes is to get employees comfortable using generative AI for everyday tasks.

“We want to teach them not to be afraid and highlight how they can be creative with the technology,” Stouch says. “We want them to be comfortable applying it right away.”

In addition to Copilot, Endo has continued to improve employee productivity through its effective use of SharePoint.

In preparation for a recent funding round, the leadership team needed to quickly gather information from across the company in a single evening to be ready for a meeting the next day. Outreach to 25 different stakeholders was accomplished using SharePoint and its co-authoring feature to gather input and move the document among collaborators.

“Before DAMA, it was hit or miss on workflow for projects getting done, with some users onboard while others were not,” Stouch says. “There was not enough consistency. The benefits are there now for using SharePoint. We have everyone using it consistently for effective collaboration.”

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How Generative AI Helps Drive Workplace Culture

Productivity suites with generative AI tools can do more than improve work processes. They are also capable of improving work life, as employees at Attache, a small, Washington, D.C.-based property management company, recently found.

The company, which specializes in providing furnished monthly property rentals in the Washington area to corporations, has been using Google Workspace since the product’s rollout in 2006 and has always been a quick adopter of new features. Attache’s 13 employees have been using Google Chat and Meet to stay connected over multiple time zones.

The company’s employees previously struggled to differentiate between essential and nonessential business communications. Email inboxes were getting overloaded. In response, Attache founder Tim Touchette instituted a new policy requiring employees to use Google Chat first when communicating with coworkers to get a task or activity done. This move helped reduce response times on business tasks and lowered a barrier to direct communication among employees.

LEARN MORE: What small businesses need to know about Microsoft Copilot.

“Post-pandemic, the big challenge for us has been keeping company culture alive,” Touchette says. “It was easier to promote and establish when everyone was in the office. We’ve created a Space called Attache Fun Stuff. As part of our weekly all-hands call, everyone shares something they are grateful for: pets, weddings, activities, whatever is going on in their lives.”

Attache has also integrated Google’s new Gemini generative AI feature into its managers’ daily huddle. In this brief touchpoint meeting, each manager walks through a series of questions, concluding with a helpful reminder to use Gemini.

“We go through these questions: What’s your focus today? What are your stuck items? What question are you going to ask Gemini? This daily reminder is important to help drive home that the technology is there to assist us,” Touchette says.

How Generative AI Makes Work Easier

As workers familiarize themselves with their generative AI productivity tools, newer use cases will continue to emerge, Marsh says.

“Generative AI is having an impact on them already,” he says. “General tools are becoming more focused on operations because of AI. The theme that’s developing is knowledge management. Suites of productivity tools will become more vertically oriented rather than horizontal, more specialized in focus.”

NC Fusion, a soccer-focused nonprofit athletic club based in Winston-Salem, N.C., is pushing the boundaries of how generative AI tools can deliver value to a particular business function. Chris Barnhart, head of IT and data systems for NC Fusion, has been operating as a one-person marketing department thanks to Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.

“We’ve been using Microsoft marketing products for about six years,” he explains. “It’s allowed us to gather a robust database of customer information and build marketing campaigns. And I’ve been able to do it as a single person. It’s opened up a lot of opportunities for the club.”

The product now includes integration with Copilot, which Barnhart has quickly taken advantage of to create content.

“Before Copilot, writing content was labor-intensive. Now, I ask our stakeholders what they want their audience to know in the communication. They provide me with that information along with a few subtopics. From a few sentences of input, I can generate an article for their audience. Sixty minutes of work gets shrunk down to a 10-minute process.”

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How AI Improves Marketing Effectiveness

NC Fusion also takes advantage of Customer Insights’ database-building process to create a single data source to pull information together from multiple places, including the club management system, its website and other data streams. Barnhart uses Copilot to understand the data better. “It suggests questions I would not have thought of, or it points out trends I wouldn’t normally see,” he says.

Copilot uses this database to create marketing segments as well. Barnhart types the parameters of his search into Copilot, and it automatically builds the segments for him. “It creates a customer journey that meets the needs of that segment.”

While his measurements are mostly anecdotal, Barnhart estimates that NC Fusion’s email open rates were about 15 percent prior to using Copilot. Today, open rates are approximately 40 percent.

“The biggest thing for me has been the time savings,” he says. “It’s helped reduce the time I spend on marketing to about 20 percent of what it was. I don’t think NC Fusion would have had the growth we’ve seen without Customer Insights.

Editor's Note: This article was originally published on September 9, 2024 and has been recently updated.