Scottish Water uses Microsoft 365 Copilot to Boost Officer Worker Productivity
The Scottish pioneer offers an exemplar case study of the productivity transformation that enterprises can achieve through adopting workplace AI.
Water is the planet’s most precious resource. It is life. In Scotland, Scottish Water’s 4,500 people provide water and wastewater services to 2.6 million households.
In addition to field operations and the treatment works themselves, digitalisation plays a big role at Scottish Water: it helps the company to analyse the water cycle and better understand water demand.
This crucial work is often interrupted by tedious tasks that keep people from doing what they love most – delivering safe drinking water to Scotland’s homes and recycling waste water in ways that are good for the environment.
John Cairney, Head of Digital Strategy and Architecture, comments that their challenges are those common for all who work in office environments, that a high volume of meetings and labour intensive writing of documents and presentations makes sustaining high levels of productivity a challenge.
We’re able to deploy a technology that so evidently makes people’s lives easier.”
Intelligent Meetings
Andrea McCheyne, Transformation Manager, describes that Copilot is a game changer for Scottish Water, citing key benefits such as being able to easily summarize the content of Teams calls. Copilot will automatically generate a transcript so that each attendee can see what work has been assigned to them. It can also recap chat threads.
Tackling Blank Page Syndrome
Andrea also identifies another big win scenario, addressing “Blank Page Syndrome”.
When needing to create a new document or presentation such as a communication, simply getting started can often be the toughest part, when you experience a type of writers block.
Now workers can simply provide the Copilot prompt with a couple of keywords and it will generate the content for you, what Andrea describes as a sense that there is someone there supporting and inspiring you.
Boosting Productivity
Scottish Water provide an exemplar of the very simple but very powerful transformation that Copilot AI offers organizations: It makes life easier for office staff by intelligently automating the myriad of tedious and time-consuming tasks required to complete projects, freeing them to work on higher level activities that contribute far more effectively to the overall organizational productivity.
