Case Study: GHD sees productivity spike

GHD has reported individual time-savings across its workforce of between 60 to 30 minutes per day, leading to the creation of new opportunities from time saved for its people. 

Paul Murphy, chief information officer at GHD told Digital Nation the global design, engineering and environmental services company has now teed up Copilot for Microsoft 365 tool for a variety of business verticals.

“We’re looking at AI with the view that we've got AI for personal productivity, AI for enterprise productivity, client value generation and enterprise value generation and the fifth one is protection from threats. 

“So for us, this was an opportunity for us to test out AI for personal productivity,” Murphy said. 

He added GHD took the opportunity to join the Copilot for Microsoft 365 (M365) Early Access Program (EAP) to search for the potential “creation of new opportunities with time for our people” as well as be an earlier adopter of the technology. 

“We wanted to change the culture and mindset of our organisation. We wanted to be seen in the industry but also seen by our people as an organisation that's willing and able to give something new a go.

“Historically, a lot of engineering and professional services firms would be regarded as relatively slow to move with respect to technology. And we're certainly seeking to shift that, um, perspective about our organisation.” 

Murphy said the tool has helped with automating standard tasks. 

“Looking at Copilot itself for us, we're looking at it as a human-like assistant for our people and it's a personal assistant. 

“It integrates nicely with the Microsoft 365 environment, Teams, Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint and it provides the ability to query all of the artifacts and known knowledge that sits in those environments.”

Murphy added “one of the greatest features” the team noted was “around Microsoft Teams meeting summarisation”. 

The capability can summarise meeting, covering who spoke, convey tone and intention plus require less people to join a call, according to Murphy. 

“Those sorts of things create the opportunity for people to spend less time processing information and more time being present in the meetings themselves.”

GHD staff now have more opportunity to work on more important tasks, added Murphy. 

“On average, each of the participants in our early access program has probably been able to achieve a productivity gain of around 10 hours a month through using the Microsoft 365 copilot tools.

“That comes in the form of faster generation of content, moving from a blank sheet of paper to something that is 50 60 or 70 percent workable in a very short period. 

“We're finding on the whole that that ability to go from white sheet to something of value is that is the significant change with M365 Copilot.”

He said while the technology is still new it does “get people moving faster” and “this is the hypothesis that we're continuing to test.” 

“We believe will then creates opportunities for people to reinvest that time and spend that time on other valuating opportunities and processes.”

Murphy explained staff can “get moving faster on a couple of key tasks” with team now investing “in the ability to generate reports and ability to generate written submissions” such as tenders or quote requests. 

With around 300 licenses deployed, Murphy said it's important the company has a full range of users, from new starters to executive members.

“On average about 85 to 90 percent of our original participants entered the program very quickly and started consuming Copilot 365 services. We did find that there was probably a 10 to 15 percent of the group didn't start consuming the licenses in the way that we had expected. 

“For us, that was a really interesting point. 

“It was a great opportunity for us to go back to that 10 or 15 percent cohort and start to understand was there a particular reason that they didn't use the services when it was activated, was there a learning gap? Was there a fear? Was there simply not a use case that the individuals were thinking about?”. 

Murphy said “it sounds a little bit unusual, but in fact, our greatest learning came from the people that didn't use it in the way that we otherwise expected.”

“There's been a lot of commentary previously that some of this is generational. Interestingly, those, that cohort of people that didn't initially start using Copilot, that wasn't generationally related.”

Murphy said the main goal is to demonstrate the benefits and its next steps is to upgrade and increase the scale out the program. 

“The second thing that we're now working on is how do we connect more with our customers and their needs and their challenges and how do we use AI to solve the challenges that they have that previously may not have been able to solve, be solved? 

“The things that we're thinking about there are opportunities around climate change, opportunities to be able to be more efficient with building and infrastructure design and operations and those things being more efficient with energy.

“That's obviously where we want to want to start spending our time and effort over the coming months and years.”