Our First Campus Zero to AI Copilot Hero programme, run with Microsoft, took public sector teams from AI fundamentals to confidently using Copilot Chat, Microsoft 365 Copilot and their own agents, with a managed-service follow-up so the adoption stuck.
Copilot Adoption & Enablement
FDX - Train & Certify
Methodology
Practice
A wave of public sector organisations had taken on Microsoft 365 Copilot, but the licences were running ahead of the skills. Staff had heard the promises and seen the headlines, yet most had never opened Copilot Chat, were unsure where it sat in Word, Outlook or Teams, and had no idea you could build an agent of your own. In an environment where every rand of public money is scrutinised, paying for AI that nobody used was not an option. What these teams needed was a way to go from zero to genuinely capable, and to trust the tool, without cutting corners on the data and governance rules a public body has to live by.
We ran our First Campus Zero to AI Copilot Hero programme as part of a joint initiative with Microsoft. It is built as a modular, hands-on journey rather than a one-off lecture, with half of every core session spent working in the tools. Teams started on the core track, Zero to Copilot Chat Hero: the art of the possible with business-safe, grounded AI, a proper grounding in prompting through the GCSB framework, working with a human in the loop and building a first agent that follows group instructions, and a hands-on look at keeping AI use secure. Each cohort then took the focus track that fit them, getting the best out of Microsoft 365 Copilot across Word, Excel and PowerPoint, or building their own grounded agents in Copilot Studio with their own tools and triggers. We taught all of it against real public sector work, and kept the emphasis on using Copilot safely within the data and governance rules a public body has to meet. It did not end at the classroom: our AI Guy managed service stood up a Copilot community and adoption analytics, engaged and empowered champions, and ran monthly follow-ups over the months that followed.
The teams came out the other side actually using Copilot, not just licensed for it. People who had been nervous about AI were prompting, drafting and summarising with it as a matter of routine, and the enthusiasts who took to it fastest became the champions, backed by a community and analytics, who now carry adoption forward inside their own departments. With the core solid, the first grounded agents are being put to work on the repetitive, rules-heavy public service tasks that used to eat the day, and the monthly check-ins keep teams current as Copilot moves. The investment in Copilot is finally returning the productivity it promised.
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