Workplace Reimagined

Cognizant’s Intelligent Workplace Offering

Introducing Generative AI (Gen AI) into workplace productivity software will transform the nature of work. Gen AI tools, such as Microsoft 365 Copilot , will transform how workers spend their day, enabling more time to focus on innovation and thought leadership as completion of routine tasks will be simplified and accelerated by a next-generation AI Assistant. This will result in a fundamental shift in the workplace, freeing up human capital to focus on value-added activities to accelerate growth, delight customers, and envision new products and services.

The Evolution of the Digital Workplace

The digital workplace has been evolving since the mid to late 2000s when businesses started moving their data to the cloud, enabling employees to work remotely. Post the Covid-19 pandemic, hybrid work has become the new normal for many businesses and workplace technology has continued to mature so that both office and remote workers now enjoy the same workplace experience. Another component of the digital workplace transformation journey that has been enhancing the employee experience is by providing workers with next-generation tools that streamline and simplify how they do their work. This includes tools that automate manual tasks, make it easier to find the information you need in your company’s vast knowledge management repository, enable multi-channel communication and collaboration, and deliver relevant and personalized content.

With the recent release of Microsoft 365 Copilot, the digital workplace experience will continue to undergo a significant transformation, enabling businesses to truly reimagine the workplace experience, leading to higher levels of employee satisfaction, performance, and engagement. Some examples of tasks Gen AI can support in the workplace include:

• Functioning as a virtual personal assistant to help perform tasks.
• Summarizing emails to make it easier to stay on top of the large volume of emails received daily.
• Generating draft versions of presentations, emails, and other documents by synthesizing and combining content from personal and team files and corporate knowledge base.
• Transcribing meetings, providing a meeting summary, and capturing action items.
• Improving knowledge management by instantly searching personal, team, and corporate content.
• Analyzing data to identify insights and trends.
• Summarizing data from across documents, presentations, emails, calendars, notes, and contacts to help draft emails, find key dates, or even write a plan based on other project files.

?

Although Gen AI tools in the workplace are nascent today, they will quickly become mainstream, with most workplace tools expected to include Gen AI technology over the next few years.

Gen AI for the Workplace Powered by Microsoft 365 Copilot

Microsoft 365 Copilot puts the power of Gen AI into the hands of workers. At Cognizant, we believe the introduction of new workplace tools requires a careful and systematic approach to planning and adoption. Organizations need to consider several factors when adopting new workplace tools, and this is especially applicable with Microsoft 365 Copilot, where data governance and data protection are of paramount importance. Key steps on the Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption journey include:

?

• Fully understanding the capabilities of Microsoft 365 Copilot and how an organization will benefit from its use.
• Defining key use cases or scenarios to outline how various roles in an organization will use the tool. This will help to define the scope of deployment. Organizations may decide to deploy Microsoft 365 Copilot for everyone or for specific departments and roles within them.
• Conducting proof-of-concepts ahead of a full deployment to validate personas and use cases and to have the data needed to conduct a Business Value Assessment.
• Conducting an environment readiness assessment, completing any necessary changes to turn on Microsoft 365 Copilot, and procuring licenses.
• Reviewing and modifying data governance and data permissions.
• Executing a comprehensive adoption and change management plan which includes end-user training to ensure widespread adoption and usage of Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Reimagine Your Workplace Experience with Cognizant’s Intelligent Workplace Offering

To coincide with the release of Microsoft 365 Copilot, Cognizant is adding a new offering to our Digital Workplace Portfolio. Our newest offering, Intelligent Workplace, includes four new services that will enable clients to execute their transformation to an AI-powered workplace in a structured and methodical manner resulting in a successful deployment of Microsoft 365 Copilot and laying the groundwork for extensions to Microsoft 365 Copilot and the deployment of additional Gen AI capabilities and applications. Cognizant’s Intelligent Workplace includes the following services:?

Getting Started with Microsoft 365 Copilot is a workshop designed to provide you with a high-level understanding of Microsoft 365 Copilot to jumpstart your journey into the future of work in the AI-driven workplace.

6 to 8 Week Envisioning and Proof-of-Concept will provide you with an immersive experience in Microsoft 365 Copilot. We will collaborate with you to identify key personas, processes, and business scenarios that can be reimagined with Gen AI. Following envisioning, we will scope and deploy a proof-concept to provide you with firsthand exposure to Microsoft 365 Copilot to enable you to assess the business value you will realize with AI-enabled workplace technology.

Deployment includes a complete end-to-end suite of services to deploy Microsoft 365 Copilot for your organization. We collaborate with you to define key personas, processes, and business scenarios for Microsoft 365 Copilot. We assess your licensing and technical readiness as well as your data protection and governance and address any gaps. We configure Microsoft 365 Copilot for your organization. We believe changes in workplace tooling are best enabled by strong adoption and change management practices and our offering includes adoption and change management along with robust end-user communications and training.

Copilot Extensions and Cognizant Gen AI Employee Experience Accelerators enable you to extend the capabilities of Microsoft 365 Copilot by connecting your business applications to Microsoft 365 Copilot so that you can interact directly with those applications from Microsoft 365 Copilot. Connect your organization's data to Microsoft 365 Copilot to gain deeper insights. Further enhance your workplace experience with Cognizant's Gen AI Employee Experience Accelerators that harness the power of Azure OpenAI to build next-generation applications.

Conclusion

The introduction of Gen AI technology into the workplace environment will transform how we work. Although this technology is in a nascent stage today, it will quickly become mainstream. The nature of the work we do will change as tasks that humans routinely perform today can be accelerated with Gen AI freeing up time for workers to focus on innovation and other value-added tasks. Microsoft Copilot 365 and Cognizant’s Intelligent Workplace Offering enable companies to harness the power of Gen AI to truly reimagine the workplace experience.