Name: How AT&T Turned Copilot into Measurable Business Impact
Uploaded: 2026-06-24T15:30:49.144Z
Duration: 59 min 40 s
Description: How AT&T Turned Copilot into Measurable Business Impact

Transcript for "How AT&T Turned Copilot into Measurable Business Impact": Hey. Hello, all. And, we're about to get started. Wanted to welcome everyone joining us today. For many of you, it's still morning, so good morning. But, we are global today, so I'll also say good afternoon for those who are joining us, across overseas, and good evening for some of you who are also joining us even further abroad. My name is Ramona Brown. I serve as president for North America here at Prosci. I'm very excited to have the conversation today with, with our colleagues from AT and T and Microsoft, specifically about the copilot adoption of AT and T. Again, really talking more about the sustained adoption. We'll get into that here in a moment in a second. Before we kick off, though, I wanna do a little bit of housekeeping just so everyone knows what to expect. So we are recording today's session. We will actually have muted people's, phones just to kind of keep that into accordance with the recording today. We are also going to be asking for individuals to put questions into the chat. So assuming that we have time at the end of the call, we will absolutely make time for questions and making sure that we can take as many of them as possible. So just ask that you include it into the chat. And we are, gonna make the recording available to those who are, again, on the website. For anyone who's joining us live today, we'll also make the slides and things available to you as well. And so know that you will get a copy of the materials and the slides as we cover them. But let's go ahead and, and get started. Very excited to have everyone joining us today. We've got a large audience, which just hopefully speaks to the level of interest that we've got in the conversation, and, very much excited to kind of keep us, keep us moving forward. First, for those who may not be aware about who Prosci is, I wanna just spend a moment on who we are, what we do. At the heart of it, we are an organization that's built on the principle that change success really comes from adoption and getting those people on board with the changes that you're putting in place. We are the worldwide leader in change management, and what that means is we have not only helped design, the number one methodology and framework that's used for all things change management adoption. We've done so through a research backed approach. And the research has been the heart of our business for well over thirty years. That's important because it helps to speak to not just what matters for success, but what we can show gets results for change success, and that's critical for everything that we do. And that research shows up in all of our solutions. So our consulting business where we're there to do hands on support for our organizations and clients who are looking to drive adoption and deliver outcomes, our training business where we help organizations build capability, and at the individual level. So really important to understand what's the role that I play and actually having impact on that adoption outcomes. We also support our clients through subscriptions and tools. So how do we make it easier and faster and more scalable to create that level of change across your organization? And then finally, membership. This is our way of making sure that people at the individual level and at the team level can access our content, access our tools, and, honestly, access our network and expert guidance sort of at the tip of a finger, if you will. So very excited to have individuals join us, and we'll spend some more time about how you could be leveraging and working with Prosci here across the time. I also wanna give you a sense of sort of who we work with. So the beautiful thing about our methodology is that it is truly scalable across any industry and across any set of organizations from the smallest to the largest. And you'll see here on the page just some of the organizations that we work with across not just AI adoption, change management, a lot of the work we've done on digital transformation, but critical to kind of get an understanding of when we talk about our client organizations, who do we mean in that client organization subset. And, again, today, we'll hear directly from AT and T and, again, the work they did with from Copilot Microsoft. You You'll also notice that Microsoft is not only a partner, the key client of ours as well. I also want to give folks an opportunity early on before we introduce Stephanie and Patrick here to the call to make sure that you know how to connect with us directly. So across the conversation today, we wanna be really intentional in making space for how you can get in touch with us, where you might have interest, especially for those who are joining, who are going through the same questions around driving AI adoption outcomes. So just to give a sense of the polling, you'll have an opportunity to actually respond directly here in the chat. If you would like to connect with us, you can simply, type in the letter a. If you would have interest at the organizational level, but you may not be the right person for the conversation, you can indicate that with letter b. And then if there's no interest directly today, but you do wanna stay updated on what we're offering, you can indicate that with letter c. And, again, we'll also offer that at the end of the call just to make sure everyone has a chance to participate and join. Okay. So with that, I wanna go ahead and kick us off and, start off by introducing, our colleagues, again, our partners, if you will, who we'd worked very closely with across the year or so, specifically on the work that we've done to support HCC on AI adoption. I wanna do that through an introduction. Again, I mentioned I'm joining as president for North America with Prosci, but I really wanna give Stephanie and Patrick an opportunity to introduce themselves. So, Stephanie, I'll turn it over to you. Awesome. Thank you so much, Ramona. Super excited to be here. I heard we have a big crowd this morning. My name is Stephanie Harvey. I work for AT and T, a little under twenty five years now. I've worked in technology transformation since about 2011. My specific role at AT and T is focused on technology transformation strategy. So are we deploying the right technology? Is this the right time? With an emphasis on, employee change management and user experience. So, you know, having those three domains together puts me in a really unique spot to kinda see the transformation initiatives from start all the way to success. I do personally leverage ProSci within, you know, all of the the programs I, have to say grace over. So super excited to talk about how we've leveraged CoPilot. I'm not CoPilot, but, ProSci to, roll out the the Copilot, adoption within AT and T and the success that we've had. So with that being said, I think turn it over to Patrick and introduce him, my partner in crime here or partner in success. Thanks. Thanks, Stephanie. Very excited to be here. Patrick Martin. I'm a senior, customer success account manager at Microsoft. Been with the company for a little over twenty six years. I'm also, retired army. I got my start and change with what information technology infrastructure library, also Microsoft operations framework. But the one that were really captivated me was becoming a pro side change practitioner because change is about is about people changing. You know, from my military aspects of, you know, training individuals there both individually, collectively, I've seen the success that, you know, Prosci has. But, you know, the success we're gonna with the story we're gonna tell, this isn't it, you know, this is an ad car story and it's about, you know, people change. So, Ramona, thank you again for, having Stephanie, here to talk about her story. No. Thank you. I really am excited for the conversation today. I've had a chance to talk with both of you for many times prior to this, but we're super excited to sort of tell the story of how AT and T scaled Microsoft Copilot, and not just scaled it, had sustained adoption in such as a people focused way. And so that's the real heart of what we'll talk about today. I also just wanna kinda set the stage a bit in terms of why we selected to kind of zoom in on this story. AT and T, again, large organization, global organization. When you think about scale, like, what it is to do this in such a large environment, and think about, again, the opportunity to to navigate some of that complexity and challenge with that people based approach. How do you do that? I think it's one of the key questions that we know we're hearing from our clients. Also thinking about what's unique or differentiated about the people first approach that you took. And then really important is the level of outcomes. We'll talk a bit more about this about the ROI and how you all measure ROI here. But we hear that a lot from organizations who are struggling with, how they're actually. identifying, and really understanding the opportunity there from an ROI perspective and positioning that back. Just to set the stage a bit, you know, our research points to that more and more organizations are leaning in to using AI. It was three of five individuals, eighteen months ago. It's now two out of three people. That research is available to a number of our members, and we're making it widely available here in August. We also understand that Copilot is the second biggest, AI tool, if you will, from a workforce perspective. And, again, how organizations are thinking about scale is critical. One of the key questions and challenges we we see is this idea that there's a lot of money in the technology and at the project management, but not necessarily the level of return. And there's a significant level of, I'll call it, continuing challenge with how do we get people to adopt and be using this at scale. And so that's really what we wanna dig into more today and understand specifically around, what you all did with AT and T. So maybe just to kind of help us get started, Stephanie, I'd love to start with you in understanding some of the challenges going in. I think we talk about Copilot. What we often see is organizations start with a small business unit or small department and think about how to scale it from there. I'm curious because you all took a much more strategic approach in terms of how you thought about doing this again even at the beginning at scale before you really sort of launched it to an even larger, audience of nearly 18,000 people or so. But before we get too far deep, could you walk us through what some of the obstacles that you had that you got into that maybe you didn't anticipate at the beginning? Really helping us understand sort. of what the land was. Yeah. I think that's a a really smart foundational question. Ramona, one of the first things that we didn't anticipate was the fact that, helping people understand in our organization that an AI rollout could not be treated like any other tech transformation project was foundational. Even speaking from a practitioner perspective, my organization that I work in, well versed in change management culture. But even so, we saw that the introduction of, you know, Gen AI required a unique approach. And so being clear about that from the beginning, it's not a technology problem. It's a people adoption, you know, problem. And we wanted to make sure that that landed early on. The Copilot rollout for us, we were, like, clear from the very beginning. It couldn't just be a, you know, rip and replace, here's a tool, we want you to use it, but we wanted it to have a transformative result. So one of the obstacles we ran into, which you did allude to, was how do we allocate a limited amount of licenses fairly and strategically across the company? As you know, AT and T is very large and and complex. And initially, we only had 20,000, Copilot licenses. And so the immediate question for us was who gets them first. Right? So without kinda taking you guys down a windy road, you know, some of the questions we had presented to us was do you roll it out to one specific business unit, a specific persona, maybe a cross functional cohort? And what we did was we took a step back into your your comment about value. We deliberately made the decision to deploy m three sixty five Copilot to our m three sixty five power users. These are the folks that were using the m three sixty five suite daily. A lot of companies have access to that data. So we took the first 20,000 and invited them to participate in what we coined was our co pilot, pilot. That decision, I wanna be really clear, that required executive sponsorship early on. That alignment turned what could have been a potentially, like, divisive allocation into a decision that create unity and created early understanding of our strategy. So making sure our leaders were on board was key. And I wanna hit on just a third challenge, was just the compounding complexity that we face. There's a lot of change fatigue already. I think everybody on this call probably either experiences that or they see their employees going through that. The governance requirements that we ran into around, you know, fair and responsible AI use, we already had an internally approved, AI platform. So we've got employees now, you know, what tool do I use over the other? And then just layer on top of that, you know, Copilot being such a powerful tool, we real we quickly realized we had to train our employees that, you know, AI is powerful, but it's only as good as the data that's being fed into it. So we had to get them quickly skilled up on authoritative sources, which, like, we again, just this is a new territory for everybody. And, you know, I wanna turn it over to maybe Patrick. You might be able to kinda dive into some of what you saw as we were deploying Copilot. But one of the the the biggest things, guys, that we did not realize was prompt engineering, training our employees to not use Copilot as a search tool, but use it as as a companion and speak to it, like, conversational, right, and not just put these short prompts in. And so that was key. So I just wanna say before, you know, Patrick chimes in, if you're planning your AI rollout, in your change management strategy, if it looks the same as any other software deployments, that you've been a part of, you're gonna have to stop and recalibrate. That's that's my honest feedback to you all. Gen AI requires its own playbook, and this playbook has to be built before you even start, you know, your, rollout. Don't try to do this after your adoption has already stalled. So I don't Patrick, maybe if you wanted to chime in. Yeah. You know, having the pleasure of working with, you know, many different little, one pattern I've seen happen is, you know, customers roll out Copa the same way they're rolling out a new mailbox. I mean, that's light on sponsorship, there. heavy on enablement emails, and kind of adoption then flatlines somewhere in the single digits. And when we look at from a Proside lens, they're skipping straight to knowledge and ability and. ignoring that awareness and desire entirely. And that's the most obstacle teams underestimate. And so in my you know, what was different at AT and T was that executive sponsorship wasn't a nice to have thing. I missed, you know, Stephanie's team made it non negotiable on day one. And we look at Prosign's own benchmarking, it puts active and visible sponsorship as a number one contributor to change success by a wide margin. And AT and T is the cleanest proof I've seen, which I've worked on and the result was a 96.4 adoption rate among assigned users. That doesn't happen without a strong sponsor coalition before a single license provision. And then we look at the data behind that, you know, it's very striking organizations that apply a structure change management methodology see a 450% increase in technology adoption rates, not 45, 450% That is a gap between a rollout and result. AT and T closed that gap because they answered the WIFM. What's in it for me at every level of organization from the C suite down to the end user before they provision a single license. Amazing. Patrick. Patrick got want excited. the 50%. I hope. I know. You can't you can't argue with those results. Patrick, Yeah. we're gonna get you on the research team here when you when you when you're ready. I wanna dig into this point though about leadership because I think this is a big part of what we hear. And I think both of you have talked. about this idea of how important it was to get leadership buy in early on. I think many of our, your colleagues or getting peers would also say the same thing, which is how do you get sort of leadership aligned? And so if we could maybe just dig on a bit more, you know, Stephanie, what was the approach that you all took? And maybe what was unique or different about getting leadership buy in on an AI initiative here with the Copilot versus what you've done in in sort of past technology changes? Yeah. No. Thank you. So, the approach was different here from a leadership perspective because we knew that we were gonna have to have them sitting in the room with us early on. So if, you know, if I could just be transparent, some of our tech transformation projects, they don't require, early leadership, you know, buy in. We we design what the strategy is gonna look like, and then we ship it to them and, you know, get that thumbs up. But like I said earlier, we knew that the copilot deployment would be different. And so early on, we had our, former CIO, in the room with us as we were designing our plans. Like, he was literally on the call with us just like you all are today, and we put in front of him a few different options. I think we submitted four options to him, one of them being the m three sixty five power user list, and we walked him through what our approach would be. One of the things that was helpful for us is because we already had, his support on other projects, and he he trusted the way we we, maybe approach some of our decision making. But I wanna be, like, super, super clear here. When you are sitting with leaders and you have change management strategy in front of them, you you wanna be careful to not over index on the change management methodology, but rather break it down in a way that your leader understands, I e speak their language. Right? We don't wanna overwhelm them, walking them through every single step of, you know, change management. That's our role as the the practitioner. But what we did was, for this one that was different, we ran a risk assessment early on. And so we were able to sit with our leaders and say, listen. Here's our opportunity, and here's what could happen if we don't get this right. And here's how your visible support ensures we don't have these things happen. And so that risk analysis helped us to ensure, there wasn't a lot of confusion with the plans. Because he, agreed with what we were doing early on, he had our back all the way through. Right? So when other business units, you know, questioned like, hey. Why are we doing it this way? Our executive sponsors said, hey. Listen. I stamped my approval on this, and this is the plan that we're gonna hold to. We treated this engagement, this leadership buy in as a continual process, not a one time meeting, not a one time thumbs up, but ensuring that he was with us every step of the way. So I would again, the change management plans don't present those as a a methodology. Again, translate that into their language. Help them understand the risk of of doing nothing, and show them the specific outcomes that ensures your business unit is successful with your your AI investment. And you wanna make the sponsorship feel like a leadership role and not just an ask. And so that's that kinda is what activates that that coalition of sponsorship so that that leader can then take that and, you know, go talk with their peers. So that's what was kinda different, for us, Ramona, having our leadership team sitting with us as we were building the plans and allowing them to, give us some thoughts, allowing them to tweak some of our plans, right, the ownership and not just, here you go. Here's our plans. We need you to rubber stamp them. It made it completely different, and it was all based on kinda that the Prosci change management sponsorship, alignment. Love that. Love that. Anything you'd add to that, Patrick? I know you were sort of involved in some of the leadership. alignment work as well. Yeah. Thanks. Well, so Stephanie and her team built that strategy, and, you know, our job, was to help her sequence that sponsor coalition so desire could actually take hold. And there were three kind of moments or events that happened. So on April 1, we had an in person meeting in Dallas. So it was AT and T and Microsoft leadership in the same room lining on, the plan that Stephanie and her team put together. And then before, you know, a single end user heard the word Copilot, you know, the sponsors were aligned on the why, and that's add. car awareness and desire at the level it has to be at the top. And then on June 16, we had two two hour sessions on this AT And T C Suite Floor. It was a cross section of business, executives. It wasn't just IT leadership. And we talk about Prosci sponsorship model, you know, the ABCs about be active and visible. You build a coalition, communicate directly. June 16 was that coalition bill. And then as we moved into July, we had six customer immersion sessions with the business units that would receive licenses. And these leaders were able to get their hands on CoPilot or asking their teams to, and that's where we turned desire into ability. And then I guess one line I'll leave you with, executive sponsorship, preferred sender communications are two things I tell every customer they cannot delegate. I mean, getting the right message Mhmm. from the right leader at the right moment in that journey made the difference between a pilot and the result you're hearing about today. Amazing. Yeah. And can I double back on something real quick, Ramona? Yes. Because Patrick hit on something. I know a lot of times at companies, it's hard to get our executives, on board. They're either busy. Okay. They have other, you know, deliverables and tasks they're heads down on. And so, what we also were able to do was, activate our chief of staff team that reports directly to those those higher level executives. So if we weren't able to get access to a particular leader, we had the ear of their their chief of staff team. So I would give that to you all as, like, another nugget. You're having a hard time interacting with executives. It's not a situation where you can send them an email or walk into a room with them. Start to build relationships with their their kinda second in command, if you will. You get their ear, and that helps you to then weave that narrative up to that executive, and we found that to be helpful as well. So just wanted to add that. No. That's excellent. Excellent. I think there's a number of things in that. I mean, if we think about it, one, you all recognize the value early on of leadership buy in. Could not agree. more talked about this, but the research indicates that's the number one indicator of success rate, that level of active visible sponsorship, what it is to be a good sponsor. To your point, Stephanie, it's about teaching them the arc, if you will, of change management, but. it is helping them understand the why and the risk of not getting it right. And this is where the things like the ProSight tools, like our risk assessment do come into play. It's it's enabler to have that conversation at the right level. I wanna. maybe shift gears a bit from, you know, maybe where you started with the strategy and the leadership alignment and getting more into now the execution. Because I think when people think a people first approach, they automatically think that's hard to scale. Right? Like, that kind of breaks if you, you know, when we think about how we operationalize that. And so I'd love. to get and just hear a little bit more from you all. When you think about what you did next to operationalize this, methodology, to operationalize and kind of bring this into the to the pilot environment. How did you do that? What was the way that you got into this, what I call, high touch, way that you can structure that with really structured engagement, but really dig into and walk us through a bit more about how you operationalize the pro side methodology at Yeah. I'm gonna need about an hour, to explain all this. scale. But I'll try to stay within our you know, the talk track here. So, you know, at the highest level, operationalizing Prosci at enterprise scale meant turning theory into a coordinated company wide program. We had to think about everybody at the company and not work from this siloed approach. And it's easy for you know, especially if you sit in a technology space, It's easy to look at things from a technology lens and not look out broad across the enterprise. We built everything around the ADKAR, model to Patrick's earlier comments. So, you know, awareness, desire, that's the what's in it for me regardless of where I am in the business, that knowledge of how to do your job differently with a new tool, ability to actually, you know, execute those behaviors we're looking for, and then, obviously, you know, reinforcement. We guided thousands of employees from awareness to to reinforcement, and, we applied the Prosci methodology to keep our leadership, our resources, our strategy, and our alignment in sync all the way through. Now I know you guys are probably like, what, you know, what does that even mean? But every sing every single thing that we did, right, we pulled out our change management playbook. So all of our decisions had to be grounded. And if any if anytime we wanted to maybe circumvent our change management process, right, we had to have an executive kind of readout as to why we were moving away from our change management process and doing something different. So this wasn't just like we're pulling stuff out, you know, as we see fit, but it was guided, and we always had the the container around this rollout. The, the localized approach is something that I wanna make sure you guys walk away with. So, in addition to our change management plans, we conducted a detailed persona mapping exercise, early on so we can understand how different teams would actually use Copilot across the business. That was a very in-depth activity, but that helped us to anticipate where there would be friction, where there would be resistance, where there was already employees that were skilled up. That allowed us to tailor our communications and our support accordingly. Some roles needed more hands on. Others, like, they were ready to go, and they didn't need to hear us talking to them constantly. So that allowed us to kinda be a little bit more nimble in our approach. The other thing is just, managing engagement at scale. To your point, Ramona, you know, those high touch, deep touch tactics. So lots of live training. I think we hosted over 200 some odd live training, courses, and those are broken down from beginning prompt engineering, advanced prompt engineering, how to use Copilot across the m three sixty five apps. We had a Veeva engaged community, so all of our Copilot users were added to a Veeva engaged community, where they could interact with, Sneeze. We had office hours, like I said, tiered support. And one of the other things that helped us was us partnering with our learning and development, organization. They had built a network of AI ambassadors across the business units. These folks were enthusiastic, early adopters and or SMEs within their organization. They really proved to be, resourceful in this rollout because we were feeding information to them. They were taking it back to their business unit, vice versa. They were giving us information, and we were responding to that. One other thing I wanna share with you guys is we monitor usage real time, right, so that we could course correct quickly. So we didn't wait till we got to the end and, like, oh, no. You know, what happened? We were monitoring, our data on a daily basis. So just the takeaway here, guys, if I was just like, what's the the moment for for me, the persona mapping for us wasn't just a UX exercise. It was a change management tool that we leveraged. And if you don't know how different groups are going to experience the change of you rolling out, you know, an AI tool, your communications, your training, they will miss the very people that need them the most. So make sure you've got those personas mapped early on so that you can build that plan based off of your your business and the structure and the and the people that that need the the communications the most. So, again, don't do a one size all approach is what we would recommend. Did that answer your question, Yeah. Ramona? Because, I mean, I can get into specific details, but I'm just trying to keep it, like, at the highest, level. Right? that is incredibly helpful. And I do feel like when we think about, the people based approach, I think to your point, there's a hands on element, to it, Stephanie, where you are doing a lot of hosting online training. But there was a great point that you made earlier about the persona mapping. Right? That's also, again, part of the based approach. Who are the people who need more hands on support for just where the people who are ready to go? And you talked about building that network, that network of champions, leveraging the L and D team again, critical to what we would call part of the change the. change. agent as well. Patrick, anything that you'd add to that in terms. of, against When you look at operationalizing, you know, Prosci, you know, at scale that, you know, I I think if, you know, for every person on this call should take, you know, to hear is the methodology is the asset, not the tool. AT and. T didn't win because they picked Copilot. They won because they applied Prosci's framework rigorously. And that same framework, it would carry the, whether the tool was Copilot, Gemini, Grot, ChatGPT, whatever flavor shows up next quarter. I mean, it matters because, as we know, AI is moving faster than any tech way most of us have lived through. If your adoption playbook is wedded to a specific platform, you're gonna rebuild that every eighteen months. And but but if it's wedded to a methodology, add car for an individual, PCT for the project, it compounds. And and so ATT's investment pro side over multiples years exactly why when this rollout was read that was already on track before Copilot showed up. The methodology is the moat and I can tell you why Microsoft chose Prosci specifically and it wasn't a branding decision was a global adoption recognition because Prosci is a research backed methodology, proven ability to scale across the world's largest enterprises. And over more than a decade, Microsoft's partnership with Prosci certified over 10,000 change practitioners at Microsoft and educated more than 25,000 in customers and change management. So that's how you you'll operationalize the the methodology. Yes. And you put it you put it in your email signature because that's how I was initially introduced to Prosci. Like, what's this, like, signature, you know, this that circle that you all have and went and looked it up and it's been, you know, life changing ever since. So for sure. Thank you, Microsoft. Thank you for the words life changing. I just wanna go ahead. and also remind folks. There's a lot of goal that's being shared, already in terms of some of the ideas here, the persona mapping, the work that we could help with. For those who are interested, again, if you enter into the chat, a, this is how you get in touch or remember the pro site team will reach out to you directly. A lot of these tools and resources are designed to scale. So even if you're not as large and global as a Microsoft, again, a small organization, big organizations are extremely impactful. So thank you, Stephanie and Patrick, for for walking us through that. Because, again, I guess one of the questions we tend to get consistently, how does people approach. and scale, when we get to operationalizing it? If I think about sort of maybe shifting gears a bit in terms of moving out of, I'll call the pilot phase and really thinking about how you start to then drive engagement as you're continuing to get past that launch period. What we often find that there's a lot of effort, energy investment that starts here. It starts to peter out, and then post launch, it. really starts to take a bit of a dive. And so when we talk about adoption, it's not just in that first, you know, twenty, thirty day window. It's sustained adoption. It's how that continues well beyond that initial launch period. And so can you walk us through sort of what you did to keep employees engaged throughout the the rollout, not just at launch, but sort of how you did that across across time? Yeah. Really good question. So just to be clear, we started with our 20,000, licensed users as a pilot, and then we eventually were able to scale and add an additional 40,000 users. So I'm gonna talk a little bit more so about the the original 20 k. Right? It came down to managing expectations. And so because we had a fraction of employees who got access initially, we wanted to tackle the, you know, quote, unquote, fear of missing out head on. So from day one and I'm sharing this with you guys on purpose because we we saw a shift in how we kinda manage this. From day one, we communicated directly with everybody, including those that were not going to be in the pilot. Now there were some some thoughts, right, that just don't communicate with the ones that aren't in the pilot. Like, they don't need to hear anything. And so we were able to challenge that thought, right, leveraging kinda like the change management practice. And, like, if we leave any persona out, it's gonna create a level of resistance. It's gonna be hard to overcome. Right? So what we did was, Ramona, we communicated directly with those that weren't going to be in the pilot. We said, hey. Listen. We got this pilot going on. It's going to be an exciting journey. Not everyone's gonna have the tool day one, but we still need your support while we gather results. That honest framing with, our employees helped the people who did not have initial access. It helped them to not disengage. And, actually, some of our non licensed users were the ones championing the change the most. They had ideas. They were sharing their ideas with folks that had a Copilot license, so it didn't, you know, become this he has, she has, I don't, you know, scenario. From our our pilot users, we kept them actively engaged, rather than assuming, to your point, the launch was the big event. Right? So it goes back to the interactive training. I mean, we were posting training tips, tricks, all like, we were talking to them more than I probably ever talked to employees at AT and T, but it was needed because this is different. One of the things that we heard our employees say was, like, I feel like GenAI is going to replace my job. And so we saw employees kind of, you know, resisting just a little bit early on. And so in actually talking to them, I e not just deploying it and walking away and saying like we're done, but being with them throughout their their journey as they were, accelerating and maturing. We were watching the the natural sentiment. And part of what we were able to share with them is, you know, we don't know where the industry is gonna go with AI, but what we can say right now is employees who have gotten skilled up in leveraging Copilot and other AI tools, they're gonna be more, marketable than those who decide not to. We saw an uptick in folks attending training after we shared that feedback. Right? The other thing we did was, we held firm on our policy that nobody could bypass the process that we had put in place. And so we had a structured, it was actually an automated process that was looking at all of our users and their m three sixty five usage, and that's how they got on the list of obtained Copilot. We had a structure in place where you couldn't reach out and phone a friend to get a license. And so that helped the credibility of the program. So when people were at it, they were like, oh my god. Thank you. Like, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And they were ready to be engaged with us versus like, okay. I got another tool. Right? So that helped us. So I think, you know, if I was to give you guys a takeaway, the highest engagement risk is isn't the people who have the tool. It's the ones who are waiting on you to deploy the tool to them. Make sure you keep them engaged. If you don't communicate with them early and, honestly, they become your resistance, bring them along in the journey, and make sure once they get there, you're ready for them, whether it be a community where they can go get support, sneeze that you have already trained up, training, active engagement. Be ready, and be ready to provide actual technology support as well. So when Copilot's not showing up in word for them, somebody's gotta get to them quickly. You can't let that sit for a week. Right? You guys you gotta be ready. You gotta have a team, that that's ready and available, for the duration of the rollout. So I that's kinda my takeaway on how we leveraged and kept folks engaged. They're a little too engaged. I'll get I'm like, I I guys, it's like a 100 I'm just high. You know, but that I'd rather people reach out, right, than to, you know, sit quietly and and struggle, by themselves. So. And I think that's fascinating. One of the things that we thought was a really unique practice that you all did really well to your point earlier, Stephanie, is that you were including those who had the latest and those who didn't, recognizing. the value and how early and often that communication needs to happen to continue that engagement, making sure those people don't become the resistance, if you will, in the work that you're. doing. Can we agree more? Patrick, anything that you'd you'd add to that? Yeah. I I think there were there were two practices that made the difference and both are, you know, the are in ADKAR reinforcement. I think that this step a lot of organizations chronically under invest in. I'm at first when we had that first six week rollout Stephanie mentioned, we didn't, you know, rely just on email campaigns alone. Mhmm. I mean, we also had to be engaged. AT and T employees also joined Microsoft sponsored prompt a thons that we're. holding. These are customer, you know, in Dallas, St. Louis, Atlanta, and this gave them hands on practice and help move that change from awareness into ability. And then, you know, after the May 5 launch, you know, Microsoft, you know, along you know, ATP led a six week training initiative, which was done by Dope Moore, our CoPilot Cloud Solution Architect. And he was delivering targeted sessions across Copilot workloads to more than 2,700 AT and T employees. And we also reinforce that mindset through resources like the great Copilot journey because copilot adoption is exactly that. It's a journey. It's not a launch. And secondly, this is where I get the most questions. AT and T that Stephanie mentioned before treated licenses earned not entitled. If a user wasn't engaging with Copilot, that license moved to the next person in line. That's why we're looking telemetry all the time. There was no drama, no committee, single policy, did more for sustained adoption than any other communications campaign because it made reinforcement structural instead of aspirational, and then the accountability was the change management. Fantastic. Fantastic. I wanna maybe shift, one more time here, team, to kind of talking about, I'll call it, some of the things that you've, learned now that you've gotten further into sort of post launch period and really thinking about, again, coming back to sustained adoption and ROI again, because I think that's one of the questions we get quite often. This was something you took from, you know, hundreds of users to thousands, 18 plus active users in a six week period. And this idea of that that $6,000,000 estimated in monthly business value, which is phenomenal. I just wanna dig into this a little bit, a bit more. So maybe just starting off, it's actually talking about what it looked like to keep that adoption from stalling again, truly continuing when you really took this to the next level with that that broader usage or a broader base. And then maybe it's taking a bit more time, specifically on the ROI, which I'll I'll come back to here in a second. Yeah. That's fair. So as far as adoption and stalling, we didn't let that happen. That that was, like, we knew that that was something we would have to have our hands on. We made adoption intentionally everyone's responsibility, not just the change team. And a lot of times within organizations, everybody's looking at the, you know, the UX team or the change team. It was everyone's responsibility, and we were we told our our copilot users, hey. Listen. This is transformative for AT and T. We need to be in a good position to tell our leadership, you know, the story of transformation. You are part of that story. I can make up narratives and PowerPoint slides all day. Right? But it's gotta be grounded in your actual activity. So when we come to you and we ask you for feedback, when we invite you to our focus groups, when we ask you to take surveys, we need you all to participate. We didn't just give you, you know, copilot for you to sit and tinker with it. We need you to actively use it. We need you to participate in, you know, our our feedback loops. And we made that, you know, kind of a a unspoken condition of, you know, their their role in the pilot. To go back to what Patrick, was talking about, yes. We did have a reclamation process. That was a policy that was bold, and we were initially kind of standoffish. Like, we don't know how that's gonna be perceived, right, to give somebody a license and then potentially take it back from them. But you know what? We stood our ground, and it helped in the reinforcement space. So we told users at the onset, right, you're gonna get a Copilot license. It's yours to keep. If we see because, again, we're monitoring usage, not big brother monitoring. We're not, you know, trying to get all up in people's business. But we can see if a user has actually used Copilot. So we told them, if we don't see usage within thirty days, right, there's thirty days of inactivity, we're gonna reach out to you and try to understand why you're not using Copilot. Maybe you were on leave. Maybe you're on a project that was heads down and you kinda forgot that you had the license, but we're gonna reach out. Gonna give you about fifteen days to sort yourself out. And if after those fifteen days, we still don't see usage, that's forty five days of non usage. We will reclaim your license, and it will go to the next person on the waiting list. Right? So, again, that helps to keep that momentum. So folks, like, actively on the keyboard, I gotta use Copilot to do something because I don't want them to take it away from me. The other thing I think, you know, maybe I could hit on is, to Patrick's point, monitoring usage daily, the, the Microsoft data that we had, the surveys, that get that grounded us in what our users were actually doing and where we needed to go and provide some additional reinforcement and support. So we're not just deploying and sitting back waiting and, you know, watching. We're looking at every day we got on a call and we're pulling up our metrics. Where do we see dips? Where do we need to go and support a certain business unit? Do we need to reach out to our supervisors? Right? Loop them in like, hey, Supes. We need you guys to make sure your employees are doing x with Copilot. Right? All those things help to ensure, because we were talking to all the various personas, we mapped early on, right, executives, supervisors, mid level managers, the actual copilot users, because we were engaging with those personas the entire time. Ramona, the the adoption, it didn't stall. We saw it continue to climb. Our highest was 96, you know, whatever percent. And somebody put it in the the chat here, how are we measuring adoption, or what does that mean? Adoption is active usage, within Copilot. So if a user does, you know, at least one thing within Copilot in our our thirty days that we're looking at, that is adoption. Now I can say we're seeing our users. It's not just like a one time, you know, in Copilot. We're seeing sustained behaviors. So they're using Copilot across the m three sixty five suite, but that's how we're measuring it to answer that question. It's active usage within, Copilot. Did that answer your question about kinda sustaining It momentum did. beyond the the rollout? No. Okay. It did. And I love this idea to your point about, you know, the reclaiming because in some ways, you're essentially reinforcing shared accountability. Like, yes, we might be the ones taking the lead, but you have a part to play in this, and this is sort of how we get to. outcomes. Patrick, anything that you you'd add to that? You know, not much. I just probably one sentence. I meant AT and T treated this as a a people transformation and, you know, not a technology deployment and you know, Steph, you know, without we were, you know, having three or four calls a week Stephanie. during this and looking at all the usage and so forth. So when you, you know, have that, you know, active use we're looking at, that's where you can really drive, have that reinforcement has teeth. And that's why, you know, it's kept climbing when why we reach, you know, 96, you know, point, you know, four, you know, percent. So yeah. It's like amazing. Alright. I wanna ask one more question, and then we'll, we if we have time here to open it up to the to the our products who've added questions to the chat. And this is digging in on the ROI. I think a lot of organizations are putting their toe in the water and really struggle with how to measure the ROI. And so given the success that you had, you know, how did you tell that ROI story to your leadership team? What are those results make possible? You know, we talked about that number. What what do they make possible for you going forward? Because I imagine that's a big part of the the driver. Oh, yeah. So ROI. I'll tell you guys a little story. So, providing, you know, that ROI story is something that was new for us, and it required a different level of honesty with our leadership. So, you know, when you invest in an AI tool, you know, your company has invested likely millions of dollars. Right? So they're like, hey. We we gave you this money. Now you need to tell us a story on how this what the investment is. This was a very unique, turn of events in my career. I had the unique opportunity to boldly, walk into, you know, my leader's office, and I told him directly, we we won't have an ROI number for you overnight. This is a new tool, and we need to give our employees time. They need runway to get skilled up. Guys, we're not deploying a new mailbox. This isn't like we're moving to OneDrive. Right? This this is new. And so please give our employees time. Let us train them. Let us get them over that curiosity, get to where they can really see themselves leveraging. Let us help them. That expectation setting was it was uncomfortable ish. Right? Who walks into their leader's office and say, I actually won't have that. But what it did setting that expectation was intentional, and it gave us the space to gather real data without, being pressured to, like, manufacture results before we even had any. Right? And that was key for us. So over, you know, a course of, I'd say, maybe two to three months, because we we told them, like, give us three months, and that's super aggressive aggressive with a new tool. But give us three months, not six, not nine, not one. Give us three. So over the course of those three months, we ran surveys. And, again, remember I told you guys, part of you getting a Copilot license was you had to respond to our surveys. So we got good take rates on our surveys. We did focus groups across the business units, And we asked our employees to honestly estimate where they saw Copilot saving them time productivity wise. Right? We didn't wanna guesstimate. We didn't like, what I do at AT and T is different than what somebody else might do, so we didn't wanna lump everybody into this narrative. We asked them. They responded. Hey. Copilot is saving me x amount of time per day and per week. We took all that data, and we had a lot of really smart data analysis. We took all that data. We leveraged, AT and T's own internal way of kinda cost models and calculating realistic dollar impacts, cross referenced that with the actual usage data we were seeing in the Microsoft dashboard so that our theory our story was grounded in behavior, not just perception. We were able to present that to our executives, and we didn't just have a number that we walked in. We walked in and we were able to tell them exactly how we got to that number, where it was coming from, and it was coming from our employees. Right? And so because we were able to articulate how we got to that number and we were conservative, we didn't walk in with some grandiose number. I told them, guys, like, this has got to be conservative or we're gonna get laughed out of the room. So we walked in with a conservative number. What we saw, we even truncated it down some, like, we gotta bring it down some more. When we got to a number we felt confident with and so, Ramona, to answer your question, the the conversation we had with our our leadership team was so significant that it paved the way for the expansion of the program to obtain the additional 40,000 licenses. That's a big number. So AT and T is now sitting at 60,000 copilot licenses, more resources. I would tell I would say to the folks on the call, don't wait till you have, like, this perfect ROI story because you're never gonna have it. Right? Set honest expectations with them early. Just like I said, measure rigorously. Right? Do not sleep on the measuring. And then present that methodology, how you got to that number alongside with that number because leaders trust you if they can understand how you got there far more than they, you know, trust some big number without an actual story behind it. So that's where we're at, and now we're on a journey to, you know, what's next with, you know, Copilot and some of the things that Microsoft is doing, and we feel super confident. Right? We've got a playbook, and we are repeating this change management playbook. So Microsoft, you can deploy yet another feature of, you know, Copilot and take it to another level. We're ready. We'll we'll use that same playbook, tweak it a little bit, and we go. So this has been transformative for us, internally. Incredible. Incredible. I love how your leverage one, how you created the ROI story, but also how you are leveraging that to really continue to fund and continue to move forward and advance it even bigger than where you started. Patrick, anything that you add to that in terms of a new we'll see on. Yeah. Yeah. Just to, you know, build on what Stephanie said, I mean, that ROI story works because a methodology gave it a spine. So, you know, the employee voice validated by dashboard data, you know, framed by, you know, the ProSci Informed risk model that, you know, executives already trusted, that story that's a story leaders can sponsor. So and the partnership is what makes it repeatable. I mean, you know, we brought the knowledge and ability delivered through our Microsoft Unified enhanced designated engineering resources and the AT and T owned awareness and desire and inside their culture. And Prosci, you know, held the methodology, that connected it to, you know, so the triangles. We look at Microsoft, AT and T, and Prosci as a model. I encourage every organization in this call to take away. The tool will keep changing. The methodology is what will compound, and this isn't a new bat. I mean, the reason why, you know, the ATT stories is repeatable because the infrastructure behind it has been built, tested, and refined across, you know, thousands, you know, of engagements. So but, yeah. Significant. Thank you so much. I really do wanna maybe just take a moment to to to highlight again for folks who have heard some of this. We've talked a lot today about the different tools, resources, and things that are available. I just wanna remind folks of the way that we think about getting Prosci support and help is to indicate an indicator in the chat here around the poll. So if you'd like to get some support or have someone from Prosci reach out and talk more about this, we help organizations with creating that ROI story. So this is a place that you're getting stuck. This is absolutely a place that we can continue to support you. So, again, add a into the chat, b for those who, again, are interested, maybe not with the right person, but wanna make sure to direct us to the right folks, and see for those who just wanna kinda continue to be updated. We are gonna take some questions from the audience. But before we do that, I also just wanna say a huge thank you to Stephanie and Patrick for joining and not just taking the, a call and taking us through the journey and the story, but also talking to us, I think, so authentically about what that experience was, what the challenges were, and how they really put that people based approach at the heart of it. But let's maybe take a moment to take some questions from the audience. I know there's been a lot of things firing away in the chat. I wanna make sure that we have a chance to kinda go through some of those. So if you think about this and, Stephanie, Patrick, I'll I'll, frame the question. And if there's anything else that you wanna add, by all means, please do so. I think one question that's coming in is we're seeing the public resistance around AI. Did you experience employee resistance and negative attitudes, and how did you address that? So again, I think it's a common refrain, if you will, from folks around resistance. We're curious about some of the ways that you would, share more on that. Yeah. We saw minimal, resistance. One of the areas where we saw folks kinda you know, some chatter was just the the, usage of AI in the data centers, and it's kinda drain on, you know, our our local kinda, you know, you know, water all all that good stuff. Right? And so, we had to be careful because us deploying Copilot, we're not in a position to directly speak on behalf of the company to our employees about what AT and T says about, you know, AI. So we pointed them directly to the the company's kinda stance on AI. But what we did was we pointed back to their supervisors, and we gave the supervisors this insight, like, hey. Your employees are reaching out to us about these things. How do you wanna navigate that that store? And we put it back in our hands, and we gave the supervisors some talk tracks that we came up with on maybe how to resolve some of that with their employees. So I would say with, you know, change management, you gotta be careful as a practitioner. You to take you shouldn't take on every message. Everything is not yours to solve. Make sure you've got your personas identified early on, and we decided this is a supervisor conversation. In pockets where we saw business units, maybe there was a lot of, you know, nonuses of Copilot. We took it up to that next, level, and we we spoke with their business unit leaders to understand kinda what was going on there, and we put it in their hands. Right? So but we did see some resistance. And, again, we we handled that at the supervisor level. Let me see. Maybe another question, and again, I'll frame it sort of in terms of how it's it's captured here, which is how are you approaching capability building beyond training? So we hear this idea of, you know, helping employees develop the right mindset, this a higher degree of confidence, especially when you think about other way work changes. And so curious about sort of how you are thinking about it beyond the the current training approach. Yeah. I think that's a a really good question. So one, foundational training. Two, we've got employees that use AI solutions outside of work, so they're already skilled up. Right? So not being tone deaf, but ensuring we've got, you know, training resources for those that are already kinda more intermediate and or advanced. The other thing that, you know, we did was we we told our employees, you know, not only do we have internally, you know, curated content, but we gave them some places where they could go look externally to AT and T to get, you know, training on, you know, Copilot, which we found to be helpful, to kinda bolt on. And we pointed them directly to Microsoft, which was helpful to us because we can't like, Microsoft is already it's their tool. They've created the training. So it's like, listen. We'll supply you with the foundational. Here's how we're training within AT and T. And if you want more than what we're able to give you, Microsoft has a whole, you know, suite of, you know, training, resources. We also have our l and d team, like I mentioned internally at AT and T. So they're responsible for helping employees get skilled up within AI. One of the things we did differently, Ramona, was partner with them. We. haven't always partnered with them on rollouts. Right? So being in lockstep with them in the AI strategy and how they're skilling up employees, not just with Copilot, but there's other there's other AI tools within AT and T. So what's the strategy? And making sure employees are funneled that way as well. And, again, not taking on, like, we are the voice of all things AI within AT and T and leveraging the relationships we have, you know, not only externally but across the company. That has helped us tremendously, and we now have employees coming back to us saying like, hey. I want more. Where do I go get more? We are able to confidently point them to that that does that answer the question at all? No. I hope so. great. If absolutely. does. It it funny, it actually answers one of the other questions, which was how you did that level of coordination with the talent development team in terms of, really supporting and all things could play in the rollout. Maybe just to, think about that a bit more, which is when we hear from organizations, hey. You know, we've got a level of AI rolling out. Different changes are also coming out. What when when is it too late? I think this question of how is it too late? We've got some people who are using it, some people who aren't. It's informal in some places. We don't really have a formal program. Do you have any recommendations for organizations that have already started, but maybe don't have a formal model in place? I would recommend them getting a formal model in place. No. That's that's a good question. Give me give me twenty seconds. I think the best thing that you can do is understand your personas across your business. That's table stakes. The other thing that you can do is take a look at your communications. Who and when you're communicating to is very is key. I would recommend that, you know, organizations pull back from thinking just because I sent communications out to folks, my job is done. Right? There's other ways that you're gonna have to get your hands, like, in the business, and it's not an email. It it really isn't. The a lot of employees don't even read the emails that are sent to them. So I would encourage you to find out where your employees get their information. That's where you wanna get in front of them. Try to find somebody within your, you know, your organization that has the ear of a senior leader at your company. So instead of trying to boil the ocean and go get all these leaders on board, find one leader. If you can find one, and it's not necessarily going directly to that leader. Like I said, their admin, their chief of staff, like, find a way. If you can find one, I mean, that'll open up the floodgates for you to then, you know, go in and kind of influence, you know, other leaders. And I guess the last thing is, you know, making sure you understand how to train your employees and where they are in their AI journey. So having something for the novices and having something for those that are already well on their way, that that's gonna be key, as well. Excellent. I so appreciate, truly both of you coming in and sharing so much of what you've learned. I'll call it the lessons learned, the insights, maybe the things that don't make the formal, the case study, if you will, but are critically important, if you will, to getting the work done. It is an amazing success story, but I think more importantly, it really does speak to the power of having that people first approach. And the fact that you can take an ADKAR model into an AI adoption, sort of this idea of, hey. Does that still work with something like an emerging, always changing solution like AI? The answer is yes. And seeing how you've done it and operationalize at scale is incredible. So thank you, Stephanie and Patrick, for joining us today. I also wanna thank everyone who joined us live. I know there's a lot of, activity in the chat, and so we're thrilled to have such a global audience with us. Again, we appreciate the time, and we will share the materials for those who are able to join. Have a great rest of the day. Thank you all. Thank you. Bye. Goodbye.