Exercise - Stage a phased pilot rollout group

  • 12 minutes

With tenant readiness confirmed and the oversharing risk closed, you're ready to stage the first phase of Relecloud's Copilot rollout.

Important

Prerequisites for this exercise:

  • A Microsoft 365 E5 (or E7/Frontier Suite) tenant with AI Administrator access.
  • A Microsoft Entra security group you can use (or create) to represent the pilot cohort.

This exercise builds on the readiness and remediation work from the previous two exercises—complete those first if you're working through the module in order.

Task 1: Stage the pilot rollout group

  1. Sign in to the Microsoft Entra admin center at entra.microsoft.com, go to Identity > Groups > All groups, and create (or open) a security group named Copilot Pilot – Wave 1.
  2. Add a small, deliberately cross-functional set of test users to the group—early adopters across a few different business functions, not just one department, so the pilot's feedback reflects more than a single team's usage pattern.
  3. In the Microsoft 365 admin center, assign Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses to this group (directly, or via group-based licensing if your tenant supports it).
  4. Confirm the group's members now show as licensed in Users > Active users.

Task 2: Identify the readiness signals to validate before expanding

  1. List the specific signals you'd check before moving from pilot to expand—for example: the Readiness Report showing no remaining update-channel gaps for the pilot group, the usage report showing genuine adoption (not just license assignment) among pilot members, structured feedback collected from pilot champions, and confirmation that the oversharing remediation from the previous exercise is still in force.
  2. For each signal, note where you'd check it (Readiness Report, usage reports, Viva Insights Copilot Dashboard, or a manual confirmation of the remediation steps) and what result would tell you it's safe to expand.
  3. Reflect: staging the pilot group is the easy part. The harder discipline is refusing to expand until every one of these signals—tenant readiness, data readiness, and real pilot adoption—actually confirms it, not just because the pilot ran without incident.

You've now staged Relecloud's first Copilot pilot wave and identified the exact readiness signals you'd validate before expanding it—closing the loop on tenant readiness, data readiness, and phased rollout as three separate gates that all need to hold.