Describe the people first strategy
As IT professionals, Business Leaders, User experience (UX), User enablement or Adoption Managers, we must adapt to the rise of generative AI services like Microsoft 365 Copilot. While these innovations are transformative, the focus should be on people and adopting a People First strategy.
The impact of these products on you and your organization depends not just on the product itself, but on how well the business users can incorporate these capabilities into their everyday work. Business users must have a personal discovery, known as an "aha moment", with these capabilities, discovering their value and seeing them as a worthwhile investment of time and attention. Our role as technology and user enablement leaders is to help business users realize that revelation with intention, compassion, and skill.
When introducing Microsoft 365 Copilot and generative AI, the approach goes beyond traditional methods like campaigns and success stories to build a relationship between users and the technology. This strategy focuses on fostering a relationship between business users and their Copilot experience, rather than just teaching them to use a new feature. It's essential to shift our focus from solely tracking usage statistics of our solutions to prioritizing user experience satisfaction. Our goal is to use our organization's innovation and connections to ensure meaningful benefits for everyone, regardless of the company size. The key to transforming into an AI-powered company and shifting our culture is to meet our users' needs by enhancing their creativity, productivity, and skills.
To successfully navigate this and prepare for the future evolution of these experiences, we must embrace a People First strategy and three of the key principles within its framework:
- Human connection can't be replaced. It's essential to successfully implement technology in your organization, and especially generative AI experience.
A community of practice for your business users is an essential resource to help them grow more confident, skilled, and experienced with these tools. You can create this community with our help, or by building upon an existing one, but ensuring that there's a central hub for this learning should be a key part of your strategy. - Community leaders will make or break your organizations’ successful navigation of the journey to becoming AI powered.
Your community needs leaders who have skills and training in both technology and driving change. They also need to be recognized and supported by their organization. We learned from early adopters that having dedicated adoption and user experience teams helped their business users adopt AI more easily. This helped them get more value from their investment in Copilot services faster. Do you know who those people are in your organization? - The emotional state of your business users must be included in their user experience and adoption journey.
Logic isn't the only factor that influences human decision-making. The “Think-Feel-Act.” model is a longstanding tool in cognitive behavior therapy, but we rarely apply it to our adoption methods in practice. By considering how business users feel at critical points in the user journey, you can create targeted micro-actions to address and shape their behavior.
The user journey - mapping micro-actions
We have provided an example map of a standard business user's Copilot enablement journey at key moments and the micro-actions the user should take. Note the key elements: the question, underlying feelings, micro-action, and desired outcome. This new user experience method has been designed for Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption or any experience that relies heavily on interactive customizable experiences by the user. It complements the established best practices within the Microsoft 365 adoption framework and it's three phases: Envision, Onboard and Drive Value, which will be discussed later in this module.
| The user journey | Discover / Try Phase | Envision / Inspire Phase | Onboard & Empower Phase | Realize / Drive Value Phase |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Question | “Why should I care about this new service?” | “How will I use this new capability?” | “When can I use this new capability?” | “How does this make my experience better?” |
| Feeling | Indifference, resistance, curiosity & confusion | Anxiety, curiosity & confusion | Anticipation, frustration, curiosity & intrigue | Confidence, anticipation |
| Go-do (micro-action) | Get familiar with capabilities & requirements (multi-modal comms & engagement) | Interactive learning with community | Attend rapid learning series & expand community connection | Role-based training with community of peers |
| Outcome | Prepare for change | Aha moment - understand scope of change | Gain Copilot knowledge from peers | Personal scenario use; physical experience of change |
The initial question of the business user might not always be directly spoken or expressed openly, resulting in feelings of curiosity and concern. Our goal in the first discussion with a business leader is to alleviate these concerns and replace them with understanding. You may have different micro-actions in your organization, but the overall methodology is designed to address the underlying feelings that will impact the behavior of our user communities, stakeholders, and ourselves.
The following image provides a visual aid for understanding the user journey towards an "aha moment.” Considering the full spectrum of user interaction, from their motivations and usage to their emotional and rational responses, organizations can create more effective and engaging user experiences that lead to insightful moments and drive trust-based relationships.
We should always keep in mind that every time we interact with our users, we aren't only helping them learn a new skill, but also building trust between ourselves and our users, and between our users and the new experience. As a UX Professional, User Enablement Specialist or Adoption Manager, trust is to be valued above all corporate standardized messaging. We must genuinely put our users’ trust first if we want to support them on this journey. That is how we'll get the most from AI and all it offers to our planet, our organizations, and each other.
Note
If you'd like to read the full article this content was sourced from, find it at It’s not about AI it’s about trust.