Leading Financial Services Company Delivers Enterprise-Grade Transformation with Microsoft

This large energy company had invested in several thousand Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses but found that adoption rates were not as robust as anticipated, with only about 30 percent of those licenses in use. The company was a long-standing Protiviti client and maximising both the company’s and our partnership with Microsoft, brought our team onboard to support a push to engage new users. Microsoft provided $86,000 in End Customer Investment Funds (ECIF) to help with this effort.

Assessment leads to implementation

Protiviti’s approach to any project focused on Microsoft Copilot adoption is to take a business-centric perspective. We work with the client to determine how we can best drive personal productivity across the business and ultimately begin to transform business/operational procedures and processes.

For this project, we partnered with the company’s Director of Digital Workplace Services to effectively coordinate our efforts across the organisation. We conducted assessments to gauge the client’s current state, including reviewing what was working, what wasn’t and what the client would like to do differently going forward. While the in-house Copilot team had done initial, base-level training and promotion to reach 1,500 users, adoption had slowed. Our primary challenge would be to effectively integrate this technology into the existing infrastructure and ensure its optimal utilisation across multiple departments. The company also preferred to focus on organic growth driven by motivated new users, versus assigning licenses by department.

Following the assessment, we developed a customised adoption strategy tailored to the client's specific requirements. This strategy included detailed plans for deployment, training programmes for staff, and measures to monitor and evaluate the effectiveness of the technology post-implementation. Features of the strategy included:

• Development of an initial outreach plan
• Creation of a user lifecycle, from on-boarding to endorsement using identified personas specific to this client’s workforce
• Development of specific, advanced application training leveraging Microsoft Chat and Microsoft Loop
• Introduction of multi-channel training, content and office hours, to build confidence and increase adoption across the organisation
• Introduction of ongoing knowledge sharing as teams began to understand the power of the technology

A significant part of the work involved facilitating seamless integration of Microsoft Copilot into existing systems. We worked closely with the company’s IT team to ensure the technology was implemented without disrupting ongoing operations. This was complemented by a robust support structure to address any technical issues promptly.

Change management drives success

Change management techniques played a crucial role in promoting Microsoft Copilot's usage across the organisation. We wanted to build excitement for Copilot, emphasising the timesaving efficiencies the tool could deliver. We designed and delivered comprehensive virtual training programmes, ensuring all employees, regardless of their technical proficiency, could utilise Copilot effectively. Ranging from basic Copilot skills to more advanced techniques for using the tool, these training sessions focused on demonstrating the practical applications of Microsoft Copilot in daily tasks, encouraging employees to incorporate it into their workflows.

We also developed specialised training offerings including a Copilot Chat and Microsoft Copilot in Loop session, the latter being a more advanced user feature. A “prompt of the week” message to all users continued the informal education loop. Materials were designed to match the client’s brand, reinforcing the corporate commitment to Copilot adoption.

Protiviti also helped the client implement processes for maximising the Copilot dashboard to track usage and impact of Microsoft Copilot within the organisation. This allowed the organisation to measure the success of the implementation and identify areas for further improvement.

Accelerators and a multi-phased approach

Given the specific challenges the client faced with legacy technologies, we identified how we would deliver effective solutions:

Leveraging proprietary technology developed through years of data migration and protection work, we built a solution capable of scanning, decrypting, re-encrypting, and restoring files at scale, preserving metadata and chain of custody. This tool, uniquely customised for the client’s requirements, formed the foundation for a transformative multi-workstream engagement.

The work was divided into four major phases:

• Deploying the encryption remediation utility to identify and decrypt files impacted by legacy tools.
• Rolling out Microsoft Purview Information Protection (MIP) sensitivity labels to over 98,000 users, ensuring a seamless and policy-aligned transition to Microsoft-native encryption.
• Analysing and consolidating over 350 legacy DLP policies down to 65 streamlined policies deployed within Microsoft Purview DLP—simplifying policy management and enhancing control.
• Implementing AI governance and security controls to prepare the organisation for safe, secure, and compliant Copilot adoption.

Change is good … but requires training

Recognising the importance of user adoption, we also developed and conducted extensive administrator and end-user training sessions for the client’s staff. These sessions covered best practices for data handling and security, how to effectively use new tools and a session dedicated to understanding and adhering to newly implemented data governance policies. We also provided change management support to ensure a smooth transition to the new system and foster a culture of data security and compliance within the organisation.

Long-standing partnership yields results

The migration of legacy encrypted files to Microsoft Purview, a unified classification and encryption platform, improved and simplified the overall end-user experience for over 98,000 users, and generated immediate savings to the client of $1 million+ in third-party license costs. Modernising the client’s data loss prevention policies, we consolidated and streamlined over 350 data loss prevention policies to a more manageable 65.

This engagement exemplifies how Protiviti brings together deep technical expertise, agile IP development, and robust organisational change management to deliver enterprise-grade digital transformation while meeting complex regulatory and operational requirements typical of global financial institutions.

As one of Microsoft’s most trusted partners, Protiviti continues to build solutions that are not only innovative and utilise A-enabled capabilities, but sustainable and scalable—meeting clients exactly where they are and helping them lead the way forward.