Accenture deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot to 200,000 workers

2 min readUpdated April 27, 2026

Accenture $ACN is deploying Microsoft $MSFT 365 Copilot to 100,000 employees, with a commitment to expand that to about 200,000 users, the company said. The deployment is part of a broader rollout that ultimately targets Accenture's full workforce of about 743,000 people — what Microsoft describes as the largest enterprise Copilot deployment to date.

Accenture said the initial rollout has produced measurable results. A self-reported survey covering 200,000 users found that routine tasks were completed up to 15 times faster for 97% of respondents, while more than half — 53% — said they had seen meaningful gains in how efficiently they worked. In one group of about 200,000 licensed users, monthly active usage reached 89%, and 84% said they would "deeply miss" Copilot if it were taken away.

"Real value from AI investments like Copilot doesn't come from simply turning it on," said Tony Leraris, Accenture's CIO. "It comes from investing in your people — helping them understand how to use it, how to trust it and how it fits into the way they work."

Accenture began its Copilot rollout in August 2023, starting with a pilot involving a few hundred senior leaders and select employees before scaling to 20,000 users. The company focused that early phase on data governance, access controls, and understanding how employees were using the tool in applications such as Outlook, Teams, and Word. The deployment then expanded in phases, supported by one-on-one leadership training, group sessions, and an internal social network where employees shared use cases.

Leraris said Copilot's integration into tools employees were already using was a key factor in driving adoption. Accenture manages 24 petabytes of data across SharePoint and OneDrive, and Copilot's ability to reason over that data was central to the company's decision to adopt the platform, he said. Accenture also pointed to Copilot's multimodal architecture — drawing on both OpenAI and Anthropic models — as a consideration.

The 100,000-user milestone is part of a November 2024 announcement in which Accenture, Microsoft, and Avanade — a joint venture between Accenture and Microsoft — said they were launching a Copilot business transformation practice staffed by 5,000 professionals, with access to more than 50,000 Copilot-trained employees across the two firms. That practice is designed to help enterprise clients deploy Copilot and AI agents across their own operations.

This deal is important for Microsoft. According to Reuters, less than one in 30 of the more than 450 million Microsoft 365 business users have subscribed to Copilot, which costs $30 per month. Reuters also notes that Microsoft's shares have dropped 12% in 2025, following the company's worst quarter since 2008. This reflects ongoing investor concerns about the returns on Microsoft's AI investments.

Accenture CEO Julie Sweet said in a statement that the Copilot deployment, combined with the broader partnership with Microsoft and Avanade, will help clients "accelerate and integrate AI at scale as a catalyst for reinvention."

Accenture is rolling out Microsoft's AI assistant to 100,000 workers, with plans to double that

Related Content

Related Content