Inspiring Copilot agent adoption for rapidly growing accountancy firm

Our customer, a fast-growing top 20 UK accountancy firm with over 800 employees, was exploring how AI could enhance internal operations and deliver measurable value. While the IT team had experimented with Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Studio, early attempts to build internal chatbots – such as an HR assistant – were hindered by inconsistent results, limited documentation, and challenges with data structuring.

The firm needed a practical, scalable way to demonstrate the value of Copilot beyond personal productivity, with a focus on business process transformation. Their goal was to create a working agent that could deliver tangible benefits to staff, while also upskilling the internal team to continue building on the platform independently.

Working with the customer’s Technology Change Manager and members of the Technology team, we delivered a structured, four-week engagement focused on building a minimum viable agent (MVA).

The team selected the HR assistant agent – nicknamed “Harold” – as the primary use case, designed to answer common employee questions about policies such as annual leave, expenses, and remote working.

The engagement included:

• Scenario selection and planning: Identifying the HR retrieval agent as the most viable and valuable starting point
• Data preparation: Streamlining and structuring key documents like the staff handbook and expenses policy to optimise agent performance
• Implementation workshops: Hands-on sessions using both Copilot Studio and SharePoint Agents to build and refine the agent
• Instruction tuning: Iteratively improving the agent’s behaviour and citation handling through prompt engineering
• Knowledge transfer: Equipping the internal team with the skills to build, test, and deploy future agents independently

The team also explored licensing models and deployment options, ensuring the solution could scale cost-effectively using Microsoft’s pay-as-you-go agent consumption model.

By the end of the engagement, the customer team had a fully functional HR agent ready for user acceptance testing. The agent delivered accurate, contextual responses from internal policy documents and was integrated into Microsoft Teams for easy access.

Key outcomes included:

• A working HR agent built in under four weeks, pending approval for wider rollout
• Significant improvement in agent performance compared to previous attempts
• Upskilled internal IT team confident in building and managing future agents
• Identification of additional use cases, including a technical compliance bot and a proposal assistant for the business development team

The project also sparked broader strategic conversations around document management, SharePoint optimisation, and the future role of AI in the firm’s operations.