AI isn’t just an add-on to customer experience; it’s becoming the architecture beneath it. That was the message the London edition of Microsoft’s AI Tour presented for leaders planning their AI roadmaps — the future belongs to agent-operated, human-directed enterprises.
Microsoft is placing Copilot at the heart of productivity and customer engagement, and presenting it as the front door to its enterprise AI ecosystem. The company believes it’s how employees and customers will interact with intelligence across the cloud.
As Rob Smithson, AI Business Process Lead, Microsoft UK told CX Today in an interview at the event:
We’re putting Copilot into CCaaS, and that’s the first contact center that’s being built with generative AI from the ground up. So it’s very much part of our strategy. It’s very much an enabler for users and a differentiator, because it’s not something that’s integrated with third-party systems. It’s top-to-bottom Microsoft.
“The different apps that we have — Dynamics 365, ERP, all of those sorts of things — the user may interact with them through Copilot in the future. And those different programs will essentially provide data back to the UI so that they’re able to ask questions about that.”
Taking a “customer zero” approach, in which it tests out offerings internally, Microsoft has already deployed Copilot across its global customer support organization.
“We already use it ourselves in our own customer care across the world, and we’ve seen significant improvement of things like net promoter score,” Smithson said. “Listening to customers’ feedback around the service that they give us is very powerful. So we see Copilot as a huge enabler of that.”
For technology buyers, this represents an evolution in how contact center platforms are designed. Instead of bolting AI onto legacy systems, Microsoft is building its CCaaS offering with generative AI baked in, a “human + agent” architecture that unites automation, context, and real-time insights.
Overall, AI is no longer about automating single workflows or adding smart chatbots to customer service. It’s about orchestrating entire experiences through agents that can understand, act, and adapt.
Supporting all of this is Copilot Studio, Microsoft’s low-code environment for building, managing, and extending AI agents. It’s the bridge between the standard out-of-the-box Copilot experience and more complex enterprise needs.
As Reuben Kippner, Director of Power Platform for Microsoft EMEA, told CX Today:
“Copilot Studio is the extensibility layer. So where we’re providing an enormous amount out of the box, organizations that need to tailor it to different systems, that’s the toolset that they use. So it fits very neatly.”
Kippner added that Microsoft will continue to develop role-specific agents across industries and departments.
You’ll increasingly see Microsoft augment Microsoft 365 Copilot with very role- and task- and process-specific agents. So for a salesperson, we have Copilot for Sales, Copilot for Service, and so on. We’re going to enrich out-of-the-box capabilities but provide people the ability to go and build their own.
That layered approach, blending ready-to-use copilots with customizable AI agents — is central to Microsoft’s message to buyers. It allows organizations to start small, experiment safely, and then scale as they gain confidence and capability.
A Platform for Buyers, Not Just Builders
For leaders, this unified strategy offers a practical path forward. Instead of adding disconnected AI tools, Microsoft Copilot interacting with data, workflows, and insights across the enterprise. This approach directly addresses one of the most common frustrations for customer service teams: fragmented experiences and inconsistent data.
Smithson explained:
“The biggest frustration for customers is when they call up and the company doesn’t know them, doesn’t know the context behind their business or why they’re calling. And this gives them the opportunity to do that very quickly, with very rich data from multiple different sources.”
By centralizing data across Dynamics, Microsoft 365, and Azure AI, Copilot can deliver the context agents need instantly — whether it’s a customer’s purchase history, service record, or previous interactions.
An example of this shift is HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC), the UK’s tax, payments and customs authority, which is tasked with supporting millions of taxpayers through phone, web, and chat interactions while maintaining strict compliance. The organization has started to roll out its 35,000 Copilot licenses this week.
“In HMRC, we’ve got a strategic preference for buy over build,” said Wayne Robinson, AI Lead at HMRC, in a panel discussion.
“I say that mainly for two reasons. The first is, you’ve got finite build resource, so they are quickly going to become a choke point and a bottleneck, bearing in mind the massive demand we’re all seeing. And the second reason, arguably the one I’m more concerned about, is assuming a future where you’ve got hundreds, if not thousands of AI services running on your estate, and bearing in mind the rate of change that we’re all seeing as well, if you’ve got to manage all of those bespoke AI builds, that’s going to become an absolute nightmare very quickly.”
For HMRC, the sweet spot between buy and build, “the Goldilocks zone”, is using Copilot Studio with Microsoft Power Platform, Power Automate and Power Apps.
“That’s going to allow us to move a lot quicker, but you’re still building in one in one tech stack, which I think is going to make your life a lot easier,” Robinson said.
The London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG) is an example of how Microsoft’s AI stack enables co-innovation to redefine how customers access and apply data at scale.
Emily Prince, Group Head of Analytics & AI at LSEG described a shift in thinking, one that’s not about applying AI to an existing issue, but about reimagining the problem.
“This isn’t simply a case of, here’s an established problem, we’re going to apply AI to it. It was actually starting to say, well, what was the total problem that we were trying to solve for, and what is the most intelligent way that we can actually solve that problem?”
That mindset is driving LSEG’s adoption of Microsoft’s AI ecosystem from Azure Foundry, where teams can build and experiment with AI models, to Copilot Studio, which enables secure, contextual access to one of the largest financial data sets in the world.
“We’ve looked at a lot of different things,” Prince said. “Everything from how do we enable our organization out of Foundry, in terms of building themselves, building their own AI experiments themselves, all the way through to how we’re using Copilot.”
In conjunction with the event, LSEG announced that it is using a new MCP server to enable its customers to be able to connect with 33 petabytes of data, licensed through LSEG products like Workspace and Financial Analytics, to build AI agents in Copilot Studio, without needing to build complex data infrastructure from scratch.
“So now it becomes not just about product velocity ourselves, and how can we apply our specialism, our expertise into these problems,” Prince added, “but also how can our customers, too?”
For Westminster City Council, improving customer experience isn’t about technology first, it’s about people.
“It always starts with the user, never the technology,” said Sarah Williams, Director of Customer Experience at Westminster City Council. “My role at Westminster is to ensure that, regardless of the contact channel, all of our residents, businesses and visitors, receive excellent customer service, consistent right time, every time.”
That’s no small task. Westminster is home to around 200,000 residents and welcomes 25 million visitors each year but balances prestige with high rates of deprivation and inequality among its residents.
“Until recently, we had three very siloed in-house contact centers and different processes, different systems, different cultures and dependent on the door you came through, you got a very different experience. Our advisors were always focused on typing up notes and navigating systems, trying to find information, rather than the conversation with the resident,” Williams said.
The council completed a large discovery process by talking to its users and conducted an operational review of its contact centers, auditing 3,000 call recordings for quality, accessibility and service.
“We’re now in a very different place, and thanks to the Dynamics 365 Contact Center solution, before our agents pick up a phone or pick up a chat, they understand the context behind that contact,” Williams said. “We have got case notes, summarization, live transcription, and the Copilot wrap-up has been an absolute game changer for us, that saved our agents a third of their time, a third of their day, which then allows them to focus on our communities.”
The council has launched a Copilot chatbot on its website that has a 97% containment rate, Williams said.
Our agents are really unhappy that they’re not getting lots of web chats and WhatsApps because they’re really excited about these new channels, but actually Copilot is doing its job and is answering our queries on the website.
The technology has also enabled Westminster to adopt a proactive service model. “We have a team of customer advocates,” Williams said. “They don’t take inbound calls anymore. They proactively case manage all of our repair bookings for the most vulnerable of our tenants… When the engineer goes out, because the Copilot summary is replicated on his PDA, our residents benefit from a joined-up experience, and that brings more trust to the service that we deliver.”
Beyond efficiency, Westminster’s transformation has also made the council more inclusive and accessible. The next phase of its AI journey includes language translation, video calling, and end-to-end repair appointment bookings.
Enterprise AI, Safely Deployed out of the Shadows
AI agents promise to transform service operations, boost efficiency, and unlock new personalization capabilities. But they also introduce questions about control, governance, and how to integrate them into existing tech stacks.
Microsoft is betting that its long-standing reputation for trust, compliance, and security will set it apart in an increasingly crowded AI market.
As Smithson put it:
Microsoft is known for being inclusive, trustworthy, having good governance, privacy, data compliance… and we’re applying all of those rigors and structures to AI, so that gives businesses the confidence that the way that they manage their data today, they’ll be able to continue to do that with their AI tools.
As enterprises race to experiment with AI agents, one of the biggest questions buyers are asking isn’t what they can build — it’s how safely they can build it.
Microsoft has baked layered governance and policy controls directly into Copilot Studio and the Power Platform. These tools are designed to manage access, enforce compliance, and maintain visibility over every AI agent created.
“One of the things that we want to be able to do is have very clear confidence about data that people who are building and running agents can access,” Kippner explained.
Users can set up a data loss prevention policy that defines precisely which data sources AI agents are permitted to use. The system allows for restrictions on certain applications to prevent accidental data leaks. This governance isn’t one-size-fits-all. Organizations can set rules across the enterprise or tailor them to specific teams and environments. They can also use Copilot to filter the list of agents they have running and quarantine them if necessary.
That kind of oversight directly tackles what the company calls “shadow AI” — the uncontrolled, unsanctioned use of GenAI tools inside enterprises.
A Microsoft study of 2,000 UK employees released this week shows 71 percent turning to unapproved consumer AI tools for work, with 51 percent using these tools weekly, often for tasks such as drafting reports and presentations, or even managing financial data, without formal approval from their IT departments. Around 30 percent expressed concern about the privacy or security risks involved.
Kippner said:
If you don’t provide these tools, people will go and use whatever’s at their disposal… They’re not building spreadsheets and other stuff for fun. They’re doing it because they’ve got a problem to solve. So having that level of insight, bringing that out of the shadows, that’s the other key.
The combination of self-service creativity and centralized governance gives businesses the freedom to innovate without sacrificing control or compliance. It’s a delicate balance that many enterprises are still struggling to achieve, and one that Microsoft is intent on making a cornerstone of its AI strategy.
