We’ve spent a lot of time talking about how Frontier Firms are weaving AI agents into their core processes securely and at scale.
And we’ve shared plenty about our own journey as Customer Zero for AI, rolling out Microsoft 365 Copilot, GitHub Copilot, Copilot for Sales, Copilot for Service, and Copilot for Finance across the business.
But while all of this sounds great on paper, it only matters if it actually improves the way we work. We wanted to uncover what becoming a Frontier Firm really looks like in practice, and whether Microsoft Copilot is genuinely making life easier, faster, or better for our teams at ANS Group.
This blog brings together real stories from colleagues across different teams and departments, each sharing honest, practical examples of how Copilot is helping them get more done and work with greater confidence.
At ANS, we believe it is our people and the way they work that truly unlock the value of AI. Tools like Copilot only deliver ROI when they are meaningfully adopted, embedded into everyday workflows, and used with intent. These stories show how focusing on adoption over simple usage is what turns AI investment into real impact.
Mick Smith – Senior Enterprise Account Manager
I use Copilot together with Loop and Facilitator to work more efficiently and provide a better experience for my customers. Copilot helps me quickly interpret information, draft content and stay on top of key actions, while Loop keeps everything organised in a single, flexible workspace that updates in real time. Facilitator supports smoother meetings by capturing the details I need and making sure nothing is missed.
Together, these tools streamline my workflow and cut down sales admin, giving me more time to focus on creating value for customers. That means faster responses, better conversations, and getting the very best out of our teams for every engagement.
With 53% of leaders saying productivity must improve, our sales teams are using Copilot to reduce admin overhead and reinvest that time where it matters most: supporting customers.
Jakub Wawrzacz, Cloud Solutions Architect
I started using M365 Copilot to refine complex communications and quickly adopted prompt patterns to get more consistent, higher‑quality outputs. As I built confidence, I became a Copilot Champion, sharing practical quick wins with peers.
Over time, I created custom agents that cut customer‑engagement workflows from 8 hours to 30 minutes and reduced well‑architected Review effort from a full day to just one hour. I’m now developing an agent ecosystem where routine analysis and validation are handled by agents, freeing me up to focus on higher value architecture work.
And it’s not just helping in engineering departments. In more customer-facing roles, Copilot is helping people move through the basics more quickly and spend more time with customers, with 70% of users reporting higher productivity and tasks completed 29% faster. See how one of our account executives, Claire Connor, has built her own Copilot assistant to aid her:
Claire Connor, Account Executive (Retail)
I built “Carol,” my Copilot assistant, to speed up the simple things: turning rough notes into clear emails and cutting my writing time by around 30%. Copilot helped me simplify sales activity across multiple accounts by summarising emails, preparing for meetings, structuring data, and reducing admin by around two hours a day.
As it became embedded in my workflow, I freed up significant time each week for customer conversations and strategic work, with sharper communication and less getting lost in the noise.
Improved productivity is a clear benefit as our teams adopt AI to streamline routine work and accelerate role impact. The Sales function, for example, has seen a 6.25% closing ratio uplift as a result. We’re also seeing these efficiency gains translate into healthier, more sustainable ways of working beyond ANS – reinforcing the benefits our teams are finding.
A UK cross-government trial reported an average 26 minutes saved per day when using Microsoft 365 Copilot, alongside strong intent to keep using it. At ANS, we’re turning that headroom into more consistent deal reviews, guided next steps, and clearer pipeline signals.
Adam Westall, Industry Lead (Higher Education)
Using Copilot chat and meeting transcription streamlined my day‑to‑day work and improved how I engage with customers. I identified high‑value opportunities for Copilot across my team and introduced a Copilot notebook to bring consistency to deal reviews.
More recently, I created an Agent around the MEDDPICC sales framework that has enabled evidence‑led deal reviews with scoring and guided next steps, supporting stronger coaching, better forecasting, and more effective team development.
For People Business Partner, Thomas Robinson, he’s been able to focus more on supporting apprentices directly by dramatically reducing the time spent analysing large datasets, ensuring their learning experience is fair and consistent. Copilot takes care of the surfacing priorities and patterns objectively, while Thomas applies his judgement to guide decisions and target support where it matters most.
Thomas Robinson – People Business Partner
Copilot has become essential in my day-to-day work, particularly through an agent that now handles one of my most time‑consuming tasks: compiling the monthly revenue report for apprenticeships from the Department for Education. This process used to take a full day or more and it now takes about an hour.
By surfacing trends and apprentices who may need additional support, Copilot helps remove bias from discussions and ensures decisions are guided by data rather than assumption. While Copilot automates data gathering and initial analysis, my judgement still guides final decisions.
Through our academy, we have embedded AI education into apprenticeship delivery, delivering 648 hours of AI training to 18 learners in the past 12 months, with apprentices now using Copilot 82% more frequently than the wider workforce and averaging 53 actions per user each week, showing sustained, confident adoption rather than isolated experimentation.
In a finance setting, accuracy is non‑negotiable. In this department, Copilot is being used as a carefully governed assistant to reduce friction in day‑to‑day work and speed up understanding without compromising control. Here’s how Francis Doherty uses it:
Francis Doherty, Management Accountant (Finance)
I use Copilot as an ad hoc assistant to support my day‑to‑day work, with every output carefully reviewed before use, as accuracy is critical in a finance environment. It reduces friction in many routine tasks like summarising meetings or by helping me interpret technical information and present it in clear, plain language for non‑technical audiences. This is useful when dealing with invoices that include unfamiliar IT descriptions, where Copilot can provide a concise explanation that makes sense in a financial context.
It also streamlines data handling, such as converting screenshots of figures or non‑copyable tables into usable formats, including Excel, removing the need for manual rekeying. More broadly, I use it at the early stages of projects to build understanding in unfamiliar areas, whether by identifying potential suppliers or gathering background information, enabling me to get up to speed far more quickly than traditional research alone. Overall, Copilot has helped to reduce office admin tasks allowing Finance to spend more time on value added work that supports our customers.
Last but not least, Copilot has changed how our content and social media team reviews performance and decides where to focus next. By using a purpose‑built agent to examine web and social data, time‑intensive reporting has been significantly reduced, with trends and audience behaviours surfaced far more quickly.
Joe Hallas, Content Marketing Executive
As a Content Marketing Exec, part of my job is doing monthly reports on our marketing content across web and socials, looking at the data to figure out what’s resonating with our audience and what isn’t. I used to crunch these numbers manually, but I have since created an Agent in Copilot to help me. Once a month, I feed it the data from our socials and website back-end. In return, it analyses the numbers to pick out key trends and identify patterns across the engagement.
This has taken a 6-hour job down to 1-2 hours in total, with an overall 80% increase in speed when completing this part of my job. It’s made life so much easier and allowed me to concentrate on making creative decisions in response to this data, helping to increase audience engagement.
What this means for ANS
What these stories make clear is that Copilot is already shaping how work gets done every day at ANS, across sales, marketing, finance, people operations, architecture, and beyond.
For some, that means hours reclaimed from manual reporting. For others, it means clearer customer conversations, stronger deal reviews, or faster insight from complex data. In every case, Copilot is doing the heavy lifting early, so people can spend more time applying judgement, creativity, and expertise where it counts.
This is what becoming a Frontier Firm looks like in real life. Not replacing people but equipping them with intelligent tools that scale their impact.
We know this because we track AI success through people and adoption, not just usage. Today, ANS Copilot Power Users use Copilot on average across 12 unique scenarios per day, marking a significant change in their daily ways of working habits. That’s over half of our organisation actively embedding AI into the way they work daily:
This isn’t about chasing productivity for its own sake. It’s about creating space for better decisions, better service, and more sustainable ways of working, where our teams spend less time on admin and more time creating value for our customers.
Our Copilot and AI Readiness Assessment helps you put the right guardrails in place so adoption can happen quickly and confidently. We’ll help you move beyond usage metrics and focus on what really drives ROI: people, ways of working, and meaningful adoption. Get started today!
