In the pharmaceutical industry, where the quality of internal processes and operational precision make the difference, deciding to adopt an artificial intelligence tool doesn't simply mean rolling out licenses. It means rethinking how people work, find information, communicate, and manage their time. And doing it in a way that makes the change last, rather than fizzling out after the first few weeks of enthusiasm.
The group started its Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption journey among the first clients to work with the Copilot Circle team. What began with a small group of users evolved, over the course of more than a year, into a program structured across three phases, progressively involving international offices, new departments, and hundreds of new users.
What makes this case distinctive isn't just the numerical growth. It's the quality of the adoption: each phase produced measurable data on satisfaction, actual usage, and impact on daily work. And every positive result generated internal demand to expand the program further, without needing to be pushed from the outside.
The problem: adopting Copilot without letting the investment dissipate over time
The challenges the pharmaceutical group brought to the start of the journey were the typical ones of an organization that wants to do things well, not just quickly. Three critical areas emerged from the very first phase of analysis:
- Keeping adoption active after initial training: the main concern wasn't launching the program, but sustaining it over time. Usage of new digital tools tends to drop quickly in the weeks following training: people go back to established habits, and new behaviors struggle to take root without ongoing reinforcement. For a group investing in Copilot Premium licenses, a drop in adoption would have meant leaving a significant part of the investment unused, with everything that implies in terms of internal justification.
- Scaling the program without losing quality: the group needed to progressively expand the number of users involved, including international offices and new Italian departments. Each new group brought different profiles, different needs, and different starting levels. A rigid, uniform path would have served everyone poorly: the more advanced people would have gotten bored, the less experienced ones would have gotten lost. What was needed was an approach capable of adapting without multiplying management costs.
- Managing the continuous onboarding of new licenses: throughout the program, licenses weren't distributed all at once. New users entered the system in waves, often in small groups. Each time, the HR and IT team faced the same problem: how to guarantee these people a quality onboarding path, without organizing ad hoc sessions each time or falling back on materials recorded months earlier that had, in the meantime, already become partially outdated?
Our solution: three waves, a path that grows with the organization
The program developed organically, with each phase built on the results of the previous one. There was no rigid master plan from the start, but rather a logic of continuous improvement, fueled by the data collected along the way.
Each wave introduced content calibrated to users' level of maturity. Those who were already advanced received deeper content, while newcomers followed the introductory path, without overloading either group.
Introduced in the second wave, gamification (with points, leaderboards, and badges) encouraged active participation during training sessions, with a measurable impact on engagement compared to the first wave.
With Copilot Circle, every new user who receives a license is automatically started on an introductory path, without the HR or IT team needing to intervene manually each time. In addition, Copilot Circle's AI agent monitored each user's actual usage, sending personalized notifications via Teams with use cases relevant to their role, ready-to-use prompts, and micro-course suggestions.
The first wave involved approximately 150 users, with an introductory path on Copilot Premium features followed by deeper dives for departmental use. The format was calibrated to be accessible without overloading calendars, with sessions of contained duration and real use cases relevant to each business function.
The results of the first wave generated spontaneous demand for expansion from within the organization. International offices and Italian departments not included in the first group asked to be involved. This is the most significant signal of perceived value, since no one needed to be convinced, people wanted to be part of it.
The second wave brought the number of licenses from about 150 to 500 and introduced some important methodological innovations. The basic training was redesigned to welcome new users, taking into account that some participants had already received their license and could use the sessions as a moment of reinforcement. And gamification was introduced, a system of points, leaderboards, and badges that encouraged active participation.
The comparison with the first wave was immediate: the second wave's sessions recorded noticeably higher engagement, with users coming back on their own initiative to complete the assigned activities.
The third wave, currently getting underway, expands the audience to a total of 1,500 licenses and introduces the Copilot Circle platform as a permanent adoption infrastructure.
The AI agent monitors each user's actual usage, classifies their maturity level, and sends personalized nudges via Teams with use cases, practical prompts, and micro-course suggestions. A step that directly responds to one of the most frequently expressed wishes in the surveys, namely to keep receiving training, learn new things, and get more specialized content for one's role.
The results: concrete data and a partnership that keeps strengthening
At the end of the first wave, the internal survey returned data that carried significant weight in subsequent decisions.
The adoption rate stayed above 90% even after the program concluded, including the first wave.
The figure most cited by participants concerned time: on average, each person reported saving 17 hours of work per month thanks to using Copilot. A saving that, as many respondents specified, didn't go unused: the recovered hours were dedicated to activities with greater strategic value, reducing the load of routine operational work.
The group also reported an effect related to the ability to bring in-house activities that previously required external resources, and a perceived reduction in workload and stress, with a positive impact on work-life balance.
On the participation front, comparing the two waves confirmed that gamification had a real impact. Not all 500 participants in the second wave chose to actively engage with this dimension, but those who did showed a level of engagement that positively pulled up the experience for the entire group. The training sessions were better attended, more interactive, and had a higher completion rate.
These results led to consistent decisions. The company kept investing, expanding the program wave after wave and adding more than 1,000 new licenses to reach a total of 1,500. The third wave, and the choice to adopt Copilot Circle as a permanent infrastructure, confirm that when adoption works, the investment justifies and expands itself.
What are the next steps?
With the third wave underway and 1,500 active licenses, the focus now shifts to continuity and depth of adoption.
On the training front, the surveys revealed a widespread desire for more role- and department-specific content: this will be the pillar of the third phase, with vertical paths designed for specific functions such as HR, Legal, Finance, and Sales.
At the same time, we will evaluate together with the client the introduction of AI agents on some high-impact internal processes, using Copilot Circle data to identify the departments with the highest rate of advanced users as the ideal starting point.
💡 Buying the licenses is the easy part. Actually getting hundreds of people to use them, every day: that's the real investment. And the numbers proved us right.
Are your Copilot licenses sitting unused? Book a demo and discover how Copilot Circle guarantees real, measurable, and sustained adoption over time.
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