Kier Group's prompt-a-thon approach put Copilot in front of 40% of its 11,000 staff

Senior leaders set the adoption pace whether they mean to or not. Kier Group's chief operating officer Louisa Finlay addressed this directly at the 11,000-person UK contractor, running small-group sessions called prompt-a-thons where executives and staff worked through the same questions, half using Copilot and half without, then compared results. Working in peer groups let people feel comfortable asking questions without worrying about how they appeared to subordinates. Forty percent of Kier's staff now use Microsoft 365 Copilot; the rest have Teams Premium, which adds AI features to meetings and chat. A site manager who is dyslexic emailed Finlay to say Copilot changed how he worked. That kind of outcome tends to follow once someone senior has publicly normalised the learning curve.