Copilot is a catalyst for measurable transformation at Look Ahead

From vision to business case

Look Ahead is a leading UK provider of specialist care, support, and housing services across London and the Southeast of England. The organisation supports more than 2,000 people with a wide range of services across mental health, homelessness, and learning disabilities.

Of Look Ahead’s approximately 1,000 employees, about 700 to 800 are dedicated to frontline operational support and care roles, while the remainder work in central functions and shared services.

The organisation is in the middle of a far-reaching process of digital transformation, which is being led by Geoff Balmont, IT Director at Look Ahead.

“We’ve have18 business systems at the moment, and our strategic aim is to consolidate those into five or fewer,” he explains. “We’re putting in a brand-new finance system to replace four legacy systems. We’re implementing a new customer care system. In addition we have migrated to a new Managed Service Provider that specialises in the NfP and Charity sector who manage our service desk and our infrastructure that is migrating to Microsoft Azure.”

Against this backdrop of system consolidation, integration, and cloud migration, Balmont identified an opportunity: to use AI not as a standalone experiment, but as a strategic lever for measurable productivity and efficiency gains.

Microsoft initially approached Look Ahead to participate in a funded “Vision and Value” engagement for Microsoft 365 Copilot, partnering with SoftwareOne. The objective was not to sell licences outright, but to help identify use cases within the organisation and to build a robust business case for use of Copilot.

“We didn’t want to just purchase the licences and hope adoption happened,” says Balmont. “We wanted to understand: where will this genuinely save time? Where will it remove friction?”

Stakeholders from HR, finance, marketing, and operations were invited to structured sessions. Each department articulated its primary pain points, such as time-intensive reporting in Excel, drafting lengthy board papers, producing PowerPoint packs, or responding to repetitive HR queries.

“That process was instrumental,” Balmont notes. “It enabled us to clearly map pain points to potential Copilot solutions and justify an investment of around USD $53,000  (GBP £45,000) a year.”

The outcome of the Vision and Value POC was approval from the senior leadership team to proceed with 150 Copilot for Microsoft 365 licences for shared services and central teams, alongside rollout of Copilot Chat to all staff.

From structured adoption to demonstrable ROI

For Balmont, adoption was as critical as procurement.

SoftwareOne, introduced by Microsoft Tech for Social Impact (TSI) as the Vision and Value partner, delivered structured workshops for 150 designated “Copilot Champions”. These sessions were practical and focused on the tools most staff use daily: Excel, Word, Teams, and Outlook.

“Our aim was to empower people,” Balmont explains. “Not to say, ‘Here are five things you can do’, but rather to teach them how to use Copilot so they could explore.”

Attendance was exceptional – for some workshops, 120 out of 150 invited colleagues joined the sessions. Feedback loops were built in, allowing users to share both challenges and success stories.

One HR colleague, with no technical background, used Copilot to guide herself through creating a Power Automate workflow to resolve a shared mailbox issue. “She didn’t think it was possible,” Balmont says, “but Copilot taught her how to do it.”

A dedicated Copilot Hub on SharePoint now centralises FAQs, success stories, and peer learning.

“We wouldn’t have achieved that pace of engagement on our own,” Balmont acknowledges. “It would have taken us around six months, but SoftwareOne completed the project in eight weeks.    I also want to call out the way SoftwareOne engaged users – it was impactful, energetic, accessible.”

Six months post-rollout, usage data paints a compelling picture:

• 4,245 Copilot-assisted hours
• 131 active licence holders
• 95% Copilot adoption rate
• More than 57,000 Copilot actions completed
• 2,258 meetings summarised or recapped by Copilot.

“One of the biggest areas of uptake is Teams meetings,” Balmont says. “Turning meetings into minutes, actions, owners – that used to take 30 minutes to an hour. Now it’s five to 10 minutes.”

In a hybrid organisation with heavy reliance on Teams, Copilot also enables late joiners to recap meetings instantly and clarify complex terminology in real time.

The performance team has seen even more dramatic gains.

“Exercises that used to take three hours – merging spreadsheets, comparing datasets, building reports – are being done in about 15 minutes.”

Microsoft’s Viva Insights dashboard estimates the monetary value of time saved at approximately USD $300,000 to date.

“It’s Microsoft’s metric, and in dollars,” Balmont says. “But it’s clear we are saving significantly in excess of the USD $50–57,000 (GBP £40–45,000) we spend annually on [Copilot] licences.”