Welsh councils use Microsoft 365 Copilot to cut staff hours

Three Welsh councils have rolled out Microsoft 365 Copilot across local government teams to speed paperwork and reduce staff time. Swansea, Rhondda Cynon Taf and Carmarthenshire began with small pilot groups before expanding use more widely.

Swansea County Council estimates it reclaimed about 5,400 staff hours over a four-week period after introducing Copilot. The council initially issued 100 licenses-75 for project pilots and 25 to senior leaders-and reports roughly 3,500 staff now use the tool for drafting and administrative tasks.

Rhondda Cynon Taf County Borough Council has around 350 staff using Copilot. Council leaders reported that producing assessments is now roughly four times faster than before the tool was introduced. An internal staff survey found 75% of respondents felt more positive about their role and 86% said the quality of their work had improved after adopting Copilot.

Carmarthenshire County Council built an in-house Copilot agent that pulls frequently asked questions from the council website to handle customer enquiries. The council reported the agent has helped meet an internal target to respond to complaints within 10 days. Georgia Sweet, digital transformation project officer at Carmarthenshire County Council, reported: “We’ve seen a lot of feedback from neurodiverse colleagues, particularly those with ADHD and dyslexia, where they’re finding that Copilot is transforming the way that they work. They’re finding it easy to process information, it’s really helping with their written communication and the tools like rewrite or summarizing large documents, that’s really helping them and improving their experience at work.”

Councils described initial concerns about digital literacy and confidence among some staff. Ness Young, director of corporate services at Swansea, noted: “Digital literacy can be an obstacle to initial use. Not necessarily just in a technical sense, but also in terms of confidence. We have invested in a support partner and an engagement officer who provides one-to-one support for staff with full licenses.”

Each council started with small groups of early adopters or ‘hero’ users to test use cases and then spread skills internally. Mari Ropstad, head of service at Rhondda Cynon Taf, explained volunteers from each team acted as champions, teaching colleagues and developing practical prompts and workflows so practitioners could adopt consistent standards of use.

Day-to-day adoption includes sharing prompts and techniques through Teams and peer networks. All three councils continue to refine deployments and to work with Microsoft on further use cases.

Microsoft 365 Copilot is a generative AI assistant integrated into Microsoft 365 that can draft text, summarize documents and automate routine tasks. The councils report pilots have concentrated on reducing administrative burden and improving customer response times while keeping work processes under professional oversight.