3 Ways to Accelerate AI for Work with Microsoft Copilot and CDW

November 26, 2025

Article
11 min

3 Ways to Accelerate AI for Work with Microsoft Copilot and CDW

In this blog, we shed light on the key challenges of AI adoption and how Microsoft Copilot, with its agentic capabilities, can help employees accelerate productivity with AI.

CDW Expert CDW Expert
What's Inside
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Canadian workers continue to welcome AI to the workplace with growing confidence around generative AI and AI agents. At work, AI can help workers improve productivity, focus on strategy and automate repetitive tasks.

While AI’s value proposition is clear and solid, there are gaps in how much of it is being realized by Canadian organizations.

As per CDW Canada’s 2025 Modern Workspace Report, over half (51 percent) of participating employees say they’re not using AI tools more often due to underperformance and lack of task relevancy. Additionally, 36 percent of employees state data privacy and security concerns with AI use.

Such barriers may prevent organizations from fully harnessing AI’s benefits and result in subpar outcomes for their employees.

In this blog, we shed light on the key challenges of AI adoption and how Microsoft Copilot, with its agentic capabilities, can help employees accelerate productivity with AI.

Why organizations struggle to realize the full value of AI

The following barriers often prevent organizations from extending the benefits of AI to their workers to enable safe and productive use.

Risks of unregulated AI usage

When employees use non-approved tools at work without policies or guidance in place, it may lead to data privacy and security risks. These tools could potentially expose organizations to breaches of sensitive client and corporate data, regulatory compliance issues and even theft of proprietary information.    

Therefore, employees need AI tools that conform to data governance policies along with guidance on safe usage.

Concerns around AI accuracy and reliability

Even when organizations provide access to approved tools, many employees remain hesitant due to concerns about AI’s reliability.

According to CDW Canada’s Modern Workspace Report, more than one-third of workers (36 percent) worry about the accuracy of AI-generated content and its implications for data security and privacy.

Lack of training and AI awareness

For employees to derive value from AI tools, they need training on specific use cases and awareness of AI capabilities. Employees struggle when they aren’t fully sure what AI can achieve for them and may not get desired responses.

Low confidence in AI capabilities may prohibit full adoption, emphasizing the need for intuitive tools and employee training on high-impact use cases.

How can AI agents augment productivity?

AI agents act as upgraded digital assistants that work across applications to understand context, anticipate needs and complete tasks on behalf of users. Unlike traditional AI tools that respond to single prompts in isolation, agents can chain together actions, draw from organizational data and adapt to workflows in real time.

They apply organizational policies, respect compliance frameworks and limit data exposure to approved sources, addressing risks associated with uncontrolled AI use. AI agents also offer the following capabilities to improve AI adoption:

  • Improve accuracy by integrating with organizational data and context to deliver more relevant and reliable outputs.
  • Automate workflows by bringing together multiple apps to achieve a single task autonomously.
  • Offer built-in policies and restrictions that guide responsible use, boosting employee trust in AI.

3 simple ways Microsoft Copilot helps employees adopt AI

Microsoft Copilot, with its rich AI ecosystem and agentic capabilities, can help employees overcome AI hurdles in the following ways.

1. Access AI features right in the workspace

Microsoft Copilot offers deep integration with the Microsoft 365 ecosystem, allowing access to business information for richer responses.  

Its capabilities include drafting text, summarizing conversations, analyzing data and automating routine tasks, all available within the applications employees already use. Instead of toggling between tools, employees can call on Copilot inside their workflow.

For example, when preparing meeting notes in Microsoft Teams, they can ask Copilot to generate a structured summary with action items. In Microsoft Excel, they can highlight raw data and prompt Copilot to create charts, spot anomalies or forecast trends.

This reduces the friction associated with external AI tools and speeds up AI usage with quick responses. Business information stays private while employees receive a smoother AI experience.  

Key benefits of Copilot's integrated AI

  • Improve accuracy by integrating with organizational data and context to deliver more relevant and reliable outputs.
  • Automate workflows by bringing together multiple apps to achieve a single task autonomously.
  • Offer built-in policies and restrictions that guide responsible use, boosting employee trust in AI.

2. Build customized AI agents based on work needs

Copilot Studio is a low-code platform that can help employees build fully customized AI agents that reflect their core needs. These agents can connect with hundreds of business applications, including CRM, ERP and collaboration tools, to automate workflows without advanced programming knowledge.

For instance, a customer service agent could create a bot that drafts responses to routine inquiries while flagging complex cases for human review.

Similarly, a marketing analyst might set up an agent that pulls campaign data from multiple platforms and generates weekly performance dashboards automatically.

This personalization helps align AI capabilities to highly specific use cases that employees might have, providing improved outcomes. AI agents can hop through multiple steps automatically to process a query, as shown below.

Automating a report creation workflow using an AI agent:

Step 1

Start

The agent interprets the request, breaking it into smaller tasks.

Step 2

Locate Data

Connects to approved sources like CRM or ERP to pull quarterly sales data.

Step 3

Analyze

Uses built-in analytics to detect trends and highlight KPIs.

Step 4

Draw Insights

Applies business rules or past patterns to propose actionable steps.

Step 5

Generate output

Produces a polished report in the user’s workspace.

Key benefits of Copilot Studio

  • Automate workflows that are repetitive in nature and don’t require deep human supervision.
  • Customize the behaviour of agents with data connectors, prompts and actions.
  • Use built-in agents such as Copilot Analyst and Copilot Researcher for data analysis and research tasks.

3. Work within security and governance frameworks

Copilot runs within enterprise-grade security, compliance and governance frameworks, ensuring sensitive information is handled responsibly. Features such as access controls, data boundaries and adherence to organizational policies protect users and businesses from exposure risks.

When drafting contracts, a legal team can use Copilot to speed up document creation while remaining confident that case details stay within approved systems. HR professionals can use AI to sort through resumes or draft communications, knowing candidate data is safeguarded by compliance standards.

Key benefits of Copilot for compliance

  • Prevent data breaches or leak incidents with effective security controls
  • Build trust in AI tools among employees when working with private information
  • Create prevention policies to evolve AI adoption across edge scenarios

How CDW Canada leverages Copilot across internal teams

Copilot has been instrumental in enabling CDW Canada coworkers and teams to discover useful productivity use cases, as described below.

Help Me Prepare for an existing customer meeting
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The “Help Me Prepare” prompt gives me an opportunity to come into a meeting organized and helps boost a customer’s confidence in our capabilities as an organization.

This includes giving me a rough script to follow for introductions and conclusions to the meeting, possible customer focus points and important factors to consider that we might lose focus on throughout the course of a meeting.

I find it particularly helpful when I’m travelling between customer meetings for work; I can review the outcome of this prompt in my Uber to the next onsite meeting and have found it sets me up for a successful trip regardless of the content I’m delivering.

– Adrian D’Andrea, Corporate Sales Manager, CDW Canada

CDW MDR Information Assistant
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Our Senior Manager of Tech Strategy, David Izzard, designed this information assistant in Copilot to help our CDW sellers navigate an ever-changing and complex solution landscape: managed detection and response.

Instead of simply bringing in a solution architect to help position these services, the CDW MDR Copilot Agent gives sellers an opportunity to differentiate with their customers, from high-level overviews and pricing to business and technical benefits.  

– Adrian D’Andrea, Corporate Sales Manager, CDW Canada

Learning agent and Copilot Pages for upskilling and certifications
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I use the Microsoft Learning agent to build personalized study plans based on my current skill level, how many hours per week I can commit to learning and what my exam goal is. The agent guides me to learning resources based on my preferred learning style and even generates practice questions to help me study and prepare for exams.

– Kelly LaForest, Professional Services Delivery Consultant, Microsoft 365, CDW Canada

Keep customer projects organized with Copilot Notebooks
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Managing my customer project workload requires being highly organized. I was already a devoted OneNote user before Copilot Notebooks came along. Now I create a Notebook for each customer so I can organize my project materials (including relevant Copilot chats, pages and other reference files like Office files and links) in one AI-powered workspace for easy access.

How does this help? When I ask the Copilot notebook a question, the response is grounded in my curated notebook’s content so I get tailored, in-context responses that are more relevant than just asking Copilot chat.

– Kelly LaForest, Professional Services Delivery Consultant, Microsoft 365, CDW Canada

Consolidate and summarize data from multiple sources
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In financial planning and analysis, we often work with data scattered across different spreadsheets and systems. Pulling these together manually can compromise data hygiene and increases the risk of missing key details. Copilot helps consolidate these files into one unified view by mapping common fields and aligning formats, so everything is consistent.

– Harleen Bains, Financial Analyst, CDW CDW Canada

Build visuals for leadership presentations
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Copilot transforms raw tables into polished visuals and suggests the best chart types for the data, helping me present trends and variances in a way that’s easy to understand. This is a huge time-saver when preparing slides for leadership reviews or business updates.

– Harleen Bains, Financial Analyst, CDW CDW Canada

Fast-track your AI journey with Copilot and CDW

CDW Canada’s AccelerateAI Services offer a comprehensive and customizable framework to help organizations move swiftly and securely from AI exploration to enterprise-wide adoption.

Our core Copilot offerings include the following:

1. Copilot + Power Platform envisioning & proof of concept

  • Ideal for organizations evaluating the feasibility and value of Microsoft 365 Copilot, Copilot Chat, Copilot Studio agents and Power Platform solutions
  • Helps identify high-impact business scenarios and demonstrate tangible value through pilot deployments

2. Copilot + Power Platform deployment accelerator

  • Supports full-scale deployment and adoption of Copilot and Power Platform solutions
  • Includes planning, stakeholder coordination and technical enablement to ensure secure, compliant and scalable rollouts

3. Specialized Microsoft solutions

  • Designed to meet unique organizational needs and deliver measurable business outcomes
  • These solutions can range from design thinking workshops to building custom web chatbots to support your organization

Our services are designed to uncover high-impact business scenarios, build tailored AI solutions and ensure secure, compliant rollouts through robust governance and stakeholder coordination.

CDW also addresses the critical need for user education and adoption, offering immersive training and change management to upskill teams and foster confident AI usage.

Backed by certifications in data, AI, security and modern work and recognized as Microsoft’s 2023 Modern Workplace Partner of the Year, CDW empowers Canadian organizations to use AI with greater productivity.