Sponda deployed Copilot for Microsoft 365 across its entire organization with our support
Sponda is one of Finland’s largest real estate investment companies. The company owns, leases, and develops office, retail, and shopping center properties in Finland’s largest cities and growth areas.
Sponda deployed Copilot for Microsoft 365 with our support. The key to a successful rollout was active end-user training from the earliest stages. The project demonstrated that productive and efficient use of AI does not depend solely on technology choices. It requires user-driven change management across the entire organization.
Customer: Sponda
Industry: Real estate
Location: Helsinki, Finland
The Challenge: Aiming for exceptional customer experience
The initiative began when Sponda’s leadership recognized the new opportunities generative AI could bring to strengthening the company’s competitive advantage. One strategic focus area stood out as use cases were explored: ensuring a high-quality customer experience.
Much of Sponda’s daily work involves communication, content creation, meetings, and decision-making. For years, the company has relied on Microsoft 365 cloud services as its main platform for digital collaboration.
At the start of 2024, Sponda launched a deployment project that brought generative AI into the everyday work of knowledge workers through Copilot for Microsoft 365. The goal was to increase productivity and improve both customer and employee experience.
The Solution: Productive AI adoption starts with training
Copilot for Microsoft 365 brings generative AI into Teams, Word, Outlook, PowerPoint, and Excel applications. With Copilot, Sponda’s employees can summarize online meetings, chats, and emails, produce content more efficiently, and get prompt answers based on the company’s existing communication and document content.
Copilot also enhances meeting practices. Employees no longer need to join meetings “just in case”, because essential points can be retrieved afterward through AI-powered transcripts. Copilot for Microsoft 365 also offers a ChatGPT-like experience, which allows users to generate content and insights through prompts.
Reaching the project goals required Sponda to apply user-centered change management, aligned with the organization’s starting point and the desired behavioral shifts.
Instead of limiting the deployment to a small pilot group, Sponda decided to roll out Copilot for Microsoft 365 to the entire organization at once, accelerating value creation. A crucial success factor was the leadership team’s active involvement in goal setting, training participation, and leading the change by example. The organization’s readiness for change was also high: continuous learning is one of Sponda’s core values, and employees were genuinely motivated to adopt new tools.
The Results: A successful rollout across the entire organization
Copilot for Microsoft 365 is now used throughout Sponda. Feedback collected during and after the training sessions has been positive, regarding the training content and the product experience itself.
Survey results show clear improvements. Before the training, employees had basic knowledge of Copilot. After the training, most reported good or very good skills in using Copilot.
The next goal is to embed high-value use cases into employees’ daily work to ensure the desired business impact and to enable continuous adoption of new Copilot for Microsoft 365 features as they evolve.
“We needed a partner with strong expertise in both change management and technology. We chose Twoday, which has been a forerunner in generative AI in Finland and is also a leading Microsoft cloud partner.”
Timo Pantsari
Chief Information and Technology Officer, Sponda