Think, share, do: 3 steps to enhanced-AI collaboration

AI collaboration: The new frontier

Collaboration is a vital skill for any business, especially in the age of AI. But how do you collaborate well with your teammates, managers, peers and colleagues when you have an AI companion like Copilot by your side? How do you leverage the power of AI to enhance your productivity, creativity and innovation?

In this second blog post in our series, we will share with you our insights and experiences on how to collaborate effectively with AI in the advertising and marketing industry. We will introduce you to our framework of "think, share, do", which outlines the 3 key steps to successful AI collaboration. We will also show you data and examples of how our team at Microsoft Advertising has been using Copilot for Microsoft 365 to collaborate better, faster and smarter!

Think, share, do: our framework for AI collaboration

At Microsoft Advertising, we have developed a simple but effective framework to guide our collaboration with AI. Our framework consists of 3 core ideas: thinking together, sharing together, and doing together.

• Thinking together means having conversations about how to best use AI for different work tasks. It involves brainstorming, planning, strategizing and designing new workflows with AI.
• Sharing together means exchanging best practices, prompt chains, use cases and app sequences that enable increased productivity with AI. It involves learning, teaching, mentoring and supporting each other with AI.
• Doing together means devising new habits and workflows that leverage AI in larger magnitudes. It involves executing, implementing, testing and iterating with AI.

But not every area of collaboration is equal in how many colleagues are engaging with that specific behavior. Let's look at the data:

As you can see, the largest percentage of employee collaboration comes from sharing together, which includes sharing prompts, use cases, workflows and tips to accelerate the usage of AI. This makes sense, as sharing is key to learning from each other to improve our AI skills.

What is interesting, however, is that there is also significant evidence of deliberate and meaningful collaboration in real time to reinvest time in more valuable forms of collaboration with AI. By using AI to answer simple questions and automate routine tasks, we can free up more time to focus on complex and strategic work with our colleagues.

How often and how deeply do we collaborate with AI?

So how frequently do our teams collaborate with colleagues using Copilot for Microsoft 365? We learned through data that many of our employees are either collaborating daily (14%) or weekly (32%) on Copilot-related subjects (or empowered by it). When combined with those who are collaborating monthly (20%), we see that over 60% of Microsoft Advertising employees are taking meaningful steps to collaborate using AI on a regular basis.

Additionally, we asked employees how often they use AI to answer work-related questions instead of a colleague. 35% of employees answered that they are doing this daily. That number jumps up to 47% if you look at a weekly basis. The net effect? AI technology can enrich collaboration by reducing low-value interaction to make room for deeper team connections.

So what is the overall impact of AI on collaboration, and what can others learn from our experience? What we have seen is that AI usage has led to more in-depth and fruitful interactions among colleagues. Of the respondents, 24% have said that Copilot enables them to have more meaningful conversations and interactions each day, while 54% feel that impact on a weekly basis. These numbers show the power of AI and how it leads to not only enhances individual outcomes, but also more compelling team outcomes. We only expect this trend to increase in the future as Copilot becomes more prevalent across not only individuals, but also teams using AI collaboratively to enable bigger and bolder use cases and work scenarios.

Does AI collaboration vary by function and persona?

You may be wondering if AI collaboration varies by function or persona. When we look across the variety of functions that we have in Microsoft Advertising, collaboration showed up being stronger among those in Support, Marketing and Business Excellence and Operations. These are the functions that deal with a lot of information and communication and can benefit greatly from the help of AI.

It may not be intuitive, but somewhat of an “aha moment” for us, was when we looked at the personas of our employees that we talked about in our power users guide. We saw that one specific persona type had a much higher propensity to collaborate than others. Targeters, those employees using AI for very specific tasks at a high level of frequency, declared the highest level of collaboration across all types. This is likely due to the idea that sharing, thinking and doing is more intense when you have a targeted and specific task where you are using a very specific AI technology to derive outcomes for your role.

Conclusion

In this blog post, we have shared with you our insights on how our employees collaborate effectively with AI in the advertising and marketing industry. We have shown you how our team at Microsoft Advertising has been using Copilot for Microsoft 365 to think, share and do together with AI, and how that has led to more productivity, creativity and innovation.

Whether you are new to AI or a seasoned user, we hope this blog post will inspire you to explore and adopt AI tools in your work and join us in the AI transformation journey. Until next time, keep creating those meaningful moments of collaboration with Copilot for Microsoft 365 and other AI technologies and thanks for reading!