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How to Start Using Microsoft Copilot: Enablement Tips and Strategies

By now, you have heard about or even seen the game-changing abilities Microsoft Copilot and AI can bring to your business. Despite this, you might still be asking yourself some variation of this important question:

"How do we bring that potential to life in our organization in a way that is strategic, secure, and tailored to our needs?"

If you partner with Stoneridge Software, you gain access to our Microsoft 365 Copilot Flight Plan, which can help your organization take your AI journey from early exploration to daily use. Inspired by Microsoft's early adopter approach, this program puts your team members at center stage. This means we will help you implement and use Copilot for individual productivity wins before scaling to broader business transformation. With thoughtfully structured phases, the Stoneridge Copilot Flight Plan equips your team with the tools, security context, and confidence needed to start using Copilot effectively.

In this blog, we’ll walk through the Flight Plan structure, what sets it apart, and our approach to security. We’ll also share strategies that drive meaningful adoption, starting with individuals and expanding to your entire organization.

The Four-Step Journey to Copilot Adoption

Rolling out Microsoft Copilot isn’t just about access, it’s about readiness. The Copilot Flight Plan is a phased journey that builds awareness, aligns priorities, prepares your environment, and empowers people to succeed. Here’s a high level look at how it works:

1. Meet Copilot: Before anything else, you must understand what Copilot is and what it enables. This short, high-level phase introduces Copilot’s role across various Microsoft 365 apps. Through a video and guided discussion, we can help your team see the benefits of Coplilot and how it fits into their daily work.
2. Pre-Flight: Once your vision is clear, we help you align on goals and begin planning. The Pre-Flight stage is about strategic alignment. We engage with your leaders to define purpose, explore key use cases, and address early security considerations.
3. Flight Readiness: Next, we prepare your technical environment. We ensure your devices, apps, and permissions are set for a secure Copilot experience. Additionally, we help sort out your licensing, compliance, and core IT configurations.
4. Flight School: In the last stage, we help your team start using Copilot with proactive and thoughtful guidance. We train early adopters, collect feedback, and build internal champions to support organic growth.

Once the foundational phases are complete and early users have started to use Copilot, the Flight Plan expands to broader adoption across your organization. This next stage focuses on scaling, bringing in additional teams and aligning use cases to specific roles to sustain success. Organizations can also opt into department-specific advanced training to help them deploy Copilot in more complex workflows. This is where Copilot becomes a vital asset in your business, rather than just a tool. 

A Question of Security

Protecting data security and integrity is one of the main concerns businesses raise when inquiring about Microsoft Copilot. Creating a sound data security strategy for AI is vital, as weak security measures lead to data leakages, access issues, potential compliance violations, and inaccurate responses. While the Copilot Flight Plan doesn’t replace a deep infrastructure security assessment - which we recommend as a foundational step - we take security seriously and handle AI differently than many traditional programs.

Rather than focusing solely on backend infrastructure, the Flight Plan emphasizes the security context of Copilot, dictates what it can access, what it’s generating, and pin points how your team is using it every day. During Pre-Flight and Flight Readiness, we help you assess configurations, licensing controls, prompt responses, and user access to ensure Copilot operates securely within your environment. We also support organizations in reviewing critical security settings, like data-sharing preferences or device-level deployment controls.

This practical, user-centered approach helps you move forward with confidence. You don’t have to wait until every security detail is perfect to begin seeing value, our Flight Plan builds security awareness into the journey, so Copilot adoption happens safely, strategically, and at a pace that fits your organization.

With that security context in mind, let’s return to the Flight Plan journey, starting with a deeper look at the Preflight phase and how it sets the tone for successful, secure adoption.

Preflight: Laying the Groundwork for Success

The Preflight phase of the Copilot Flight Plan is all about preparation - setting clear expectations, aligning on business value, and identifying key players. This is where the foundational understanding of Copilot takes shape, ensuring you're ready to move forward with a clear vision of how this new tool will integrate into your organization.

Key steps include:

• Kick-Off Meeting: This is where we bring together key stakeholders and leadership to introduce the concept of Copilot and discuss its potential applications in your organization.
• Understanding Copilot: We’ll teach you what Copilot can and can’t do, address common misconceptions and clarify how it can fit within your business needs.
• Copilot Security: By identifying and addressing security concerns early, we ensure you're informed on managing and safeguarding sensitive data within the Copilot environment.
• Business Value of Copilot: We’ll explore how Copilot can directly benefit your business by identifying high-value use cases and aligning them with your strategic goals.
• Identifying Key Players: Knowing who needs to be involved from various departments, including leadership and early adopters, helps ensure a much smoother deployment.
• Outcome Value Report: By the end of this phase, we provide a comprehensive report that outlines expected outcomes, areas for further exploration, and opportunities to fine-tune the plan.
• Plan Your Journey: With everything in place, we outline the next steps so you can move forward confidently and ensure your Copilot journey is set for success.

The preflight phase is not just about getting started, it's about setting the tone for the entire Copilot adoption journey, ensuring clarity, alignment, and preparedness across the organization.

Flight Readiness: Preparing for Takeoff

Flight Readiness ensures your organization is fully equipped and ready to deploy Copilot effectively. In this phase, we focus on key security and deployment tasks and ensure your systems are in place for a smooth, productive launch. It’s like a pilot's checklist, ensuring everything is ready for a successful flight.

Key steps include:

• Deploy a Security Strategy: Establishing strong security foundations is critical. We review your security framework and make necessary adjustments to align with Copilot deployment.
• Intune Deployment: Ensuring your devices are properly managed and compliant through Microsoft Intune, providing a secure environment for Copilot to function.
• Dashboard Review: We guide you through the Copilot dashboard to understand key metrics, track agent consumption, and monitor overall performance.
• Agent Consumption Meter Setup: Our team sets up the meter to track the usage and costs of Copilot agents to ensuring efficient resource management.
• Sensitivity Labeling: Implementing sensitivity labels to classify and protect your organization's sensitive data within Copilot.
• Permissions Management: Defining roles and permissions to ensure that only the right individuals can the appropriate information and tools.
• Data Loss Prevention: Setting up data loss prevention (DLP) policies to secure your data from accidental sharing or breaches.
• Copilot Deployment: The final step ensures Copilot is deployed effectively across your organization and ready to start driving productivity.

By focusing on these critical readiness components, we ensure that your organization is prepared to launch Copilot with full security and operational effectiveness, allowing for a smooth transition into the Flight School phase.

Flight School: Guiding Champions to Lead with Confidence

Flight School is where Copilot adoption increases within your organization in a more meaningful and sustained way. With your foundation in place, this phase focuses on empowering a core team of champions to lead by example. Over ten weeks, they’ll build key Copilot skills, share practical use cases, and foster broader adoption across the organization. This is about culture change through enablement—not just tools.

Key steps include:

• Kickoff Meeting: We begin with a launch session to align expectations, introduce your champions, and set goals for the Flight School journey.
• Champion Training: Weekly skill-building sessions focus on real-world Copilot use across Outlook, Teams, Word, and more, meeting champions where they are and helping them progress.
• Champion Check-ins: Regular check-ins ensure champions use Copilot actively, help troubleshoot issues, and keep momentum strong.
• Communication Kit: We provide a set of customizable templates and messaging to help champions communicate effectively with their teams and drive excitement.
• Executive Check-ins: Leadership support is critical. We facilitate periodic executive touchpoints to reinforce the message, model adoption, and share wins.
• Flight Plan Recap and Report: At the end of Flight School, we deliver a summary report with key outcomes, engagement levels, and recommendations for scaling adoption beyond the initial champions.

Flight School turns early adopters into internal advocates and arms them with the knowledge and support needed to inspire a broader Copilot culture, one that sticks.

The Secret to Sustainable Adoption: Champions and Executive Buy-In

Behind every successful Copilot rollout are the people who help bring it to life: your champions. Champions are the engine behind lasting change. These people are naturally curious, quick to adopt new tools, and already thinking about how AI can improve their day-to-day work. Whether your team is in the warehouse, in HR, or at the service desk, early adopters are critical in showcasing the benefits of Copilot and setting an example for others to eventually do the same. 

But champions can’t do it alone. Visible, consistent support from an executive sponsor signals that Copilot is more than a tool, it’s a strategic shift. When leaders actively use Copilot, speak to its value, and encourage experimentation, adoption becomes cultural, not just technical.

Why is the Stoneridge Copilot Flight School So Effective?

Most programs stop at training, but Copilot Flight School goes far beyond. While others offer one-size-fits-all instruction or generic learning paths, our approach is strategic, role-based, and focused on long-term success. It’s not just about showing users how to use Copilot; it’s about embedding it into the fabric of your business.

Here’s what sets it apart:

• Security Is Front and Center: From day one, we help you identify and address the security and governance considerations unique to your organization. This is built into the process—not tacked on as an afterthought.
• More Than Just Training: Traditional Copilot enablement often ends with a one-time training session. Flight School is a 10-week, hands-on program that includes tailored scenarios, practical usage patterns, and weekly reinforcement through check-ins and assignments.
• Accountability and Measurement: We don’t just train and walk away. We monitor adoption, track usage, and adapt based on real-world feedback. This ensures that the skills taught are being applied and making a difference.
• Train-the-Trainer Model: By building up a core team of 10 champions, we empower your organization to scale internally. These champions become the go-to experts who can support others long after the initial program ends.
• Executive Involvement: Executive sponsorship isn’t optional—it’s a built-in pillar of success. We engage leadership early and often to ensure cultural alignment and visible top-down support.
• Business Outcome Focused: This isn’t about tech for tech’s sake. Every piece of the program ties back to your organization’s goals and real productivity gains, not just product features.

Copilot Flight School is structured like a true business transformation initiative; not a product demo. That’s what makes it different, and that’s what makes it stick.

Fly Further on Your Copilot Journey with Stoneirdge Software

Copilot Flight School sets a strong foundation, but your journey doesn't stop there. At Stoneridge, we offer advanced programs to extend your organization’s learning, boost adoption, and unlock even more business value from Microsoft Copilot. Whether you're ready to scale across departments or explore intelligent agents, we’ll help you fly further.

Advanced Enablement Packages

Here’s how you can continue building momentum:

• Copilot Flight Simulator: A hands-on, scenario-based experience to help teams co-create solutions using AI. Perfect for purchasing, HR, IT, or any department, Flight Simulator helps define real business needs, build basic agents, and test solutions in a safe environment.
• Business Value Workshops: Take deep dives into your specific scenarios to uncover measurable outcomes and set a strategic Copilot roadmap. These workshops align your use cases with the right Microsoft AI tools and automation pathways.
• Extended Flight School: Ready to onboard more users? This offering scales training across your organization, up to 200, 300, or even 500+ people, with tailored coaching and support.
• Custom Copilot Security Readiness: Dive deeper into your data governance, permissions, and secure the collaboration needed to confidently scale your Copilot usage.
• Copilot for Sales & Copilot for Service: Built by our Dynamics 365 experts, these offerings help customer experience and sales teams quickly realize value with guided training and scenario-driven adoption plans tied directly to D365.

Dive Deeper: Agents and the Power of Simulation

Flight Simulator is more than a training add-on, it’s where learning meets doing. These sessions guide teams through building their own AI agents or automation flows using tools like Power Automate or Copilot Studio. It's equal parts design session and proof of concept.

• Design Around the Role: We start by identifying what the user needs to accomplish, not just the tool they’ll use.
• Proof Through Practice: These are live, hands-on sessions that result in a working solution, not just a concept on paper.
• Applicable Across Teams: Whether it's purchasing, sales order processing, or credit management, every team can participate in building something valuable.

What Comes Next? Talking to the Stoneridge Experts! 

Copilot is powerful, but like any new technology, the key to success lies in how you roll it out. The Flight Plan at Stoneridge is designed to ensure your team doesn’t just adopt Copilot, but thrives with it. By focusing on secure foundations, employee enablement, and practical application, we help your organization unlock the full potential of Copilot.

With a focus on people, security, and tangible outcomes, The Copilot Flight Plan can help you improve your business. Connect with our team today to learn more.

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