IPTD-580
Copilot 365 license trial/pilot effort
Description
Conduct a 90-day pilot with 60 licensed individuals to measure usefulness and understand where best to target licensing for optimal ROI. Feedback will be in live, recorded weekly sessions, weekly surveys and ideally in tracked usage metrics.
See listing of Ai leads and trial participants (those assigned a license) here: AI leads.xlsx
Participants will engage in recorded discussions every 2 weeks, fill out a survey weekly and record valuable use cases as they work them out.
Problem Statement
Microsoft offers a $30/month/seat license for its Copilot 365 tools, which integrate with familiar apps like Excel, Word, PPT, etc. and can be used within the context of the user and their file access and use history, emails, appointments, etc. We have no basis to advise leadership on the adoption and spending for these tools.
Project Justification
Licensing all of DEP would cost near to $1 mil per year. The need to wisely adopt ensuring ROI and uptake calls for some trial effort to learn what makes sense.
Estimated Transactions
None
Created
11 September 2025, 12:04
Target Rollout Date
1 October 2025
Target Rollout Date Reason
None
Updated
24 March 2026, 12:58
Activity
Show:
At a meeting December 18th between Microsoft and NJOIT, Microsoft acknowledged a number of stumbles in the roll-out of Copilot to government and highlighted that most of the missing features have been corrected. They also noted that some previously paid features are now available along with existing licensing (not clear if NJDEP’s enterprise license qualifies). However, there is still no clear way to know for sure what to expect or not with or without a license. In follow-up, Microsoft’s Grant Oliasani offered to make efforts to attend our pilot sessions as he is available to help us navigate these uncertainties.
Today all DEP trial participants are being notified of having been assigned a license, will be asked to confirm this and begin exploration of the tools in prep for our first meeting January 15th.
Microsoft is setting a follow-up meeting to 9/23 with Rob DeVleming so that an engineer can walk the team (Pete, Knute, Kurt, Maria, Mike Mc, Manav) through the differences between: 1. Broken expected features, 2. pending but essential basic features, 3. planned future improvements. Rob promised access to a better roadmap of pending GCC features than is publicly available.
Rob will also share some government role description to use-case mapping from other efforts.
DEP CoP team will meet Thursday with pilot timing still indefinite pending more Microsoft info.
As of this week programs have supplied more than 60 candidates, some still need to meet the training requirement. Seeking a meeting with Microsoft to learn of limitations to the tools where files cannot be edited/updated on the fly nor produced for download. Also currently lacking Analytics for use tracking. Met with OOI today who is working toward two draft surveys (weekly and initial/final).