Last fall Indiana ran a pilot with Microsoft Copilot for employees across a variety of state agencies. After analyzing the results, the Indiana Office of Technology (IOT) this year began offering Copilot Chat to staff enterprisewide — the only requirement was to complete training beforehand. IOT saw quick uptake of the program by people who wanted access to the chatbot. The full version of the software, an M365 license, is available for agencies to purchase. Lenard said some agencies have already opted in and expects that numbers will grow as the state turns to its new fiscal year this July.
A critical part of the AI program is ongoing training, and IOT is seeing state staff go through what Lenard called “all the typical use cases”: writing documents, creating presentations, analyzing contracts. While he cautions that those uses can’t be “taken verbatim,” it’s speeding up productivity.
But the training doesn’t stop with rank-and-file employees. Lenard is making sure senior management, including secretaries in the governor’s cabinet, are familiar with AI so they understand what it can and can’t do to benefit Indiana.
So we're a Microsoft shop. We started a Copilot pilot back in the fall. We ran that for about eight weeks. We had involvement from many of the agencies. After those eight weeks, we took a look at the results from that pilot. How was data being accessed? And there were surprises along the way.
We spent then the next few months after the pilot completed to kind of mitigate any risks and gaps. And starting at the beginning of this year, we slowly started to roll out the Copilot product. We started with Copilot Chat, which is kind of the free version, if you will — nothing's really free — and we sent that out and we allowed everyone to have access at the state. You had to complete certain training before you could actually gain access to the platform.
Those trainings have been critical, not only across the masses, but also training folks at the senior management level, at the secretary level. We've had sessions with the secretaries to kind of embed them into the technology and expose it to them and say, “Here's what it can do, here's what we need to be careful, here's how it works.” So they have a really good understanding of the technology and how it could benefit.
