Leading Australian wealth management firm Colonial First State (CFS) has expanded its rollout of Microsoft’s Copilot to 75 per cent of its workforce, representing more than 1,000 staff across its Australian operations.

After an initial test-case rollout of 300 Microsoft Copilot licences at the beginning of 2024, CFS tech and operations chief Jeroen Buwalda, speaking directly to Microsoft on the rollout, said he is now actively encouraging innovative use cases for the technology “rather than presenting business cases for immediate return on investment”.

One particular use case he cited was an in-house experiment, which leverages Microsoft’s large language model (LLM) combined with CFS’s extensive dataset, to enable financial advisers to receive immediate answers to complex queries on superannuation legislation through chatbot-style natural language prompts.

“[Our technical services team] are experts in superannuation legislation and highly sought after by financial advisers,” Buwalda said.

“Using Azure OpenAI Service, we’ve created a service that is trained on our extensive library of documents on superannuation legislation to essentially tap into the knowledge of this team.”

Buwalda said early results with the LLM have been “promising”, with the team looking to extend this capability to advisers directly. However, he stressed that people will never be taken out of this process, with a “human front and centre to ensure accuracy”.

He said CFS is also looking to extend GenAI to CFS’s call centre agents, providing information on trends in interaction feedback or enabling AI to handle simple customer queries. He stressed, however, that a human will remain “in the loop”.

Copilot, which is Microsoft’s dedicated GenAI platform embedded into its software suite, enables users to create, edit, synthesise or analyse a variety of content through natural language commands. This includes the outputting of text copy (such as the drafting of documents or spreadsheets, or the creation of computer code) or the ability to generate original images through text prompts.

Citing CFS survey data, Buwalda reports that CFS’s pilot program for Copilot is delivering, on average, a 30-minute saving per day for around 40 per cent of its staff.

However, others in the business have reported significantly greater productivity benefits, Buwalda said.

“One of our product managers believes it saved them about 70 per cent of the time required to run a market analysis and the insights they gained are now being used to prioritise changes to our offering.

“Another team member used it for speeding up proposal development for process changes, using Copilot to quickly access a repository from a previous project with similar changes. This saved them 90 per cent of the effort.”