Manchester City Council harnesses Microsoft 365 Copilot with Copilot Studio to drive greater service for citizens
Manchester City Council deployed Microsoft 365 Copilot integrated with SharePoint for contact centre knowledge retrieval, cutting new-starter onboarding from one to two weeks down to a single day, and built an AI Foundry automation with partner ANS that classifies pothole severity from citizen-submitted photos.
Overview
Manchester City Council deployed Microsoft 365 Copilot integrated with SharePoint for contact centre knowledge retrieval, cutting new-starter onboarding from one to two weeks down to a single day, and built an AI Foundry automation with partner ANS that classifies pothole severity from citizen-submitted photos.
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Inspect the highlighted sourceThe challenge
Manchester City Council's contact centres, particularly housing services, handled a large volume of enquiries against a big knowledge base of SharePoint documents that staff had to trawl through manually, slowing support and new-starter onboarding; highways services also relied on time- and resource-intensive manual pothole inspections.
The solution
The council integrated Microsoft 365 Copilot into SharePoint so housing contact centre staff could query the knowledge base in natural language, built a tailored Copilot Studio agent to consolidate SharePoint pages and website content for its main contact centre, and worked with Microsoft partner ANS to build an AI Foundry automation that analyses citizen-submitted photos of potholes and classifies their severity (category 1-4) to prioritize repairs.
Reported business value
New contact centre starters were answering phones within a day instead of the previous one to two weeks; staff can find information faster without trawling file folders; and the pothole AI model now handles initial severity assessment (still verified by manual inspection today), accelerating reporting and prioritized repair decisions.
Sources
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