NHS England pilot of Microsoft 365 Copilot saves 43 minutes per staff member daily across 90 organisations

NHS staff across 90 organisations were spending significant time on administrative tasks such as note-taking in meetings, managing emails, and other workflow activities. With over one million Teams meetings and 10.3 million emails per month, the administrative burden was diverting staff time away from direct patient care at a time when waiting lists were growing and budgets were under pressure.

NHS England piloted Microsoft 365 Copilot across 90 NHS organisations involving more than 30,000 NHS workers — the largest AI trial of its kind globally in healthcare. The tool was deployed directly into Microsoft Teams, Outlook, Word, and Excel, enabling staff to use natural language prompts to get help with tasks and workflows including meeting summaries, email summarisation, and document drafting.

Self-reported results showed staff saved more than 43 minutes per day per person, equating to five weeks per person annually. A full roll-out to 100,000 users could save up to 400,000 hours of staff time per month and potentially generate hundreds of millions of pounds in cost savings per year. Meeting note-taking alone could save 83,333 hours per month, and email summarisation a further 271,000 hours per month.

• Large-scale AI productivity tools can deliver measurable time savings in healthcare settings when deployed across existing collaboration platforms staff already use.
• NHS's collective buying power enabled access to Microsoft Copilot Chat at no additional cost, demonstrating a scalable procurement model.
• Self-reported savings suggest strong staff adoption, but a full roll-out evaluation should capture objective productivity metrics alongside self-reporting.