How Kier Group’s Louisa Finlay is using Copilot to drive safety and productivity in the construction industry

Two years ago, Kier Group plc decided to embrace AI - with a little help from work friends and peers.

Executives at the UK construction and infrastructure firm were excited by AI's promise to boost productivity and enhance safety practices. But "some leaders were reticent because they were very busy and it is new technology," says Louisa Finlay, chief operating officer of Kier.

"I will happily be the one that asks the silly question," she notes. "But if you are a senior leader, that can be quite worrying."

To encourage experimentation, executives and colleagues were invited to a series of "prompt-a-thons," where they were encouraged to test their knowledge against AI. One team was asked to answer questions on their own, while a second team was asked to answer the same questions using Microsoft's Copilot AI assistant.

Separately, Kier encouraged AI adoption via fun prompts posed to multiple influencers and leaders throughout the company. Participants asked Copilot to review their emails, meeting documents and collaborations over the past six months and then identify which character they'd be in one of their favorite films. Colleagues who chose to participate enabled Copilot to identify participants' leadership strengths and blind spots - and receive advice that would help them become more effective over the next 12 months.

"The engagement following that was amazing," says Finlay. By conducting the training in small peer groups, the prompt-a-thon "allowed people to feel comfortable not being the cleverest person in the room, knowing it's OK to ask questions and not know the answers." Since then, she says, Copilot use has "taken off."

Kier has roughly 11,000 employees and is based in Salford, England, not far from the northern industrial hub of Manchester. The company builds everything from schools to prisons and has a fast-growing infrastructure services division that builds and manages large-scale water and nuclear energy projects. About 40 percent of colleagues use Microsoft 365 Copilot; the rest have Teams Premium, which adds advanced AI features to the Teams chat and meeting functions.