How Amadeus Employees Use AI with Microsoft Copilot 

The AI assistant in Microsoft Teams can take notes during meetings, list follow-up points, and more. That’s been one of the top uses by Amadeus employees since they started testing Microsoft’s Copilot generative AI chatbot last August.

“There is no organization in the world that is really super good at taking notes of meetings. And it’s always difficult to have somebody focusing on what is said and taking notes instead of being part of the discussion,” said Frederick Ros, head of digital workplace services at Amadeus. “So now with this kind of technology, it’s much more efficient.” 

He added that the chatbot in Teams was able to understand five different accents and company-specific acronyms during one meeting.

Madrid-based Amadeus has been among a handful of companies testing Copilot as part of Microsoft’s Early Adopter Program. The Copilot tool is integrated across Microsoft’s suite of products — Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams.

The test at Amadeus started with 300 employees at various levels of the company. The company has been working to make the tech available to 6,000 employees, about a third of the company.

Amadeus is still trying to measure exactly how much time Copilot saves on certain tasks, but the sentiment from employees was clear.

“The signal that they were all sending was, ‘Don’t remove it. I want to keep it,’” said Ros, who is leading the adoption of generative AI internally at Amadeus. 

Adopting AI at Amadeus

Amadeus in February 2023 compiled an internal policy regarding generative AI. The company has also put together trainings on how to generally use Copilot and generative AI, as well as how to create prompts that elicit the best responses. 

“If we want to be able to develop products with generative AI, we need to ensure people on our side are really understanding what generative AI is, and are trained to use generative AI,” Ros said. “If they start using Copilot daily, then they will have this deep understanding of how it works and what they can bring, and it will probably spark some ideas in their mind.” 

Some other ways Amadeus employees have been using Copilot:

• Summarizing long threads of chat between coworkers, which is particularly helpful for those who join a chat late
• Suggesting draft text for an email based on the context of the employee’s job
• For manually drafted emails, making suggestions about grammar and tone, especially helpful for non-native English speakers
• More effective searches online and of Amadeus’s own data

There have been bugs along the way, which he said are expected, but they typically are identified and solved quickly. 

“That’s software — there are always some bugs,” Ros said. “But interestingly, the solution is evolving really, really quickly.”

AI at Microsoft and Amadeus

Microsoft in September said that Copilot would be integrated into its products. The announcement included an example of how it could be used to plan meetings and for corporate travel. Copilot for Microsoft products became generally available to enterprise customers last November. 

Skift outlined how adopting AI as a back-office assistant was a rising trend in the travel industry.

Microsoft has invested billions of dollars in OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, which makes Microsoft part-owner of the company and gives it exclusive access to develop products with the generative AI technology.

The same tech powers the new Amadeus retail system meant to make airline sales what Amadeus characterizes as more like shopping on Amazon, as well as a connection being tested that would allow an employee to book a business trip using natural language. There are several other pilots under way, as well. 

Photo Credit: Amadeus is using Microsoft Copilot internally.