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HMRC rolls out Microsoft Copilot AI
HM Revenue and Customs has begun to roll out Microsoft 365 Copilot to its staff, with the aim of making productivity savings
HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) has begun to roll out Microsoft 365 Copilot to its staff, aiming to make productivity savings.
The department has invested in 32,000 licences, with plans to scale to 50,000 in 2026, hailing it as the largest Copilot artificial intelligence (AI) roll-out in government.
In a LinkedIn post, Simon Price, director of insight, AI and innovation at HMRC, said the roll-out coincides with the launch of the Civil Service’s One Big Thing 2025: “AI for All” initiative, and staff are required to complete a 90-minute Copilot training session to have access to the licence. “Over 2,000 people completed the training within the first 24 hours,” he said.
“Training is designed to instil Responsible AI principles, and to reinforce the need for human oversight and judgement everywhere that AI is used in HMRC,” added Price.
The HMRC roll-out comes after government ran a trial of using AI with 20,000 civil servants, with results demonstrating they could save nearly two weeks each annually by using the technology.
The trial used generative AI (GenAI) tools such as Microsoft 365 Copilot to assist with everyday tasks, including drafting documents, summarising lengthy emails, updating records and preparing reports.
The results of the trial, published in June 2025, coincided with research from the Alan Turing Institute, which has reported that AI could support up to 41% of tasks across the public sector, offering significant time savings.
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Price said in his LinkedIn post that the use of Copilot AI is “way more powerful than the free-tier AI tools we’ve all tried from home”.
“For a start-off, our data remains securely within our tenant and is not used to train models,” he said. “However, the big win is the ability to ask questions of and manipulate all the internal information you have access to (note it does not widen your access at all). Responses are grounded in our own data. Citations are given. We’ve already had some wonderfully imaginative examples of how to use Copilot in very specific roles. The excitement is there and the desire to do work better, faster is self-evident.”
He added that there is a network of champions in place in each business area, live support through a dedicated Copilot team, and its digital academy is training and guiding learners.
Following the government’s trial of Copilot, results showed that 82% of those in the trial would not want to return to how they worked before using the AI software.
However, it also found that some were concerned around Copilot’s potential for generating incorrect information and the dependency on AI for tasks that involve critical thinking and creativity.
Price added that there have been colleagues who have “objected to the concept of AI philosophically, or based on media, or citing examples of where it has been used for tasks where it is ill-suited”.
“Some of the examples cited have been hilarious, some have been scary, but they could have been avoided by following Responsible AI principles,” he said. “The point I’ve made many times in these discussions is that Copilot is a tool and a skill. Skills take time to learn. Tools are only fit for certain tasks, not for all.”
