Adopt Microsoft Copilot — Qatar's MCIT Reports 62% Adoption and 1.7 Million Tasks Across Nine Government Entities

The Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MCIT) ran 'Adopt Microsoft Copilot' as what its Assistant Undersecretary for Infrastructure and Operations Affairs, Sami Mohammad Al Shammari, called the first large-scale experiment in using generative AI tools inside Qatari government entities. Phase one covered nine governmental and semi-governmental organisations.
At a graduation ceremony announced on 4 December 2025, MCIT published four headline figures for that first cohort: a 62% adoption rate, more than 9,000 active users, 1.7 million tasks executed through Copilot, and more than 240,000 working hours saved. Phase two was launched at the same event, expanding to 17 further governmental and semi-governmental entities and moving the training component under the Qatar Digital Academy, with specialised programmes intended to raise staff digital skills rather than simply hand out licences. Lana Khalaf, General Manager of Microsoft Qatar, spoke at the ceremony. The programme is positioned within Qatar's Digital Agenda 2030 and its third national development strategy.
The adoption and usage numbers are the credible part of this record. A 62% adoption rate and 9,000 active users are countable facts about licence take-up, and 1.7 million tasks is a platform telemetry figure. They establish that the deployment was real and reached meaningful scale rather than stalling as a pilot.
The 240,000-hours figure deserves scepticism, and the catalogue records it as a claim rather than a finding. MCIT has not published the methodology behind it. Hours-saved estimates for Copilot deployments are typically derived from self-reported per-task time savings multiplied by usage counts, which assumes both that users estimate their own savings accurately and that time saved converts into output. Government trials that tested that assumption more rigorously have produced sharply different answers: the UK Department for Business and Trade's Copilot pilot found no measurable productivity gain, and the UK's cross-government experiment and DWP's controlled evaluation produced far more cautious estimates than vendor-side figures. None of those trials used a randomised design either, but they at least attempted a counterfactual. Qatar's programme has published no control group, no baseline output measure and no independent evaluation.
What the case demonstrates well is the institutional scaffolding: a named ministry owner, a staged rollout from nine entities to seventeen, and training routed through a standing national academy rather than left to each agency. That structure is the transferable part. The productivity claim is not yet evidence.

Read the full analysis: https://www.mcit.gov.qa/en/news/mcit-graduates-first-copilot-adoption-program-cohort-and-launches-phase-two/