DWP's Controlled Evaluation of Microsoft 365 Copilot — A More Rigorous Estimate of UK Civil-Service Time Savings

The UK Department for Work and Pensions, the government's largest public-facing department, piloted Microsoft 365 Copilot from October 2024 to March 2025 (evaluation published February 2026), allocating 3,549 licences across 12 licence groups covering core departmental functions and excluding frontline caseworkers.

DWP compared survey responses from 1,716 Copilot users (48% response rate) against 2,535 responses from a non-user comparison group (27% response rate), plus 19 in-depth interviews, using a Seemingly Unrelated Regression model to adjust for age, gender, grade, role, directorate, health conditions and prior AI experience.

The adjusted estimate found Copilot users saved an average of 19 minutes per day (26 minutes on information retrieval, 25 on email writing, 24 on summarising, 9 on meeting transcription); 95% of users reported being satisfied, 89% redirected the time saved to other tasks, and job satisfaction and perceived work quality rose modestly (0.56 and 0.49 points on a 7-point scale).

DWP's report explicitly notes its 19-minute estimate sits below the 26-minutes-per-day figure from a June 2025 Government Digital Service trial of 20,000 civil servants that used self-reported measures with no comparison group -- illustrating how methodological rigour changes headline AI productivity estimates. DWP also disclosed its own trial's limitations: no randomisation, no pre-intervention baseline, and reliance on self-reported measures.