Newark & Sherwood District Council was Highly Commended in the Artificial Intelligence category at the Housing Technology Awards 2025. Kristin McIntosh, the council’s digital solutions team leader, explains how it used Microsoft Copilot as an additional ‘admin’ project resource, effectively adding an extra person to its small nine-strong team.
Common challenges with projects, both large and small, can occur with resources, whether it’s insufficient budget, scope changes adding to an already busy workload or pulling together a sufficiently skilled team. At Newark and Sherwood District Council, our project to replace our housing management system was no exception, so in April 2024 we had the opportunity to test the technology and see what support Microsoft Copilot could give our team, and it yielded some exceptional results.
Why Copilot?
While there are many headline-grabbing examples of AI in the social housing sector, Copilot delivers at a more fundamental and easy-to-access level. Our aim was simple: to give our staff a cost-effective tool to help them work more efficiently and manage their workloads better, with the aim of ensuring project success and avoiding expensive project extensions, all without having to recruit and train additional staff.
Video management
One standout application of Copilot was video-content identification. With numerous recorded sessions taking place internally, manually re-watching and marking these sessions to know where specifically relevant content was located was immensely time-consuming, often requiring at least four hours per full day of recordings.
Copilot reduced this process to just four minutes, freeing up valuable staff resources and allowed us to focus on content review rather than labelling videos for future reference. This automation not only saved time but also provided additional methods for searching content, enhancing accessibility and efficiency. The time saved was an average of six days per month.
Meeting support
Managing meetings is another area where Copilot has had a substantial impact. Traditional meeting administration tasks, such as writing minutes, catching up with colleagues and summarising action items, were time-consuming and often required a dedicated minute-taker.
Copilot’s meeting features such as recap, summary and action-list generation eliminated the need for manual minute-taking, reduced attendance requirements and streamlined our administrative activities. Furthermore, Copilot’s ability to find suitable meeting slots and identify relevant resources for preparation significantly reduced the time we spent on meeting logistics. Our savings around ‘meeting support’ totalled an average of five days per month.
Report refinement
Updating reports for various stakeholder groups was labour-intensive, requiring extensive time to distil activities into concise and comprehensible content.
Copilot’s support in providing alternative versions of paragraphs and simplifying content for the appropriate audience streamlined this process. The time spent on creating reports was halved, resulting in more concise and informative reports that required fewer follow-up questions, resulting in average savings of a half-day per month.
SQL code-writing support
SQL code-writing was a challenge for our team members unfamiliar with the intricacies of this programming language. Copilot’s suggestions for achieving complex outcomes and its error-checking capabilities accelerated our learning curve, enhanced our skills and enabled us to run the project more efficiently.
The skills gained by our team allowed us to exploit a range of what might be considered ‘nice to have’ functionalities within our new system, which in turn helped with boosting end-user adoption of our new HMS.
Communications support
Effective communication is critical to the success of any project. Copilot’s structural, layout and content suggestions for presentations and internal communications significantly improved the quality and efficiency of our content creation.
Whether generating content for workshop planning, presentation decks or blog posts, Copilot expedited the process, ensuring that our messages were clear, contextually-appropriate to the audience and engaging.
Qualitative benefits
Beyond the quantitative time savings, Copilot also delivered significant qualitative benefits. It provided tailored support for our neurodiverse and dyslexic team members, enhancing their ability to contribute effectively and confidently.
Real-time text-to-speech and speech-to-text functionalities, grammar and spell check, template suggestions and automated formatting simplified our documentation process and ensured high-quality outputs.
Exponential and ongoing improvements
By using Copilot as our additional project resource for two-thirds of our nine-strong team, we freed up the equivalent of one FTE at a cost of less than one tenth of the salary of an average team member while at the same time increased the quality of our outputs and quantity of work.
Copilot is ever-evolving and as new functionality has been released, we’ve seen additional benefits in areas such as locating information on our corporate SharePoint site. This has reduced our reliance on personally-saved information and the number of queries sent between colleagues looking for infrequently-used information, thereby continuing to yield additional efficiency improvements across a range of areas.
Kristin McIntosh CITP MCBS is the digital solutions team leader at Newark and Sherwood District Council. The council was Highly Commended in the Artificial Intelligence category at the Housing Technology Awards 2025.
