NCDOT study finds staff expectations change after hands-on Copilot use

Ask the CIO, transportation business-unit leaders, learning team and budget owner which office tasks justify the license and what would count as sustained value. Use the study's changing usefulness ratings to discuss expectation setting, not to label staff resistant. A bounded engagement could assess a small set of communication, analysis and document workflows and recommend targeted enablement. The value hypothesis is more informed allocation of training and licenses. Ask how managers will measure quality and correction effort alongside perceived usefulness. Do not claim this survey proves productivity loss, financial return or improved transportation outcomes, and do not generalize its user clusters to another workforce.

Begin with the existing collaboration tenant and identify precisely which documents and applications each test role may access. Prerequisites include approved test material, clear information ownership and accessible interaction paths. Validate representative drafting, summarization and spreadsheet tasks separately; an acceptable summary does not establish reliable numerical analysis. Instrument errors, source checking and correction time under a documented configuration. Include adversarial content in retrieved documents and tests for unauthorized information access. Compare observed task performance with the current process while separately collecting feedback. The research does not compare hosting architectures, coding assistants or autonomous agents, so those require their own technical assessment.

The workforce enablement owner should coordinate business managers, platform IT, accessibility specialists and security. Deliver role-based examples, office hours and guidance on checking outputs, then repeat feedback collection after routine use. Dependencies include protected learning time, stable configuration and managers willing to hear disappointment.

Proposed acceptance criteria

each selected workflow has an observed quality assessment and cost record, staff can demonstrate correction and escalation, and the license decision records unresolved fit gaps. Track adoption without treating high usage as success by itself. Risks include surveillance-like employee scoring, using preliminary personas as permanent labels and continuing subscriptions where local workflow evidence remains weak.