A week with room to breathe
Nine hours is a handsome thing to find in a working week. At Black & Veatch, the engineering, construction and consulting firm founded in 1915, that is the approximate saving the company reports for its Microsoft 365 Copilot users. An old business has discovered a thoroughly modern luxury: time to think before the next deadline arrives.
The figure comes from Black & Veatch’s customer account published by Microsoft on September 8, 2026. It describes this customer’s experience, rather than a benchmark every buyer can expect. The story does not set out a measurement method, sample or independent audit. Those missing details matter when a number this attractive begins to travel.
Still, the setting gives the claim its interest. Black & Veatch builds the infrastructure on which ordinary life depends. Its history starts with 12 employees in one Kansas City office; its headquarters today are in Overland Park, Kansas, and its work reaches more than 100 countries. Water and power projects make a demanding stage for software promising to spare people paperwork. A quicker answer has value only if it helps someone do the next job well.
Black & Veatch’s reported Copilot productivity gain.
Customer-reported result ↗The paperwork before the project
The case study offers a concrete example: research summaries fell from 15 hours to four. It also reports faster contract reviews, RFP responses, scheduling and presentations. Matt Raven, Director of Enterprise Content Collaboration Applications, supplies the headline estimate: “We have seen approximately 9 hours a week in productivity gains per user by using Microsoft 365 Copilot.”
These are the quieter parts of engineering work, easily overlooked beside a construction site. A proposal must be assembled before a project can be won. A contract must be understood before commitments are made. A schedule turns promises into dates. Shaving effort from those tasks can move the business along without asking an engineer to design faster simply because a machine can write faster.
There is a useful distinction here between shortening a task and shortening a working day. The company’s stated problem is rising client demand and pressure on its workforce. In that setting, saved time can become capacity for another assignment. The commercial proposition is straightforward: give specialists fewer administrative obstacles, and the firm has more opportunity to put their judgment to work.
A century of experience needs somewhere to live
Black & Veatch’s other deadline is retirement. Experience leaves with people unless a company finds ways to pass it on. An archive may contain the answer, but the existence of an answer is little comfort to someone who cannot find it.
BV Ask, built with Microsoft Foundry, makes company knowledge searchable in plain language. In Microsoft’s companion adoption story, operations president Jennifer Divito describes a tool containing thousands of process and procedure documents, later expanded to training and a directory of experts. This gives a new employee both material to consult and people to approach.
That combination is more interesting than a talking filing cabinet. Written instructions record a procedure; a colleague can explain its exceptions. A system that points to both offers a route through an unfamiliar organisation. The promise is particularly relevant in a long-lived engineering firm, where yesterday’s project may contain the clue to tomorrow’s problem.
Knowledge transfer also changes the meaning of scale. Hiring adds people. Making useful experience easier to find can help those people become effective sooner. The ambition is to let institutional memory travel further than the corridor, the team meeting or the availability of one much-consulted veteran.
Safety has two clocks
The customer account connects BV Ask to safety information. Separately, technology chief Mike Adams says field telemetry collection has begun, with safer construction strategies among its aims. More advanced field autonomy remains a future ambition.
Those are different kinds of work. Finding a safety document is an immediate knowledge task. Turning observations from a project site into a useful intervention requires a further chain of decisions: what to collect, what it means and who acts on it. A searchable procedure and an autonomous field system should not be bundled into one triumphant statistic.
For an engineering customer, this distinction is practical. Faster access to instructions can help people prepare. Site data may eventually help teams recognise conditions earlier. Neither function removes the need to understand the physical work. The attraction of AI here lies in bringing information closer to a decision while leaving the consequences of that decision in view.
The expensive part is changing habits
Software arrives quickly. Habits take longer. Microsoft’s companion case study describes six-week adopter courses for cohorts of 500–850 people, followed by more advanced learning. More than 6,000 professionals were using Copilot at the time of that account. Training, peer communities and recognition were part of the rollout.
This supplies a less glamorous explanation for the results: people were taught how to use what they had bought. A license creates access; a useful routine creates demand. Colleagues demonstrating a task can make a new tool feel less abstract than a slide announcing a transformation.
The pattern also helps explain why the nine-hour claim cannot simply be lifted into another company’s forecast. Documents, jobs, teaching and employee interest all shape what a tool can accomplish. A buyer hoping for the same result would need to examine the surrounding work as carefully as the software.
MATT RAVEN · BLACK & VEATCH“We have seen approximately 9 hours a week in productivity gains per user by using Microsoft 365 Copilot.”
Director of Enterprise Content Collaboration Applications · Microsoft customer story
Microsoft gets more than a Copilot sale
The deployment spans Microsoft 365 Copilot, Azure, Foundry, Copilot Studio, Security Copilot, Purview, GitHub Copilot and Fabric. In the main account, Purview and Security Copilot support data protection and threat response, while Fabric supports growth research. An AI governance committee oversees the company’s approach.
Read commercially, this is Microsoft’s connected-tools strategy made visible inside one customer. Office assistance creates an accessible starting point. Knowledge applications give the work somewhere deeper to go. Development tools help employees build; data and security products surround the resulting systems. Each new use makes another part of the portfolio relevant.
For Black & Veatch, the attraction is continuity between ordinary office work and more specialised applications. For Microsoft, the opportunity extends well beyond a subscription attached to a desk. The relationship can reach into how a customer organises information, develops services and manages access.
The firm’s age lends the story its wit. A company that began before the modern computer is shopping for ways to keep its accumulated judgment useful. Nine hours makes the memorable headline. The more consequential wager is that a century of experience can become easier to consult, teach and apply when the next project arrives.