Three County Councils in South Wales – Swansea, Carmarthenshire and Rhondda Cynon Taf – are co-operating to ensure they use Microsoft AI in the most effective way: improving internal operations, customer service, and the quality of care they offer their most vulnerable residents.
Council care services are built on human moments: a visit at home, a difficult conversation, a decision about support. But behind each moment sits admin. Notes must be written up. Needs and risk assessments must be completed. Case histories must be reviewed, followed up and transcripts captured digitally.
Now, generative AI in the shape of Microsoft 365 Copilot is helping to reduce much of this admin and shift the balance back to the human moments that matter.
Mari Ropstad, a head of adult social care at Rhondda Cynon Taf, says: “The attention that our workers are able to pay to a person when they see them is now significantly enhanced.”
Minutes won back from admin lead to better explanations, fewer misunderstandings, and a clearer view of what support is needed, she says.
With M365 Copilot 365 in the hands of around 350 staff, needs assessments – “our bread and butter” – are completed almost four times quicker. Reviewing case notes is more than twice as fast. And they can complete nearly twice as many risk assessments within an hour.
Staff feel happier as a result, with 86% saying the quality of their output is higher; 50% saying their wellbeing has improved; and 75% saying they feel more positive about their role, says Ropstad.
“Happy staff stay“
These stats matter because “happy staff stay”, she says, and this has knock-on benefits for recruitment and retention costs, not to mention the quality of care.
“Social care is a pressurised area with a lot of stress,” Ropstad explains. “We have seen qualified people leave the profession because of it.
“If you have happy staff, they stay in a job, and it’s easier to recruit to your teams,” she says.
That stability matters for residents, too, because continuity of relationship is part of good care.
‘Making a difference’
Swansea County Council has bought 1,000 Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses and has 2,500 staff regularly using Copilot Chat to assist their work across multiple departments.
Ness Young, Director of Corporate Services, says Swansea has invested in training, built a network of champions, and ensured that colleagues understand how to use the tools safely, confidently and responsibly.
Staff are using Copilot to prepare for meetings, summarise long documents, and draft clearer reports. In large organisations, small time savings add up to big gains – the Council estimates it has saved 5,400 staff hours in four weeks alone using AI.
This is freeing up time for analysis and better decision-making, says Young.
“They can focus on work that truly makes a difference“
As in Rhondda Cynon Taf, Swansea is finding that in social care, teams that spend less time on repetitive admin can spend more time focusing on residents and communicate more clearly with the people receiving support.
“They can focus on work that truly makes a difference,” she says.
Swansea’s roll-out has extended across housing, education and customer service, as well as social care. In each case, Young says, “It’s giving people hours back – speeding up housing casework, cutting social care admin, improving the quality of responses, and helping us resolve issues more quickly.”
Swansea is also starting to use AI agents to support frontline decisions, says Young. In children’s residential care, for example, AI is helping to “spot early signs of risk by picking up on patterns in daily records,” she explains.
“And in our 93 schools, Copilot turns complex policy changes into clear, quick guidance so families get accurate information faster.”
Better answers, faster
It’s a theme repeated throughout Carmarthenshire County Council, says Digital Transformation Project Officer Georgia Sweet, where they’ve markedly improved customer service by building a chatbot to pinpoint the right information quickly so that customer care agents can answer residents’ queries faster and more accurately.
Previously, staff would have to trawl through large FAQ documents or the Council’s website while someone waited on the phone. Moving key resources into Microsoft SharePoint and applying the chatbot to this centralised data repository has transformed operations, she says.
Copilot’s ability to access the right policies and documents fast has also contributed to complaint response times tumbling to well within the 10-day target, Sweet adds.
And neurodiverse staff – particularly those with ADHD and dyslexia – now feel less anxious and overwhelmed by clerical work, says Sweet, which makes for a more inclusive workplace.
Learning together
Rather than each of the three Councils reinventing the wheel, they’re working closely together to accelerate impact, sharing learnings, approaches, and ways to reduce errors and improve consistency.
They’ve organised joint ‘Promptathon’ and ‘Agentathon’ events to give colleagues the skills they need to maximise the technology’s potential. It’s a powerful model: learn once, benefit many times.
Sweet says the shared learning helps the Councils avoid wasting time on the same early mistakes. Young agrees, noting that confidence grows when people can see practical examples from peers, not just guidance from IT.
In Rhondda Cynon Taf, that has meant frontline staff feeding back what works, then refining prompts and templates so colleagues elsewhere can reuse them. Ropstad thinks that matters because time is the crucial resource in social care.
“If we can take the admin away,” she says, “we can put that time back where it belongs.”