Whitbread, owner of the UK’s number one hotel brand, Premier Inn, is collaborating closely with Microsoft to implement responsibly governed AI that can improve productivity and automate business processes, freeing up colleagues to spend better-quality time serving guests.
Domenica Sabou, Senior Location Strategy and Data Manager at Whitbread, has used Microsoft 365 Copilot to build an AI agent that assesses the likely success of potential new hotel locations.
It brings together factors like driving distances and local amenities, and scores them. This gives her a data-first starting point for strategic business recommendations, rather than one based on instinct or partial evidence.
“But the judgement is still coming from you,” she says. “You have to do that. And you’re just learning constantly about how to prompt, what not to prompt: the best way of doing things.”
Agents plus humans
It’s a good example of how Whitbread is using Microsoft agentic AI technology to do the data-heavy groundwork so colleagues can focus on higher-value human decisions that require critical thinking.
Sabou’s experiment is at the front line of the agentic direction Whitbread wants to pursue. Her current agent was built through Copilot, and the company is laying the groundwork for more advanced agents as it scales its use of the technology.
Whitbread has started an AI Enablement Office and put a governance process in place for colleagues who want to take an agent beyond their own work and make it available to others. That means considering safety, ownership, and cost before a useful experiment becomes a shared service.
Whitbread’s Group CTO, Mark Smith, sees that governance as a foundation for broader adoption.
“When we get to the end of this, everybody will have the opportunity to build an agent.”
He says the ambition is to “drive more efficiency into our business” while preserving frontline roles.
“Keep the human in the loop where it’s really important for the human to be in the loop, which is serving the guest”.
Focus on value
Whitbread’s agentic ambitions are being built on a solid Copilot foundation, which has helped spread AI literacy throughout the group.
They began with a pilot involving 270 support-centre colleagues at Whitbread’s head-office, amplified by a ‘Digital Heroes’ programme between September 2025 and March 2026. This combined access to Copilot with training, practical sessions, and a community where people could compare what worked.
The pilot was deliberately broad, bringing together people from commercial, finance, property, procurement, people, technology and other support functions. For Smith, a positive response to a new tool was encouraging, but it wasn’t enough on its own.
“We’re a budget hotel business; we need to justify every pound that we spend,” says Smith.
Whitbread gathered feedback throughout the pilot, and colleagues reported saving an average of 24 minutes a day. As a result, the company is now extending Copilot to 1,650 people across its support centre and to multi-site hotel managers.
For the next phase, the focus is on fostering sustained use.
Every colleague will be offered training sessions, while local champions will continue to share examples that make sense for a particular job. The goal is for people to know where Copilot can help, and where it shouldn’t be asked to decide.
‘Third workforce’
Emma Cluett, Head of Delivery Transformation in Whitbread’s Group Transformation function, has used Copilot to help her team build more internal capability. The group manages large programmes for the company, and much of its work goes into business cases, executive presentations, meeting organisation and keeping stakeholders aligned.
Cluett says the tool can never replace oversight: “The decisions will never go away from that kind of human sense-check”.
But through AI, her team has been able to avoid extra costs.
“We’ve been able to keep our team number quite static because we’ve used Copilot as almost our third workforce to be able to support us in that,” she says.
Sabou has also seen her efficiency increase. She says Copilot has saved her a considerable amount of time over a year of experimentation.
“The output that Copilot has been able to generate has been getting better. And the quality of the work has been slowly getting better to the point where I think it’s probably reducing my time by at least a third.”
She describes her interaction style as “a backwards and forwards, almost like conversation between you and the AI”. She says: “I’ve been able to get the most out of it by being able to ask it questions to solve various different problems.”
Governance and growth
The Digital Heroes programme is central to how Whitbread is trying to make that kind of confidence more widespread. Christopher Adams, Business Change Manager in Technology and Data, and Harprit Takkar, Technical Product Specialist for Frontline and AI, have run group sessions, drop-ins, written guidance and short recap videos alongside the formal training.
The content has to keep changing because the technology changes so quickly.
“The material that we used six months ago is out of date already,” Adams says.
He and Takkar have focused on giving colleagues a place to ask questions as well as sessions that demonstrate new features, rather than expecting people to work it out alone.
That approach also gives the company a way to discover useful ideas from the people closest to the work.
During the pilot, colleagues developed more than 60 role-specific use cases across eight functions. Some began with straightforward tasks, such as summarising meetings or finding information, while others used Copilot to research questions that could previously have required an external adviser.
As Copilot is rolled out for more and more people at Whitbread, Smith says he’ll be watching to see whether colleagues keep finding new ways to use Copilot and share their lessons.
“I want to see more people grabbing me in the coffee shop to say it’s been fantastic and they’ve learned lots,” he says.
But the fundamental aim of AI is to accelerate the business, says Smith.
“We’re trying to get our people to do better-quality work in a more productive manner, to drive value to our guests and our shareholders.”