TL;DR
Three South Wales councils — Swansea, Carmarthenshire and Rhondda Cynon Taf — are using Microsoft 365 Copilot to slash administrative workload across social care and other services. Early results include needs assessments completed four times faster and 5,400 staff hours saved in just four weeks.
Putting Time Back Where It Belongs
The councils have collectively rolled out Microsoft 365 Copilot to over 3,500 staff, with the clearest gains in adult social care. At Rhondda Cynon Taf, where 300 workers use the tool, needs assessments — described as the service’s “bread and butter” — now take roughly a quarter of the time. Case note reviews are more than twice as fast, and staff complete nearly double the number of risk assessments per hour.
The impact goes beyond productivity. Among staff, 86% report higher-quality output, 50% say their wellbeing has improved, and 75% feel more positive about their role. Mari Ropstad, head of adult social care at Rhondda Cynon Taf, noted that happier staff stay longer, reducing recruitment costs and improving continuity of care for residents.
Scaling Across Services
Swansea County Council has purchased 1,000 Copilot licences and has 2,500 staff regularly using Copilot Chat across housing, education, customer service and social care. The council estimates it saved 5,400 staff hours in a single four-week period. Swansea is now piloting AI agents in children’s residential care to spot early signs of risk by identifying patterns in daily records.
Carmarthenshire has focused on customer service, building a chatbot on Microsoft SharePoint to help agents find the right information faster. Complaint response times have dropped well within the 10-day target. Staff with ADHD and dyslexia report feeling less anxious about clerical tasks.
Learning Together
Rather than working in isolation, the three councils share learnings through joint “Promptathon” and “Agentathon” events. Frontline staff feed back what works, refine prompts and templates, and share them across authorities — a model that accelerates adoption while reducing early mistakes.
Looking Forward
The collaboration offers a practical template for other UK local authorities considering AI adoption. With measurable gains in productivity, staff wellbeing and service quality, the Welsh model suggests that public sector AI works best when paired with structured training and cross-organisation knowledge sharing.