TL;DR

Manchester is extending Microsoft 365 Copilot across all 65,000 of its staff and students, including the Researcher and Analyst agents alongside Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Once the rollout finishes in late 2026 the university says it will be the first anywhere to have done so. Student access begins around September.

Training first, tools second

The detail worth copying is the sequencing. A cohort of nearly 3,000 staff went through live learning sessions in April. Before those sessions, 24% said they felt confident using Copilot; afterwards, 80% did.

That is a measured outcome from a deployment, which is rare enough in AI adoption reporting to be worth stating plainly. Most organisations buy licences and describe the purchase as a rollout.

CIO PJ Hemmaway frames the universal access as an equity decision: “Employers are increasingly expecting graduates to be confident users of AI technologies… we are tackling the digital divide head-on, ensuring all can benefit from AI tools regardless of personal means.”

Governance built alongside

Policies were written with the Students’ Union and staff networks rather than issued at them. Two formal policies — one covering acceptable IT use, the other governing AI in teaching — have both been tightened, addressing how information is handled, what counts as academic integrity, and what students may do in assessed work.

Copilot runs inside the university’s existing Microsoft 365 tenancy and inherits its permissions, so nobody gains access to data they could not already reach. Feedback from open forums has already changed delivery — longer learning windows, clearer signposting, more worked examples.

Hemmaway is explicit that none of it concerns headcount: “Copilot is a support tool, not a replacement for professional expertise, decision-making or accountability.”

Looking forward

Manchester has some claim to the ground here — Turing published Computing Machinery and Intelligence there in 1950, and more than 1,600 of its researchers now work on AI across the university’s sites.

The comparison that matters is closer to home. The NHS Copilot rollout, covered here last week, is testing whether governance can keep pace with deployment. Manchester’s answer is to put the training and the policy in front of the licences and measure whether either worked. Any UK organisation about to hand a generative tool to thousands of people can steal that ordering for nothing.