KOHLER achieves 98% Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption with AI change management strategy

KOHLER has a 153-year history of manufacturing beautifully crafted premium kitchen & bath products, and a world-class hospitality brand. The company created an AI change management and skilling program which helped them achieve a 98% adoption rate.

Beginning with enterprise-wide licensing for Microsoft 365 Copilot and hugely popular training sessions, KOHLER approached AI adoption with strong C-suite support, a thriving champions network, and vocal support for AI use cases across the business.

In 6 weeks, KOHLER achieved 98% Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption, helping 5,000 employees save 2 to 5 hours weekly while improving code releases by 25% with GitHub Copilot, and cutting error defects by 75%. To date, they have created 3,000 agents.

When Matt Wilson, Senior IT Manager, Digital Workplace & EUC, Digital, KOHLER, set out to create a “Leadership Candor Coach” using Microsoft Copilot Studio, he combined principals of radical candor, a leadership communication framework developed by Kim Scott, with KOHLER’s own “Bold Leadership” pillar. The result was an agent that keeps KOHLER’s values top of mind. “The Candor Coach agent is designed to help leaders uphold our principals,” says Wilson.

“I haven't been to a KOHLER company town hall where our CEO, David Kohler doesn't talk about AI as one of our top three priorities.”

Eric Tabor, Chief Digital Officer, KOHLER

Leading boldly and encouraging leaders to engage with new technologies is key to KOHLER’s approach to AI adoption – an approach exemplified by the Candor Coach. “When it comes to a change of this magnitude, it’s essential to put a change management team into place and have top-down support,” says Eric Tabor, Chief Digital Officer, KOHLER. Tabor and the leadership team showcase their support as daily users of AI, something they take care to highlight in enterprise-wide forums, “I haven't been to a KOHLER company town hall where our CEO, David Kohler doesn't talk about AI as one of our top three priorities,” says Tabor.

Building a leadership toolkit to inspire change

Sheri Tower, Organizational Change Manager for AI, KOHLER, knew that executive buy-in was key to a successful AI transformation; she created a leadership toolkit designed to build excitement about the new technology. The toolkit, combined with specialized leadership training, made the value of transformation clear. “It’s important that leaders see the value of AI so they can encourage it within their own teams,” says Tower.

“My organization uses GitHub Copilot to improve our code releases by 25% and we've reduced our error defect rate by 75%.”

Eric Tabor, Chief Digital Officer, KOHLER

Tabor and his peers are doing just that, showcasing use cases and success stories at every opportunity. “My organization uses GitHub Copilot to improve our code releases by 25% and we've reduced our error defect rate by 75%,” says Tabor. “In addition to IT, we have AI success stories from finance, marketing, supply chain, and operations. Sharing successes becomes like compounding interest of your investment into AI.”

Creating a champions community where bold ideas thrive

KOHLER made sure that all segments of the workforce were equally supported. Creating a champion’s network that connected all layers of the business was, as Tower puts it, “a critical part of us changing how we work.” Today, more than 200 champions gather via a Microsoft Viva Engage community and virtual meetings. These communities are a place to share ideas, best practices, and even some occasional myth-busting. “We do a segment called ‘Fact and Fiction’ where we talk about misconceptions around AI,” says Tower. Delane Boll, Senior Administrative Assistant, KOHLER, shares her learnings as an AI Champion with other administrative assistants via Microsoft Teams. “I've seen what Copilot can do firsthand saving me time, and it excited me to be able to come up with different prompts, or use cases that could help my fellow peers,” she says.

Mitchell Calvert, Systems Support Manager, Supply Chain Improvement, KOHLER, parlayed a longstanding interest in emerging technologies into a prominent role in the champions community. “As a super champion, my goal is to get people out of their comfort zones and away from their fixed idea of what AI is,” he says. “We are looking to unify our supply chain processes by using our data and Microsoft Foundry models in machine learning to help us improve our work.” Calvert highlights the ever-changing nature of tools like Microsoft 365 Copilot. “We know that every few months, there will emerge a new capability that we hadn’t even conceived of before and we stay open to that,” he says.

Incremental training for sustainable progress

Tabor stresses that implementing AI is not a typical technology deployment. “We have a responsibility to drive AI forward because it is transformative,” he says. That uniqueness is reflected in KOHLER’s approach to training, which encourages a gradual progression from entry-level to more advanced skilling, supporting experimentation along the way. Tower credits Kohler’s adoption success to a multi-tier approach, targeting specific areas of the business with tailored training; “What stood out from other technology deployments is that we focused distinct resources and training at all three levels of the business throughout our Microsoft 365 Copilot deployment,” she says. An early round of Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat training drew thousands of attendees.

Tabor notes that expanding the scope of training from technology-focused to more big-picture is an important aspect of AI adoption. “The skilling that a lot of companies miss is the business skilling,” he says. “We also focus on how to dissect processes and convert them into AI workflows.”

“Our original goals were 95% Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption in 9 months. We hit that within 40 days.”

Matt Wilson, Senior IT Manager, Digital Workplace & EUC, Digital, KOHLER

Governance and security that keeps the cool factor

For Tabor, leading through an AI transformation required breaking old habits. “My instinct is to lead with governance and cybersecurity on everything new,” he says. While always staying attuned to risk, Tabor and his colleagues realized that a security-centric approach was dampening enthusiasm among trainees. “We realized we were taking the cool out of one of the coolest technologies we will see in our lifetimes,” he says. “So, we decided to flip our mindset, lead with ‘yes,’ and immediately we saw more enablement and use cases emerge, but security and governance are our quiet enabler” he says.

98% adoption sets the stage for becoming a frontier firm

Today, KOHLER has achieved an impressive 98% adoption rate and time savings have reached a monthly average of 2-5 hours per associate. “Our original goals were 95% Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption in 9 months. We hit that within 40 days,” says Wilson. For Tabor, cultivating a learning mindset isn’t just a cultural priority, it creates a competitive advantage. “Every job is going to be touched by AI,” he says. “We want to work with these tools to continue to evolve and stay ahead of the competition.’

Already, the business is exploring about what’s next, including agentic AI and becoming a part of the Microsoft Frontier Program. “We have over 3,000 agents and hundreds that are active on a daily basis,” says Wilson. “Microsoft 365 Copilot is a game-changer, helping us make informed decisions faster and answer questions quicker. There is so much excitement about where this is going. KOHLER’s AI journey has just started,” he adds.

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