Sensei: Transforming wellness with Microsoft 365 and Copilot

Welcome back to Grow Your Business with Copilot, your guide for actionable insights on leveraging AI in small and medium-sized businesses. As new Copilot functionality comes at a dizzying pace, we’re mindful to focus on how these innovations can truly reshape the ways organization work.

Each day, we hear how Copilot helps companies streamline business processes so they can focus on what matters. In this blog, we spotlight Sensei, whose migration to Microsoft 365 enabled the health and wellness company to significantly consolidate productivity tools, saving money and administrative overhead. Sensei has also leaned into Copilot to help streamline tasks and automate business processes, freeing more time to create unforgettable customer experiences.

We’ll also share an immediate opportunity to apply for our Microsoft 365 SMB Customer Advisory Board, where qualifying business leaders meet directly with Microsoft to share feedback and insights on the challenges you face, and help shape Microsoft solutions. 

And with that, let’s dive in!

Transforming wellness with Microsoft 365 and Copilot 

Sensei Lānaʻi, A Four Seasons Resort

Sensei offers personalized, data-driven, and scientifically sound wellness services from world-class retreats that encourage people to live longer, healthier lives. One of Sensei’s core differentiators is leveraging technology to deliver exceptional customer experiences. Not surprisingly, as a small and growing business, Sensei used similar analytical methods to improve the health of its operations.

“We offer a high-end experience, and staff can’t be wasting time logging into multiple systems. Microsoft 365 gives our staff as close to a ‘single pane of glass’ they can have, making business continuity and business operations a lot easier.”

Nick DeMarco

Vice President of Information Technology, Sensei

Consolidating productivity solutions

As many businesses grow, they acquire a collection of disconnected tools that can be both expensive and time-intensive to manage. Sensei recognized the opportunity to save licensing and administration costs by modernizing their IT infrastructure and consolidating productivity, communications, and security tools with Microsoft 365.

By bringing capabilities together on a single platform, Sensei reduced the number of solutions from 15 to 5. This lowered costs, simplified workflows, improved data security, and enhanced customer experiences. Microsoft 365 replaced Sensei’s legacy solutions for file storage, collaboration, chat, email, meetings and more.

Migrating to Microsoft 365 has allowed Sensei to explore using AI to further boost workplace efficiency. With limited resources, every minute spent writing meeting recaps, analyzing orders, responding to proposals, and documenting operations is a minute not optimizing the customer experience. Copilot has helped Sensei automate these processes, increasing efficiency and freeing up valuable time to accomplish more.

Use Copilot in Excel to help analyze customer behavior.

"We're always in meetings, where so many ideas are discussed. Copilot really shines at catching everything that's said, taking notes, and providing next steps. It's huge for us,” shared DeMarco.

Use Copilot to query a meeting recap for your action items.

Expanding the use and benefits of Copilot

While Sensei acknowledges they’ve just scratched the surface on the benefits of Copilot, they’re already seeing return on their investment. “Copilot in PowerPoint is a winner. We use it for editing slides – easily paring down presentations while keeping the essence to make them more audience-friendly. The accounting team uses Copilot in Excel. And more broadly, we use Copilot in Teams, Outlook, and Word,” said DeMarco.

Copilot in PowerPoint can help you create slides from a source document, apply design elements or edit for length and tone.

Initially, Copilot was given to select employees to monitor costs and usage. The company is finding new use cases daily and plans to roll Copilot out to more users in the organization.

“The investments we’ve made in the cloud with Microsoft 365 and Copilot have really paid off, and it's helped us become a truly decentralized, secure company. This stack makes us more efficient and frees us up to drive the business forward,” said DeMarco.

Discover more about Sensei on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and X/Twitter.

Apply to join the Microsoft 365 SMB customer advisory board

Join the Microsoft 365 SMB customer advisory board!

The Microsoft 365 SMB customer advisory board is an exclusive opportunity for business leaders to meet directly with Microsoft. Through interactive quarterly meetings, you will share feedback and insights on the challenges you face and help to shape Microsoft solutions. 

Members will have the chance to:

• Meet with Microsoft executives
• Make connections with like-minded peers
• Discuss business challenges, trends, and technology
• Influence the direction of product development
• Learn the latest insights from Microsoft research
• Receive complimentary tickets to the Microsoft 365 Community Conference and exclusive swag

Eligibility

This Microsoft 365 small and medium business customer advisory board is focused on the following profile, though Microsoft welcomes all small and medium businesses to apply.

• Strategic decision-maker role (C-suite, founder, business or IT leader)
• Represent a business with under 1,000 employees
• Current Microsoft 365 customer
• Based in Canada, LATAM, or the United States

We are accepting applications through February 28, 2025.

Interested? Visit aka.ms/SMBCAB to learn more and start the application process.

Take Action 

Learn more about using Copilot to transform your business, sign up for a trial, or contact our team for a personalized demo.  

Try out some of the ways Sensei uses Copilot  

• Catch up on meetings and tasks with Copilot in Teams 
• Draft and edit content, briefs and more with Copilot in Word  
• Easily structure, design and edit presentations with Copilot in PowerPoint
• Analyze data and provide business insights with Copilot in Excel

Become a Copilot power user! 

• (New each week) Try a new proven Copilot productivity tip to get time back for more important work 
• (New) Get your one-stop guide to successfully deploy Copilot with the Copilot Success Kit  
• Join the SMB Copilot Community to learn directly from Microsoft experts and your peers  

Here's some highlights of the latest news on how Microsoft 365 Copilot can accelerate your business

• Copilot in the Microsoft 365 admin center has been rolling out, offering a transformative IT experience that leverages AI to optimize routine tasks, generate insights that enable better decision-making, and simplify wayfinding in the Microsoft 365 admin center. Learn more here.
• Rolling out this month, the Copilot icon now appears in an Excel spreadsheet so users can more conveniently access Copilot capabilities in the flow of their work. Copilot can suggest formulas, conditional formatting, or different ways to visualize data with charts and PivotTables.
• Also rolling out in February are a slate of enhancements for Copilot in Outlook, including a redesigned interface that makes it more intuitive to use Copilot writing assistance. Auto Rewrite can be used on selected portions of text for more precise edits and more flexibility throughout the writing process. Mac users can now also use Copilot Chat in Outlook for Mac.

If your company has used Microsoft 365 Copilot to grow and you’d like to share your story, we’d love to feature you. Comment below and a member from our team will get in touch! 

Angela Byers  

Microsoft 
Senior Director, Copilot & Growth Marketing for SMB 
Let's connect on LinkedIn 

Meet the team 

The monthly series, Grow Your Business with Microsoft 365 Copilot, is brought to you by the SMB Copilot marketing team at Microsoft. From entrepreneurs to coffee connoisseurs, they work passionately behind the scenes, sharing the magic of Copilot products with small and medium businesses everywhere. Always ready with a smile, a helping hand, and a clever campaign, they're passionate about helping YOUR business grow!  

From left to right: Angela Byers, Mariana Prudencio, Elif Algedik, Kayla Patterson, Briana Taylor, and Gabe Ho

About the blog 

The Grow Your Business with Microsoft 365 Copilot blog aims to inspire and delight you with insights and stories on how AI is changing the game for business. This monthly series is designed to empower small and mid-sized businesses to harness the power of AI at work. Each month, we feature scenarios where an SMB is using AI to transform, scale, and grow.