Day 1 — The Clock Is Already Ticking

You arrive at Unilever House on Victoria Embankment, overlooking the Thames. The building is Art Deco grandeur — marble floors, curved staircases, and the faint smell of old money reinvented by modern ambition. The lobby has a digital screen cycling through Unilever brands: Dove, Ben & Jerry's, Hellmann's, Persil. Beneath the brand logos, a new tagline pulses in the corporate rotation: 'AI-First. People-Powered.'

Aleksandra Spasova meets you at reception. She's dressed practically — blazer, no tie, a lanyard with three building access cards. She walks briskly, pointing out landmarks as you move through the building. "Welcome. Third floor is IT. Fourth floor is marketing — that's David Blanchard's territory, your pilot group. Fifth floor is the executive suite — Conny's office, the SteerCo room. You'll spend more time on the fifth floor than you'd like."

The project room is a glass-walled space on the third floor with a view of the Thames. Two large monitors, a whiteboard already covered in sticky notes from a previous Microsoft FastTrack workshop, and a stack of printed deployment playbooks with the Microsoft logo. A Gantt chart is pinned to the wall — it shows an 18-week timeline starting today, ending at Q4. Someone has drawn a red circle around the Q4 date and written 'Board KPI' in marker.

Aleksandra closes the door and sits across from you. Her tone shifts from tour guide to candid briefing.

"Let me be straight with you about what you're walking into. Conny committed to '12,000 users on Copilot by Q4' at the investor day. That's 18 weeks from today. The licenses are already purchased — £2.1 million, committed. Microsoft FastTrack is already engaged. Their lead, James Chen, has a deployment playbook that gets us to 'active users' in 90 days." She pauses. "Active users. Not productive users. Not happy users. Not users whose data governance is sorted. Active users."

She leans forward. "I deployed Teams to 80,000 users in 2020. Three months, pandemic timeline. Ninety percent had the app. Thirty percent used it properly. I don't want a repeat. Copilot adoption that looks good on a dashboard but doesn't change how people work is worse than no adoption — because we'll have spent £4.8 million to prove AI doesn't work here."

She slides a printed one-pager across the table — a data governance preliminary audit from IT security. "And then there's this. We've got SharePoint oversharing problems. Copilot surfaces everything a user has access to. If we turn it on before we clean up permissions, a junior marketer could ask Copilot to 'summarize recent company strategy' and get a board-level M&A document in the response. That's not a technology risk — that's a trust risk."

She stands. "Your job is to make the deployment successful, not just fast. Fast and successful are not the same thing."