NHS England is expanding its use of Microsoft Copilot, an artificial intelligence tool, across the health service. The move follows a trial with 30,000 employees.
In June 2026, NHS England announced plans to make Copilot available to as many as 505,000 clinicians and support staff. Trial participants reported saving an average of 43 minutes per working day.
That adds up to about five weeks of time per person each year, according to a Microsoft report published on October 21, 2026.
Strict Rules on How Copilot Is Used
Dr. Alec Price-Forbes, national chief clinical information officer for NHS England, said the tool is only used for administrative tasks. It is not used for clinical work.
The NHS has set standards for clinical safety, information governance, cybersecurity and real-world evaluation. Officials say transparency and human oversight are essential to keep the trust of staff and the public.
Price-Forbes said the NHS is still in many ways an analog system. He said the goal is “to reduce cognitive load and administrative burden for healthcare professionals.”
“Patients and staff must know when AI is being used, how it shapes decisions and where human oversight applies,” he said.
How Yorkshire Ambulance Staff Use the Tool
Yorkshire Ambulance Service is one of more than 200 NHS trusts. It received about 1.25 million calls to its 999 number in the 2025-26 fiscal year.
Tom Smith, an area operations manager at the service, oversees frontline teams and plans staffing. He said Copilot does not make decisions for him.
“It does a lot of my admin tasks for me that would previously have been really time consuming,” Smith said. “Then I can just review what it’s done.”
Smith, who is dyslexic, said the tool helps him draft emails and summarize long reports. He said it helps “level the playing field” for him.
Samantha Robinson, the service’s chief digital information officer, uses Copilot to turn operational data into briefings for senior leaders. She also uses it to turn national guidance into clear instructions for staff.
Her team reviews and adapts each first draft before it goes out. Robinson said the tool helps staff “join dots” that would otherwise take hours of searching through reports.
The service is also working with community teams on a transfer-of-care hub. The hub arranges home care and referrals for patients who need non-urgent treatment.
Not every patient seen by an ambulance crew needs to go to an emergency department. Some can be treated safely at home or sent to another service.
The service aims to cut the share of patients taken to emergency departments to 50%. Smith said Copilot helped staff collect and study the data needed to find where changes could be made.
That work has supported a drop in the service’s conveyance rate from 60% to 56% today.
