Overview & concepts

ValueLens is the FinOps view of Microsoft Copilot — cost versus value, ROI, and the time and tasks Copilot and its agents save. It turns raw Copilot activity into a defensible business narrative: how much time and how many tasks Copilot saved, what that is worth in money, and the return on investment once licence and consumption cost are factored in.

What ValueLens measures

Quantified value — hours saved and dollar-equivalent assisted value, grounded in research-sourced time baselines.
Frontier Firm maturity — where you sit on the Pattern 1 (human + Copilot) to Pattern 2 (human + agent) to Pattern 3 (agents run workflows) journey.
Value by function — Sales, HR, IT, Legal, Finance, Marketing, and Customer Service, with task-level attribution.
User maturity — Beginner to Developing to Proficient, from behavioural breadth and agent adoption.
Business case — projected annual value, ROI multiple, and licence investment net.

How the value model works

Every interaction is classified into an AI Task, mapped to a research-sourced time baseline, summed into Hours Saved, then multiplied by an hourly rate to produce Assisted Value:

interaction  ->  AI Task  ->  research-sourced time baseline  ->  Hours Saved  ->  x hourly rate  =  Assisted Value

Realised value then trends over time and is broken down by function, team, and user maturity, so you can see not just the headline number but where the value is concentrated.

The report at a glance

ValueLens ships as a single Power BI report whose fullest build carries a 15-page portfolio — adoption, value, maturity, governance, feedback, billing, and reference appendices. Not every page appears in every deployment: page availability varies by the path you choose (see the Page reference for the full portfolio and the per-path availability matrix).

IDVL-OVERVIEW-001

CaptureCapture the ValueLens report with the User Activation page selected, using anonymized sample data. Include the full Power BI report canvas, visible page navigation, and headline activation metrics; exclude browser chrome, tenant names, and personal data.

Proposed altValueLens User Activation report page with anonymized sample data.

Where the numbers come from

ValueLens works from a small set of core sources out of the box, and lights up extra pages as you add optional sources:

Core — Copilot interactions (Purview audit logs), licensed users (Microsoft 365 Admin Center), and org data (Microsoft Entra). These drive activity, adoption, value, and maturity.
Optional — Agents 365, Cowork / Work IQ consumption, Copilot Studio message-credit consumption, product feedback, and Copilot Studio agent transcripts. Each is gated so the dashboard works fine without it.

The exact source, permission, and contract detail lives in Data sources & requirements.

Research behind the value model

The human-time baselines behind Hours Saved are drawn from published research — Microsoft Research, MIT / Science (Noy & Zhang 2023), NBER (Brynjolfsson et al. 2023), BCG / Harvard (Dell’Acqua et al. 2023), McKinsey, Forrester TEI, IDC, and others. The full per-task source list is in the report’s own Metric Glossary page.

Choose how to deploy

ValueLens uses one shared value model across all three deployment paths, but page availability varies by path. The paths also differ in how data gets in and refreshes:

SharePoint — the simplest start on Power BI Pro, no Fabric capacity.
Fabric — the recommended path on Fabric capacity, with the best performance and the optional billing and feedback pages.
Fabric Extended (Fabric + Copilot Studio) — everything in the Fabric path plus the deeper Copilot Studio agent, topic, and evaluation pages.

Start at Choose your deployment path for a full comparison and decision guidance.

Usage & compliance disclaimer

While this tool helps customers understand the business value of their AI usage data, Microsoft has no visibility into the data customers input, nor control over how the template is used. Customers are solely responsible for ensuring their use complies with all applicable laws and regulations (including data privacy and security). Microsoft disclaims all liability arising from use of this template.

This is an experimental template with Purview audit logs as the primary source. Audit logs provide visibility into Copilot/agent interactions but are not intended as the sole source of truth for licensing or full‑fidelity reporting. Not supported through Microsoft support channels — please open an issue in this repo.