HMRC is betting big on Microsoft Copilot, rolling it out to tens of thousands of staff after a Whitehall trial estimated it saved each user roughly 26 minutes of time per day.

The department has dished out about 28,000 Microsoft Copilot licenses and is preparing to switch on agentic-style features, with chief AI officer James Mitton pitching a future where HMRC becomes "the most AI-enabled tax authority on the planet."

Legacy tech is the gift that keeps billing for UK's tax collector

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"We have rolled out 28,000 Copilot licenses," Mitton said at the Think AI for Government event in London last week . The plan, he added, is to give staff "some fairly potent AI tools that they can safely play with."

This didn't come out of nowhere.…