Microsoft's AI Revolution: How Legal & General is Transforming Customer Service with Generative AI

Microsoft and Legal & General Forge AI-Powered Customer Service Partnership

UK financial services provider Legal & General (L&G) is collaborating with Microsoft to develop an AI-powered customer service platform that will transform how they serve their 12.4 million customers.

The AI-Driven Service Platform

The new system leverages Microsoft Dynamics 365 Contact Center integrated with Copilot AI assistant to provide customer service teams with a complete, real-time view of each customer's relationship with the business. The initial implementation will focus on customers with workplace savings, retail protection, and annuities, with additional product lines to follow.

Streamlining Customer Interactions

Dynamics 365 Contact Center will analyze customer conversations in real-time, highlighting useful tools to support interactions, suggesting relevant next steps, and prompting outreach across customers' preferred channels. The platform is specifically designed to reduce complexity for employees by consolidating multiple tools and minimizing call transfers.

Advanced Sentiment Analysis and Vulnerability Detection

The system incorporates tone and sentiment analysis during calls, helping employees identify and respond to customer vulnerabilities more effectively - a critical capability for a business managing complex financial products like pensions and insurance.

Empowering Frontline Teams

Copilot AI will handle administrative tasks including transcription and case summaries, freeing up agents to focus on meaningful customer interactions rather than data entry.

Laura Mason, Chief Executive Officer, Retail at L&G, emphasized the strategic importance of this transformation:

"We recently launched the first fully digitized claims process, cutting average claim times by nearly two weeks, while our pensions app is the highest rated among peers, using digital tools to help people take control of their savings."

"This new collaboration takes that ambition further, using AI to raise the bar while ensuring our teams can tailor support for customers who need us most."

Microsoft's Broader AI Vision for Customer Experience

This partnership reflects Microsoft's expanding strategy for AI-led customer engagement, positioning Copilot as the central user interface for enterprise AI across business applications.

Rob Smithson, AI Business Processes Lead at Microsoft, explained:

"It's the first contact center that's actually being built with generative AI from the ground up. It's very much part of our strategy and a differentiator because it's not something that's integrated with third-party systems."

"We already use it ourselves in our own customer care across the world, and we've seen significant improvement of things like net promoter score."

Built-In AI Capabilities

For organizations like L&G, this means agent assistance, sentiment analysis, and call summarization are no longer add-ons but are baked directly into the platform. This represents a fundamental shift from static chatbots to dynamic, data-driven agent networks that learn and evolve over time.

Darren Hardman, CEO of Microsoft UK & Ireland, highlighted the partnership's significance:

"By combining L&G Retail's vision for customer experience with Microsoft's AI and cloud technologies, we're enabling teams to deliver more personalized, efficient, and secure support at scale."

The Future of Customer Service

This collaboration exemplifies Microsoft's vision of an "agent-led, human-directed enterprise" where digital agents handle complexity behind the scenes, allowing human agents to focus on empathy, problem-solving, and proactive engagement.

As Smithson noted:

"The biggest frustration for customers is when they call up and the company doesn't know them, doesn't know the context behind their business or why they're calling. And this gives them the opportunity to do that very quickly, with very rich data from multiple different sources."

L&G's investment builds on Microsoft's broader enterprise AI ecosystem, which has seen similar deployments in the public sector with organizations like HMRC and Westminster City Council.