Copilot Training for European Leadership Teams: What Is Different Over Here

I deliver these sessions in English as well as Hebrew, including flying out to global team meetings, and the difference in the room is consistent enough that it is worth writing down.

If you are running a European or multi-country leadership team, here is what actually changes.

Worth saying plainly first: leadership teams are my favourite audience, in any country. It is maximum impact. They are the only group that can require an entire organisation to learn this, and the only group that can decide real time and budget go into it. When they understand it deeply the organisation moves, and when they do not, everything stays at pilot level. What I like about these rooms in particular is that the question is almost always how, not whether.

The first question is always about the data

In some rooms the first hand goes up about productivity. In European leadership rooms it goes up about where the data goes.

That is the correct question and it deserves a real answer rather than a reassuring one. The short version: Microsoft 365 Copilot works on top of the mail, files and meetings that are already inside your tenant, and enterprise data stays within your existing agreement rather than being used to train the model. That is a materially different position from an employee pasting a customer contract into a free chatbot at home.

The longer version, including residency specifics, belongs in a proper conversation with your own compliance people. I wrote up what I can on the Copilot, GDPR and EU data residency page.

The reason this matters for a leadership session, and not just for legal, is simple. Until leadership can answer that question out loud, employees will keep using AI quietly from personal accounts, which is the actual data exposure you were worried about in the first place.

Blocking everything does not work, and Europe tries it more

I see more blanket blocks in European organisations than anywhere else, usually well intentioned.

What happens after 6 months is the same every time. Usage did not drop, it moved to personal phones. And on a personal phone you have no visibility, no controls, and no record.

The useful question is not whether to allow it. It is which category of information is allowed into which tool, and whether anyone has told employees in language they actually understood. In most organisations that document exists and nobody has read it.

The team is spread out, and that changes the format

A leadership team sitting in one room in one country is a different session from 14 people across 5 countries on a call, some of them in their third language.

What I change when that is the case:

Everything gets demonstrated live rather than described. Watching it happen crosses a language gap that a slide does not.

The examples come from their own files, not from generic ones, because a shared concrete artefact is the fastest way to get a mixed room to the same understanding.

And the pace is different. A mixed-nationality group asks fewer questions in the room and more afterwards, so I leave more structured space for that rather than assuming silence means agreement.

One of the more useful pieces of feedback I have had on this came from Eden Dvir Zano, Managing Director at EIT Hub Israel, after I flew out for their global team meeting in Portugal: getting a mixed audience from different backgrounds and countries genuinely engaged is not a simple thing, and it is a different job from presenting to a homogeneous group.

What European executives push back on

The pushback is usually sharper here, and better.

Balazs Furjes, a Management Board member at EIT Health, described the session afterwards as insights that make you think differently about what is coming, rather than a lecture about AI. That is the register that works with this audience. They are not looking for a demo, they are looking for a way to think about a decision.

Paul Emmet, CEO of SIT UK, put it in terms of the discussion continuing in the room long after the session was supposed to end, which is the honest measure of whether a leadership session landed.

What does not work with this audience: unqualified productivity percentages, American-style enthusiasm, and any claim you cannot source. A European board will ask you where the number came from, and they should.

The numbers I bring, and where they come from

Since this audience asks, here is what I use and who produced it.

An AI initiative with senior leadership backing is 3.8 times more likely to hit its goals, the largest gap of any factor studied (Prosci, KPMG Global AI Pulse 2026, Gallup). Only 24% of managers say the CEO is accountable for AI results, and only 22% of employees have heard from leadership how it applies to them.

85% of employees globally have access to an AI tool and 25% use one, while around 95% of enterprise pilots never move the bottom line (IBM CEO Study 2026, McKinsey, MIT Project NANDA).

And from PwC in August 2026, across 351 CEOs in 59 countries: 20% of companies are capturing 74% of the value. The gap is not evenly spread and it is widening.

What leadership has to do, wherever they sit

The geography changes the questions. It does not change the job.

The CEO and the C-suite own this. Not IT, not a steering committee. Being the owner means giving teams time to learn, to keep learning and to practise, and giving champions time to get good, to mentor and to teach others.

Leadership has to require it, not encourage it. Use it on every task, or at least try. Using AI is not embarrassing any more, it is part of the job. And in the same breath, no copy and paste, because copy and paste is how you get publicly embarrassed. Every output is a draft, and what makes it worth sending is what you pour in: insight, experience, creative thinking, strategy, and a lot of human brain.

It goes on the standing agenda, in management meetings and team meetings, as a recurring item.

And you measure 2 things, constantly: usage, and business impact. Which means setting KPIs before you start.

Practical notes on running this in Europe

Sessions run in English without any loss, and I would rather run in English for a mixed group than have half the room working through translation.

Ask for real files in advance. It is the single biggest quality difference between one session and another, and it matters more with a multi-country group because generic examples land differently in different markets.

If the leadership team sits in more than 3 time zones, split it. A session at 19:00 local time for a third of the room is a session that third will not remember.

And get your compliance person in the room rather than briefing them afterwards. In European organisations they are usually the person who can unblock the whole thing, and they are almost never invited.

Questions I get from European organisations

Do you work with organisations outside Israel?
Yes, regularly, in English, both remotely and on site.

Can you deliver to a leadership team spread across several countries?
Yes, and it is a format I would rather plan deliberately than improvise. Tell me the spread and the languages in the room when we talk, because it changes the structure.

Is the content the same as for an Israeli organisation?
The framework is. The emphasis is not. Data residency and regulatory questions get real time here, and the examples get chosen for the markets in the room.

Do we need licences in place first?
For a leadership session, no, and a purchase decision is often one of the outputs. For hands-on training, yes, otherwise people practise on something they will not have next week.

If you are weighing it up

Start with whether your leadership team is actually aligned. If half the room still thinks this is a chatbot and the other half tested it 2 years ago and was unimpressed, a training programme for the wider organisation is premature.

Get the leadership team to one picture first. It is the cheapest step and it is the one that decides whether everything after it works.

What you actually book is the 90-minute Copilot Executive Briefing, live online. Want the wider case for training across European timezones? That is on Copilot training for European companies. The full menu of live online formats and prices lives on the live online Copilot workshops hub. There is more detail on formats on the Copilot training for executives page, and on the wider programme on Copilot training for companies.

Eyal Marcus is an AI consultant, trainer and keynote speaker who helps organisations actually adopt AI, working in English and Hebrew with enterprises in Israel and across Europe. He has been working with AI since early 2022, almost a year before ChatGPT launched, publishes the weekly "Don't Panic" AI newsletter and hosts the "Hands On AI" podcast. He has delivered 260 sessions in 112 organisations, and works with European and global leadership teams including sessions delivered on site in Europe.