HMRC, the UK’s tax authority, has distributed 28,000 Microsoft Copilot licenses to staff and is preparing to activate agentic features in Copilot Chat, chief AI officer James Mitton announced at the Think AI for Government conference in London on April 23. The deployment makes HMRC one of the largest single-agency rollouts of agentic AI tools in any government worldwide.

The Rollout

“We have rolled out 28,000 Copilot licences,” Mitton said at the event, according to Think Digital Partners. “We were about to switch on agents in Copilot Chat next week, and the intention is to give the entire organisation some fairly potent AI tools that they can safely play with.”

Mitton described a “T-shaped strategy”: broad access to AI tools across the entire workforce, combined with deeper, high-impact use cases for large-scale operations. Staff will use the tools at “Official Sensitive” classification level, the standard security tier for most day-to-day government work.

Prior Evidence

The deployment builds on a June 2025 cross-government trial run by the Government Digital Service, which gave 20,000 civil servants across a dozen departments access to Microsoft 365 Copilot. The GOV.UK findings report found participants saved an average of 26 minutes per day, with over 70% reporting reduced time searching for information and 82% saying they would not want to go back.

The trial also flagged “limitations when dealing with complex, nuanced, or data-heavy aspects of work” and concerns about “security and the handling of sensitive data,” according to The Register.

Mitton also cited £8 billion in benefits from existing AI tools, primarily machine learning, robotic process automation, and natural language processing used to close the tax gap over the past two years.

Governance Structure

HMRC is establishing an AI Centre of Excellence after discovering it was “almost impossible” to track all AI activity across the department, with multiple teams sometimes procuring similar tools independently, Mitton told Think Digital Partners. The Centre will create a single front door for AI initiatives and use AI itself to power an internal coordination portal.

On public trust, Mitton said HMRC is considering publishing more information externally about where it uses AI, where it does not, and why. “We need to think about AI as a tool that can help us, but we must never forget that we have to do it through kindness and operating in the open,” he said.

Scale in Context

The 28,000-license deployment arrives the same week Microsoft rolled out Agent Mode for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint across Office 365. HMRC’s activation of agentic features in Copilot Chat would place autonomous task execution capabilities in the hands of tax compliance officers, policy designers, and administrative staff simultaneously. Whether a government agency that discovered it couldn’t even track its own internal AI initiatives is ready to manage 28,000 autonomous agents is the question The Register raised: “a system that works well enough to rely on, not quite well enough to trust, and far too embedded to switch off.”