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In September, the Microsoft News Centre announced that Rest Super and Suncorp will be two of the leading Australian organisations invited to participate in the global Early Access Program (EAP) for the Microsoft 365 Copilot launch.
According to a recent study by the Tech Council of Australia and Microsoft, the financial services sector in Australia is estimated to gain between $5 – $13 billion annually in economic value by 2030 as a result of generative AI adoption.
Jeremy Hubbard, Chief Technology and Data Officer at Rest Super said, “AI continues to transform the way we work at an incredible pace; it has enormous potential to influence the future direction of Australian workplaces and the superannuation sector. Our participation in the program allows Rest and its people to be part of this evolution – building our capability in this powerful technology and empowering us to explore its potential to help Rest deliver the best possible retirement outcomes to the nearly 2 million Australians that entrust us with their super1.”
Microsoft 365 Copilot’s generative AI technology unlocks new levels of productivity and creativity in the apps we use every day – Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams. Going far beyond simple ‘questions and answers’ functionality, Copilot delivers a deep understanding of you, your job, your priorities, and your organisation.
The most recent Microsoft 365 Copilot Overview2 provides an example to illustrate: “When you ask it about the ‘Q2 Sales Report’, it doesn’t simply look for documents with those words in the file name or body. Instead, it understands that ‘sales reports are produced by Vittorio on the finance team and created in Excel.’ And it uses that conceptual understanding to determine your intent to help you find what you need.”
In behaving like an intelligent virtual assistant, it will “tame the complexity, eliminate the drudgery, and reclaim time at work.”
Microsoft 365 Copilot also has the potential to transform your member experiences. Integrating Copilot within the Member Support team’s desktop or workspace, for example, enables the team to triage questions and deliver a faster, more accurate and valuable response to members.
By analysing broad customer datasets, Microsoft Copilot will identify patterns, anticipate customer needs, and give suggestions to the Member Support agent on how to best handle each member’s query or interaction.
Because all this is happening in real time in the agent’s existing workspace, the member gets a much more accurate and valuable response much faster. And the agent can handle more queries in less time, increasing efficiency and improving the overall customer experience.
1. Microsoft News Centre; 18 Sept. 2023
2. Microsoft 365 Copilot Overview; Sept 22, 2023
It all sounds truly game-changing – like all new developments from Microsoft. But the success you have with Copilot will be firmly grounded in your business data, and your ability to integrate Copilot into your entire ICT infrastructure.
As Zachary Cavanell explains in the Microsoft Mechanics Blog2, “A lot of the magic that makes this possible is the Microsoft 365 Copilot system on the backend. This provides a powerful orchestration engine between the large language models, the Microsoft Graph and Microsoft 365 apps.”
This includes building plugins to integrate your own line of business apps directly into Copilot. A recent Microsoft Teams Blog3 explains: “The integrations available to both ISVs and customers include OpenAI plugins that connect ChatGPT to APIs; Microsoft Teams message extensions, which allow users to interact with a web service through buttons and forms in Teams, Outlook, and Microsoft 365 app clients; and Microsoft Power Platform connectors, which offer a set of prebuilt actions and triggers for developers to build their apps and workflows.”
Delivering real-time access to both your content and context in the Microsoft Graph will enable Copilot to generate answers anchored in your business content – your documents, emails, calendar, chats, meetings, contacts, and other business data – and combine them with your working context – the meeting you’re in now, the email exchanges you’ve had on a topic, the chat conversations you had last week – to deliver accurate, relevant, contextual responses4.
3. How to get ready for Microsoft 365 Copilot; June 23, 2023
4. How to transform work with plugins for Microsoft 365 Copilot and AI app; Sept 21, 2023
5. Introducing Microsoft Copilot; Mar 16, 2023
Tecala has recently launched a new business unit, called ‘Automation, Data and AI’ (ADA), which is engaging with mid-market organisations to ensure they get the best outcomes from Copilot, as well as many other automation and AI technologies.
To integrate Microsoft 365 Copilot into your existing IT infrastructure you’ll need to address the issue of how you manage the planning, configuration, and implementation with your existing Microsoft 365 and broader ICT environment.
As a first step, it will be essential to assess your current infrastructure, identify compatibility requirements, and ensure adequate resources for a smooth integration. Next, you’ll need to set up your user accounts, licences, and security settings in Microsoft 365 to ensure they’re all aligned with your organisational structure.
Building the platform with Cyber Security front and centre will ensure your organisation operates in a secure environment with flexibility, agility, and adaptability. Copilot is integrated into Microsoft 365 and automatically inherits all your company’s valuable security, compliance, and privacy policies and processes. Two-factor authentication, compliance boundaries, privacy protections, and more make Copilot the AI solution you can trust.
Ongoing monitoring, maintenance, and regular updates will ensure optimal performance and security of Microsoft 365 Copilot as it becomes an integral part of your workplace. Ensuring it remains in lock-step with your broader business and operations vision is the responsibility of Senior Consultants and can be embedded in a Strategic Technology Roadmap.
Microsoft 365 Copilot will be a game-changer for Superannuation organisations looking to empower their people. It will create a fully connected and AI-empowered intelligent business where people, data, assets, and devices openly and securely interact and collaborate.
But as with all things in IT, it will need to operate in your interconnected web of infrastructure, platforms, applications, and devices that are dependent on one another for their performance.
To make sure your organisation is ready for Microsoft 365 Copilot and many other emerging technologies, talk with Tecala today.
The Tecala Microsoft 365 Copilot Readiness Assessment has been developed by our ADA team in collaboration with Microsoft.
It delivers three outcomes to ensure a successful Copilot configuration:
1. Understand where it will be used and by whom, for example:
a. New product and service development.
b. Customer services, via the Call Centre.
c. Day to day productivity tasks, including productive meetings.
2. Review your existing Microsoft 365 usage and your objectives with Copilot
a. Are you already using Microsoft 365?
b. Does your existing configuration already support Copilot?
c. What needs to be done to implement, set up, and enable services?
3. Identify the most effective approach for rolling out your Copilot platform within Microsoft 365 platform
a. Ensuring high data integrity and curating the right data into your data model (pool).
b. Ensuring security and privacy of your data.
c. Configuring your Azure tenancy account to enable Copilot.
d. Setting up your accounts.
e. Setting up your Roles Based Access Controls.
f. Getting the right licensing in place.
g. Education and training to ensure your teams get the best possible outcomes for Copilot experiences.
In this blog we put a spotlight on the importance of high quality, processed data to be the foundational resource for your automation and AI initiatives.
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