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It’s nearly here – Microsoft is now releasing regular news updates on its new Microsoft 365 Copilot platform. Scheduled for launch later this year, Microsoft 365 Copilot — “your Copilot for work” – will combine the power of large language models (LLMs) with your data, in the Microsoft Graph and the Microsoft 365 applications.
With the promise to turn “words into the most powerful productivity tool on the planet,” Microsoft Copilot is designed to work alongside you, embedded in the Microsoft 365 applications we all use on a daily basis.
In the latest official Microsoft blog on the Copilot, Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO of Microsoft, says: “With our new copilot for work, we’re giving people more agency and making technology more accessible through the most universal interface — natural language.”
Microsoft is positioning Copilot as enterprise-ready AI. Designed to be more than OpenAI’s ChatGPT embedded into Microsoft 365, it is instead an augmentation tool that is designed to enrich, enhance, and boost each interaction you have with the Microsoft 365 ecosystem.
Microsoft says: “It’s a sophisticated processing and orchestration engine working behind the scenes to combine the power of LLMs, including GPT-4, with the Microsoft 365 apps and your business data in the Microsoft Graph.”
On a basic level, Copilot is integrated into Microsoft 365 in two ways. It works alongside you as your AI companion. If you’re in Word, for example, it’ll write, edit, summarise, and create drafts and versions for you, based on your verbal or typed prompts.
If you’re in PowerPoint, it’ll use natural language commands to adjust layouts, reformat text, and perfectly time animations, as well as transform existing written documents into decks or start a new presentation from a simple prompt or outline.
On this Microsoft blog, you’ll find some really good tutorials on how you’ll be able to use the application to enhance your experience with these apps and boost your creativity.
Beyond the day-to-day workplace productivity sphere, Copilot also has the potential to transform customer experiences.
Agents in customer service contact centres, for example, are regularly asked questions by customers. If they can’t answer the question directly, they’ll typically search multiple internal knowledge sources or try to find an internal expert to consult with. The amount of time it takes to read through search results, find the right solution, compose a response back to the customer, and resolve the case is often lengthy.
Now, agents can chat with their AI-powered Copilot within their Customer Service desktop or workspace to triage the challenge or diagnose the problem. By analysing broad customer data sets, Copilot will identify patterns, anticipate customer needs, and give suggestions to the customer service agent on how to best handle the customer's query or interaction.
Because all this is happening in real time in the agent’s existing workspace, the customer gets a much more accurate and valuable response, much faster. It also allows the agent to handle more queries in less time, increasing efficiency and improving the overall customer experience.
We’re already seeing AI in online chatbots, of course. But Copilot enables a much more enriched dialogue between two people in a more technical or complex support setting, such as Tier-1 IT support.
But it’s probably Copilot's potential to unlock and drive productivity that is getting the most attention – especially at a time when more organisations are unifying their communications and collaboration on Microsoft Teams Direct Calling, and managing the platform migrations involved in that move.
Copilot will be integrated in the productivity apps we rely on every day. This integration will deliver an intuitive and consistent user experience and, according to Microsoft, it will “look, feel and behave the same way in Teams as it does in Outlook, with a shared design language for prompts, refinements and commands.”
In Outlook, for example, Copilot will summarise long email threads to quickly draft suggested replies, removing that tiresome daily burden. In Teams, it will summarise key discussion points, bring in background references, citations, reports, and presentations into live meetings, enabling a much more collaborative and expansive session.
And when applied to Business Chat, it will enhance communication. Working across the LLM, the Microsoft 365 apps, and your data, you’ll be able to ask it to do things you’ve never been able to do before. You can give it natural language prompts like “tell my team how we updated the product strategy,” and it will generate a status update based on the morning’s meetings, emails, and chat threads.
Even with this very brief summary of Microsoft 365 Copilot's capabilities, 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.
To get value from Copilot (and indeed all AI and Intelligent Business Practices generally) you’ll need to ensure your data is accurate, complete, consistent, and relevant to your analysis or decision-making process. This includes verifying the sources of data, addressing any data entry errors, removing duplicate or irrelevant data, and performing data cleansing and validation processes.
Microsoft explains in its official blog: “AI-powered LLMs are trained on a large but limited corpus of data. The key to unlocking productivity in business lies in connecting LLMs to your business data — in a secure, compliant, privacy-preserving way."
Microsoft 365 Copilot is only successful if it has “real-time access to both your content and context in the Microsoft Graph. This means it generates answers anchored in your business content (your documents, emails, calendar, chats, meetings, contacts, and other business data), and combines 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 responses.”
Tecala’s Unified Communications and Collaboration Services (UCaaS) are designed to enable mid-market organisations to get the most value from their communication and collaboration applications.
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.
If migration of data and email accounts are required, you’ll be able to use Microsoft's migration tools and services to manage that, and you’ll need continual access to the skills, capabilities and experience required to continue driving your Microsoft 365 implementation projects to ensure they’re continually validated and updated.
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 organisations looking to empower their teams, because 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 each other for their performance.
To make sure your organisation is ready for Microsoft 365 Copilot and other emerging technologies, talk with Tecala today.
Let Microsoft 365 Copilot take your work to new heights. Say goodbye to mundane tasks and hello to a game-changing experience, let Microsoft 365 Copilot be ‘your Copilot for work’.
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