Microsoft 365 Copilot: The assistant you didn’t know you needed…until now!
You might be lucky enough to have a personal work assistant, but for most of us, we turn up to work and wish we had another “me” to assist with the day’s tasks; to help get those first few lines of content down, to analyse that last report or to simply assist with the daily workload.
Coming soon to a desktop near you, there *may* be something that does just that!
Coffee Cup endeavour to be at the forefront of all innovative technology, so it’s no surprise that AI (Artificial Intelligence) has been on our radar for a while now. We’ve spent many hours on tools like ChatGPT seeing how far we can test it, along with building and streamlining processes within organisations using AI.
As a long-standing Microsoft Partner, we’re eagerly awaiting the official launch of Microsoft 365 Copilot (no date yet), this isn’t your average Copilot, this is another “you” assisting you with your daily workload. If that hasn’t sold you already, let me go into a little more detail…
OpenAI is a leading research lab focused on developing safe and beneficial AI, you’ll have heard of ChatGPT, one of their products along with GPT-4, Whisper, and Jukebox to name but a few. All using AI in various magical ways. Azure OpenAI is a partnership with Microsoft and OpenAI which means it’s essentially the ultimate power couple in the tech world. By joining forces, Microsoft brings its powerful cloud computing resources while OpenAI brings its superpowers of knowledge and skills creating some seriously smart solutions.
Microsoft have invested $10billion in this technology and will own 49% of OpenAI. With this ultimate knowledge at their fingertips, they have developed the latest AI assistant in “Copilot” for Microsoft Office 365 users.
Here’s the basics – A Large Language Model (LLM) like Chat GPT works by sourcing all available information from public sources on the WWW. Here’s the difference; Microsoft have cleverly created a LLM that uses data only from your organisation, transforming how you work. Copilot works alongside you.
A few quick examples of its wizardry are;
- In Word, Copilot can easily write an entirely new document, like a business proposal using content from your existing files.
- In Outlook, based on the content you select, Copilot can compose your email replies for you.
- In PowerPoint, you can transform your written content into a visually beautiful presentation with the click of a button.
- In Teams, Copilot can generate meeting summaries with discussed follow-up actions.
- While using Business Chat in Microsoft Teams, it can help you catch up on something you may have missed, bringing together information from multiple sources to bring you up to speed.
With correct and thought-out prompts Copilot can be your personal assistant, and fast forward hours of workload.
Copilot will take your business to the next level. Not only with streamlining an individual’s day-to-day tasks and minimising workload, but with more specific business-related challenges such as managing customer services relationships, supply chain management, customer insights and marketing to name but a few. We’ll be exploring these business cases in our next round up of Copilot.
For the CEO’s and HR brains amongst us, rest assured knowing your organisations data is safe with Microsoft 365 Copilot. Here’s how:
- Copilot is hosted in the Microsoft Cloud via the Azure OpenAI service. To be clear, Copilot is not calling on the public OpenAI service that powers ChatGPT.
- Copilot capabilities work with Microsoft 365 apps. Microsoft Search is used for information retrieval to feed prompts.
- The Copilot system respects per user access permissions to any content it retrieves.
Microsoft 365 Copilot will only generate responses based on information that you have explicit permission to access.
Here’s a thorough explanation of how Microsoft 365 Copilot has just changed the future of work, watch Lisa Crosbie’s video for all the details (7) Microsoft 365 Copilot Explained: How Microsoft Just Changed the Future of Work – YouTube
From Microsoft direct (7) How Microsoft 365 Copilot works – YouTube for visual examples of how this genius tool will streamline how your organisation works, quite literally overnight!
For the IT techs, here’s what your organisation will need to get you to get started with Microsoft 365 Copilot when it launches later in the year.
- A M365 E3 or E5 license for each user who will be consuming Copilot. For small and medium business (SMB) customers, Microsoft 365 Business Standard or Business Premium will be eligible base licenses.
- A Copilot license.
- An Azure AD account.
- Have all the supported M365 Apps deployed i.e., Word, Excel, PowerPoint, New Outlook, OneDrive etc.
- Have your data stored in M365 (Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, Exchange) for the apps to be able to access it. The richness of your experience will depend on these data sources being indexed by Microsoft 365.
- Manage the permissions of your data – so that the right people have the right access to the right data that will be consumed by these apps and Copilot.
If you want this plus the latest and greatest tech stack at your fingertips Coffee Cup will manage this for you – drop us a line [email protected]
