Microsoft Copilot – one of the most trending topics recently in the enterprise AI space.
Introduced as a successor for Cortana, Microsoft’s answer to Siri and Alexa, Copilot is your everyday companion at work bringing artificial intelligence into mainstream enterprise data and applications.
The intersection of generative AI with a vast range of business processes holds an immense potential to bring a great transformation in the business operational and productivity landscape across industries.
What’s happening at a typical workplace now?
Most knowledge workers feel that they are doing more of drudgery and less of value-adding work.
Employees, being humans, want to use their creativity, intelligence, and energies in work that adds value. However, they spend most of their time on mundane tasks that make them feel disconnected from the core of their work.
According to Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2023 Report, only 23% of employees worldwide feel engaged at work.
With an underlying philosophy to bring a shift in our work culture, Microsoft Copilot makes technology more accessible in the most universal interface – natural language, and frees up employees from mundane tasks.
To understand how Copilot can transform work in real life, Microsoft conducted a study on the early users of Copilot. The study revealed that 77% of the employees didn’t want to give up Copilot at work as it helped them improve their productivity and quality of work.
Copilot is omnipresent in the Microsoft ecosystem.
That said, is Copilot only limited to Microsoft products? How can you use Copilot for your business?
To answer many such questions, we have created this complete guide to Copilot, covering different forms of Copilot available for businesses and the benefits of it.
For beginners, let’s start this guide with a brief introduction about Microsoft Copilot.
What is Microsoft Copilot?
Microsoft Copilot is an AI-powered virtual assistant that will help you create content, generate ideas, edit text, perform tasks, provide insights, and do more.
Microsoft backed OpenAI, the company that created ChatGPT. While ChatGPT is majorly an AI chatbot for individuals, Microsoft wanted to bring ChatGPT-like AI assistant that would work specifically on enterprise data, helping businesses transform their operations. The AI tool should help businesses drive their operations with great efficiency and navigate them into a new world of opportunities created by AI. And, in February 2023, Microsoft introduced Copilot to the world.
Like its sister AI tool, ChatGPT, Copilot is also built on GPT-4 Turbo large language model (LLM) and works on the latest information available on the web.
When integrated into Microsoft products, which we will discuss in later sections, Copilot will work with your own enterprise data.
So, your employees can use this generative AI tool in their everyday tasks, automating the mundane tasks.
Is Microsoft Copilot safe to use in work?
This is one of the most common questions that might come to mind when thinking about using it in your enterprise applications.
Although you integrate Copilot into your Microsoft products, Copilot does not train on your enterprise data and does not store your chats.
Microsoft Copilot also uses role-based access control, preventing unauthorized access to data. For example, if you don’t have access to your company’s financial reports, Copilot cannot provide you with information from the financial reports even if you are in the company’s finance team. Responses generated by Copilot might not be completely accurate. So, you should be awake while using Copilot at work.
There is a copilot for your every need
Copilot is available across Microsoft products in different forms helping users in numerous ways.
For ease of consumption, we classified all available copilots into three sections- Copilot for business roles, Copilot for individuals, Copilot for modern workplace, and Copilot for security.
In the following sections, we will discuss each type of Copilot and how it helps your business.
Copilot for business roles
Most businesses, despite using digital solutions, face the challenges in cross-team collaboration and operate in silos. To address this challenge, Microsoft launched Copilot in its products in the Dynamics 365 suite.
Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales
Microsoft Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales opens a new door for strengthening customer relationships using the power of artificial intelligence. Copilot’s generative AI capability generates emails, summarizes meetings, and handles data entry seamlessly. This assistance will translate into valuable time savings, allowing your sales teams to channel their efforts into building meaningful relationships with customers.
If you have Copilot integrated into your Microsoft 365 applications and other line-of-business applications, Copilot delivers a comprehensive view of customer interactions. This integration of Copilot will ensure your sales teams always have the latest information handy and will enable more personalized customer engagements.
Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights for marketing
Understanding your customers will help you create more effective target segments and launch successful marketing campaigns. To help your marketing teams to get deeper insights into your customers, Microsoft has introduced Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.
Using Copilot, you can discover unprecedented insights into customers in real time with prompts in your natural language. You can use these insights to create more personalized experiences for your customers and improve brand loyalty.
Your marketing team can interact with Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights to understand your customers better and create more specific target segments. They can use the AI tool to create personalized customer journeys and generate ideas for marketing campaigns.
Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Service
Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Service modernizes your contact center with AI capabilities to enhance customer service experiences and boost agent productivity. You can integrate this Copilot with other data sources, such as your CRM, website, and Microsoft 365, and enable your agents to find information faster to diagnose and resolve issues.
Copilot for Service will also help your agents create replies to customers with a more personalized tone and enhance their experience.
Copilot in Dynamics 365 Field Service
Copilot in Dynamics 365 Field Service empowers your frontline service teams with AI capabilities to resolve issues faster and more efficiently. Copilot for Field Service can make recommendations for scheduling technicians based on their skillset, availability, etc.
Your field agents can get all customer-related information from different sources in your ecosystem with natural language prompts in Copilot and deliver personalized services to the customers.
Copilot in Dynamics 365 Finance
Copilot in Dynamics 365 Finance helps you build agility in your finance organization with AI-powered automation and content generation. With Copilot, your finance and operations teams can automate mundane tasks that consume a lot of their time and stay focused on matters of strategic importance. Copilot also helps in creating project status reports, planning tasks, and performing risk assessments – all within seconds.
Copilot in Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management
Microsoft Copilot in Dynamics 365 helps you forecast demands and navigate disruptions proactively in supply chain management. Using Copilot, you can predict the impact of a supply chain disruption and collaborate with stakeholders effectively to minimize the impact.
Copilot in Dynamics 365 Business Central
With Copilot in Dynamics 365 Business Central, you can save time creating product descriptions and drive sales with tailored marketing copies. Copilot can create differentiation in the content for different products using attributes like material, color, and size. Copilot also automates publishing this content to your e-commerce platforms such as Spotify and streamlines operations.
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Microsoft 365 Copilot
You might know Microsoft 365 as a powerful suite of productivity tools such as Word, Excel, Power Point, Teams, and Outlook. Empowering business users with AI to save more time and boost productivity, Microsoft has introduced Copilot into Microsoft 365 as an add-on.
Copilot in Microsoft 365 is available in the form of Microsoft 365 Chat.
Microsoft 365 Chat works on your enterprise data within the apps, such as word files, emails, excel sheets, etc. This copilot helps you create content, find information, draft emails, follow up on meetings, summarize email threads, schedule meetings, and more.
Microsoft 365 Chat also works on data on the web and can help you find answers to your specific questions.
You can integrate Copilot into each of the productivity apps in the Microsoft 365 suite. Copilots in these individual apps help you do your work on the respective apps faster and better.
Let’s explore how Copilot in each of these applications can help you unleash your creativity.
Microsoft Copilot in Word
Copilot in Word helps you unleash creativity in writing and speed up work on Word. You can interact with Copilot in natural language and ask the AI tool to generate ideas for your draft. You can describe what you want to write, and Copilot will deliver the first draft in seconds. You can make iterations to the draft and ask Copilot to make the content read better.
If you have too many pages to read through but are running out of time, you can ask Copilot to summarize the content and highlight the key points from the document. Copilot in Word can also transform text in paragraphs into tables to make information more comprehensible.
Microsoft Copilot in Excel
With Copilot in Excel, you can visualize and analyze your data faster and extract insights with ease. You can ask Copilot to perform basic tasks like filtering, sorting, deleting, highlighting data and more. Copilot can help you with formulas while performing complex calculations on your data. You can gain deeper, actionable insights into your data on Excel using Copilot. You can identify trends in your data and get recommendations that will improve the outcomes.
Microsoft Copilot in Power Point
Microsoft Copilot in Power Point helps you create presentations faster and better. You can describe your requirement or idea to Copilot, and it will deliver the draft presentation in seconds. You can communicate with Copilot to give suggestions and make iterations to the presentation.
If you have a long presentation to go through, you can take Copilot’s help to summarize the presentation and get key information faster. Copilot can also make suggestions that will make your presentation more appealing and help fulfill your objectives.
Microsoft Copilot in Teams
Copilot in Teams can transform collaboration among your team members and offer some powerful features that will boost productivity. The generative AI capabilities of Copilot can create meeting summaries and provide you with key points and action items. The AI tool can help you catch up with conversations on Teams by quickly reviewing action items and key points.
Copilot on Teams can also work on data from other Microsoft applications such as Calendar, Outlook, Word, Power Point, etc. This will enable you to get information and act promptly without leaving Teams.
Microsoft Copilot in Outlook
Writing good emails is very important for professionals. This is where Copilot in Outlook will help you. Using the generative AI capabilities of Copilot in Outlook, you can create email drafts and edit the drafts quickly using natural language descriptions.
Copilot helps you stay on top of your email conversations by summarizing long email threads in short. Copilot can assist you scheduling meetings automatically, understanding context from your email conversations.
Source: Copilot in Outlook help & learning (microsoft.com)
Copilot for a modern workplace
Microsoft empowers enterprises to create modern digital solutions using low-code development and automation to transform operations through its Power Platform.
Now, Power Platform is equipped with Copilot, allowing you to create apps and automation flows with just a prompt in the AI chat box.
Microsoft introduced Copilot into Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power BI, enhancing experience of working on these platforms a breeze.
Copilot in Power Apps
With Copilot in Power Apps, you don’t have to learn a programming language to create an app. Using your natural language, you can describe your app and Copilot will design the app for you. It will create tables in Dataverse and use them to develop your application. You can suggest changes to the design and table as per your requirement, and Copilot will make iteration in seconds.
The AI-powered low-code app development will empower citizen developers in your organization and reduce dependency on IT teams. The accelerated transformation will translate into considerable savings in time and operating costs, improving your bottom lines.
Copilot in Power Automate
Power Automate helps you streamline your workflows and free up your workforce from mundane tasks. However, automating workflows on a case-by-case basis is often time and resource-intensive. Copilot in Power Automate turns this tide and enables you to create automated workflows with simple natural language descriptions.
Copilot can understand the context and automatically set up connections to deliver a reliable automated workflow. You can ask Copilot questions about the workflows for better understanding and suggest changes.
Copilot in Fabric and Power BI
A lot has been said emphasizing the importance of data and analytics for sustainable growth culture. Offering new ways to process data and extract deeper insights, Microsoft incorporated Copilot into Microsoft Fabric and Power BI.
Copilot empowers data professionals with machine learning algorithms to create robust data pipelines and complex analytical models, streamlining end-to-end data lifecycle. The AI-powered data infrastructure will deliver deeper insights in real time, strengthening your decision making.
Copilot for Azure
If you are an Azure user, you can also transform your cloud operations with Copilot. Microsoft Copilot for Azure simplifies designing, operating, troubleshooting, and optimizing your Azure cloud infrastructure using natural language descriptions. The AI tool will provide you with insights into your cloud usage and make recommendations to make the best use of the cloud platform.
Foster security with Security Copilot
Cybersecurity has become a focal point in the digital world. Empowering IT security teams with generative AI capabilities and amplify efficiency, Microsoft launched Security Copilot.
Security Copilot analyzes huge volumes of data signals and delivers actionable insights, enabling your security teams to identify cyber threats and respond to them proactively.
Your IT professionals can ask Security Copilot questions about security operations, device management, identity management, data protection and compliance, and cloud security, and get insightful responses from the AI tool. It will automate the tasks of your IT professionals and allows them to focus on strategic work, strengthening your security.
Advantages of copilot
Copilot is revolutionary in democratizing artificial intelligence for enterprises of all sizes. Before Copilot, although AI finds applications in every industry, businesses couldn’t imagine using AI in their daily operations.
Copilot shifts the paradigm and empowers business users with the power of generative AI. Taking a broad view of Copilot’s applications in business operations, here are a few advantages of the AI tool from Microsoft:
Productivity gains
Copilot is wonderful in eliminating mundane tasks by automating a variety of tasks. Be it writing an email or summarizing a long thread of emails, catching up with meetings or preparing presentations, Copilot is a powerful tool for professionals.
You can complete tasks, which would otherwise take hours, in minutes and refocus on strategic things. These productivity gains will translate into savings in your bottom line.
Streamlined collaboration
Copilot seamlessly integrates into the Microsoft ecosystem and breaks silos in your organization, facilitating cross-team collaboration. This collaboration eliminates ambiguities in operations and tremendously improves efficiency with expedited processes.
Enhanced experiences
Copilot comes in handy in internal and external communications. Your employees can get information from across your ecosystem and find answers to their questions. This safe and easy access to information uplifts employee and customer experiences, strengthening loyalty.
Improved compliance
Most businesses suffer penalties and damage to the brand reputation due to non-compliance. One of the primary reasons for this non-compliance is due to poor data access. Copilot addresses this challenge effectively while maintaining data security and privacy with role-based access controls. Your employees can easily access the required information with simple natural language prompts and adhere to prescribed guidelines.
Improved employee engagement
Monotony at work kills productivity. Mundane tasks cause monotony at work. Copilot, with its generative AI capabilities, automates the mundane tasks and allows your employees to focus on what truly deserves their attention. This will boost the morale of your employees and keep them engaged at work.
Licensing Cost and requirement of Copilot
At the time of writing, any business with a product license for Microsoft 365 Business Standard, Business Premium, E3, E5 or Office 365 E3 or E5 can purchase Copilot for Microsoft 365 at $30 per user per month.
Can you build custom copilots?
In the earlier sections, we discussed a wide range of copilots across the Microsoft product line. The scope of Copilot is not limited to the Microsoft ecosystem.
Businesses not using Microsoft products can also bring the power of generative AI into their enterprise applications with custom-built copilots using Microsoft Copilot Studio. The platform also allows Microsoft users to customize Copilot for Microsoft 365 to match their specific business requirements.
Joel Jolly, VP of Technology at Saxon AI, hosted an informative webinar on Copilot Studio. If you want to learn more about building your own custom copilots on Copilot Studio, we’d recommend you watch the webinar: Copilot Studio | On-demand webinar | Watch for free (saxon.ai)
Do you need a technology partner?
As an end-user, working with Copilot is a breezy experience. When planned and executed right, Copilot can be a great addition to your AI strategy.
After the launch of Copilot, small and medium scale businesses also started embracing AI strategies to drive business growth on par with large enterprises. However, integration of Copilot into your AI strategy requires a thorough analysis of your readiness, existing infrastructure, potential opportunities, risks, and challenges.
To help you launch successful AI initiatives, you can reach out to a trusted Microsoft partner like Saxon AI. We have been delivering transformative enterprise solutions with profound expertise for more than two decades.
We host tailored workshops for enterprises where you can interact with our experts and discuss strategies. We carefully consider your readiness, requirements, and challenges to create the most suitable roadmap that will help you achieve your end goals faster.
