What is Microsoft Copilot?
The age of AI is here, and the most revolutionary change is the natural user interface. With generative AI, human language has become the ultimate coding tool, and Microsoft Copilot is the AI companion that brings it to life across the Microsoft ecosystem.
Generative AI works by receiving user inputs and generating responses using large language models (LLMs) trained on vast internet data. While this approach suits many consumer needs, businesses need deeper insights. That’s where Microsoft Copilot stands out. It integrates with Microsoft 365 apps like Word, Teams, and Excel, utilizing embedded AI and Copilot Chat.
Unlike general AI tools, Copilot taps into your organization’s Microsoft Graph for specific context and data. It then refines the AI-generated output using that information, ensuring more accurate results tailored to your business needs.
How does it help your business?
Generative AIs, when used correctly, can provide transformational benefits to organizations. However, they have two significant downsides:
Microsoft Copilot solves for both of these, bringing the transformative power of generative AI to your business.
In short, Microsoft Copilot enables your business to take advantage of generative AI and all its benefits from within your own digital environment without the risk of data leaks, security breaches, or compliance lapses.
How is it implemented across Microsoft tools?
The first layer of engagement with Copilot is Chat: a powerful digital assistant always within arm’s reach wherever you are within Microsoft 365 and its many peripherals. With Chat, you can request quick generations of text or images, call up documents or people within a team, set reminders, send invites, and much, much more.
It’s a powerful and intelligent companion just a click away.
Additionally, Copilot’s natural language interface and powerful data analysis unlocks unique abilities and commands within the myriad tools across Microsoft 365.
Learn how to use Copilot here: How to Use Microsoft 365 Copilot – YouTube @SYSCOMGS
Copilot in Teams best acts as a meeting assistant, and helps with meetings in three ways: before, during, and after.
Before: Prior to joining a meeting, you can ask Copilot to recap the previous meeting with this team, review recent messages in the team’s group chat, and provide a summary of key points that need to be addressed in the meeting.
During: As a meeting begins, Copilot can be added as a participant and provide an ongoing transcript of what’s been said. Additionally, it can answer questions about specific items mentioned in the chat, monitor open items that still need to be addressed, and keep track of next steps.
After: Copilot continues to make the meeting better after it concludes by sending a summary to all parties involved along with next steps for individuals and teams. If you missed a meeting or joined late, you can request a summary of what you missed.
Copilot also enhances your team’s group chat by being able to reference documents, presentations, emails, calendars, notes, contacts, and more across your organization, right from within the chat. You can ask it to do things like:
Pull up all documents related to a project
Reference data trends contained in a report’s spreadsheet
Call up the next steps as laid out in a recent presentation
Copilot in Outlook combines the generative capabilities AI has become famous for with summarization and coaching and editing to create a powerful tool for quick, accurate communication.
Generating content:
- Jumpstart emails with quick first-draft generations, customizable by length and tone
- Use prompts to generate specific emails based on topics, projects, or updates
Summarizing emails
- Ask Copilot to pull out the important items you need in an email
- Ask Copilot to generate a summary of an email thread for you to catch up on
Coaching and editing
- Receive live editorial coaching as you write
- Request suggestions for improvement on something you’ve already written based on your prompts, like “how can I make it more concise” or “how can I make it more action-oriented”
Copilot in Word acts as your editor and writing assistant, keeping your writing concise, to the point, and effective.
Begin faster
- Get a head start on a document by prompting Copilot to generate a first draft for you to punch up
Make your documents clearer and more effective
- Copilot can suggest different kinds of content and formatting for your document, like tables, charts, images, and more
Summarize
- Request a summary of Word documents from Copilot
- Have Copilot generate a high-level summary of key points from the document to append to the end
Copilot in PowerPoint makes it easier to create presentations and make them look better.
Generate presentations:
- Create a presentation from a simple prompt: “Generate a presentation for the executive board about our Q1 growth in EMEA. Make the slides highly visual, with 2-3 bullet points each.”
- Create a presentation from an existing document: “Generate a PowerPoint presentation based on the info in our recent Q1 EMEA growth report.”
Improve presentations
- Copilot can review your presentation and suggest ways to improve its organization, like rearranging, combining, or expanding slides.
- You can also use Copilot to make batch changes to an entire presentation at once, like changing fonts across multiple slides.
Summarize presentations
- Copilot can summarize PowerPoint presentations for you, too.
Copilot in Excel unlocks groundbreaking new ways to quickly manipulate data and uncover insights.
Manipulate data:
- Tell Copilot exactly what you need a cell to do, in your own natural language, and it will tell you the precise formula you need.
- Copilot can even tell you if there are better, more efficient functions to do what you need.
Identify insights
- Ask Copilot to highlight data trends and connections relevant to your work, using your own words.
- Ask it to further identify areas to focus your attention as you analyze the data.
Copilot is embedded into CRM and ERP applications within Dynamics 365 to help unlock deeply powerful customer and enterprise insights, enhance workflows, and assist day to day operations to increase productivity.
Target customers in Customer Insights
- Describe the demographic you want to reach in simple semantic language
- Create entire target segments based off that description with query assist
- Jumpstart campaign creative development with copy and image generation
Streamline ecommerce in Business Central
- Use product attributes like color, material, and size to create compelling product description
- Tailor descriptions further with tone of voice, format, and length
- Publish seamlessly to Shopify with a few clicks
Manage supply chain issues in Supply Chain Management
- Flag external issues like weather, financials, and geography
- Communicate about issues proactively with predictive insights
Learn more at Dynamics Digest: Exploring the Latest in Microsoft Business Technology.
Copilot transforms what you can do in Power Platform by unlocking natural language commands, even further simplifying low-code/no-code app development. It can also automate workflows and generate content for websites and data analysis.
In Power Automate, anyone can generate new workflows with their own words: “I need to receive an alert any time our server room temperature exceeds 100 degrees. If I don’t respond in five minutes, I need that alert sent to the CTO.”
In Power Apps, create entirely new apps in seconds by describing what you need: “I need an app that will prompt users to enter account info, send that info to our database, and enable users to look up their account info in that database with self-service.”
In Power Pages, generate entire professional websites and enhance your data analysis without knowing any code: “Create a webpage to share the results of the Q4 sales report with our sales agents.”
How can SYSCOM help?
As a Microsoft Solutions Partner, we’re already a trusted expert on all things Copilot. If you already have a Microsoft 365 enterprise license, we can help you roll out Copilot across your organization and onboard your teams to this powerful tool. And as Copilot is regularly updated, we make sure to keep ourselves informed. Please reach out for the most updated info.
Additionally, we can help with actually using Copilot, too. We’ve been using it ourselves internally, and have already developed some go-to prompts to achieve incredible results. For more information, please contact us.