The AI revolution is here - companies worldwide are rapidly adopting AI into their businesses, and for good reason. However, with so many possibilities for how AI can be used in your business, it can be overwhelming to know how or where to start.
Microsoft Copilot puts one of the most popular types of AI - an AI language model with generative capabilities, right into your hands, meaning that it gives you access to some of the most powerful AI capabilities that can help superpower your business and truly transform how your organisation operates.
In this blog, we’ll explain the functionalities of Microsoft 365 Copilot including the best practices for implementing it into your organisation, as well as why AI adoption is becoming increasingly vital for companies looking to stay ahead of the competition.
What is Microsoft 365 Copilot?
Microsoft Copilot is Microsoft’s new innovative AI tool designed to be your copilot for work. It uses large language models (LLMs) in combination with your data, making it an incredibly powerful tool to have at your disposal.
Integrated into Microsoft 365, Microsoft Copilot is always there to help you with whatever you need. Let’s say that you’re in Microsoft Word and you need to draft something based on prior meetings or other past communications, Microsoft Copilot will be able to help you complete it in an instant.
Copilot can draft out everyday emails, contracts, proposals, and everything else that takes up time in your role, enabling you to focus on more important tasks. But it can do much more than simple writing tasks too. For example, in Microsoft Teams Copilot can compile meeting notes, summarise key points, and track what people agree and disagree with, providing you with actionable suggestions based on these key points.
Example use cases:
Copilot in Microsoft Outlook: instead of having to constantly sort through your emails yourself, Copilot helps you separate what’s important from what’s not. It also helps you write and draft emails with ease. With just a few clicks and a prompt, Copilot gives you access to a fully customisable draft with options to change the tone and length of the email.
Copilot in Microsoft Teams: Copilot has been integrated into Teams to be able to create a full meeting recap and summary. With this, you can ask Copilot questions about the meeting summary to save time. Copilot also highlights content within this recap, ensuring that the most important information is conveyed with ease.
Copilot in Viva: in Microsoft Viva, Copilot is there to help you create engaging posts that will capture the attention of those in your organisation. Simply enter a prompt and choose the tone that you’d like, and Copilot will handle the rest for you.
Copilot in Word: with just a brief prompt, Copilot will be able to generate any written work that your organisation requires, intelligently. Copilot will be able to pull from files around your organisation and ensure that the tone, content, and formatting are all correct based on any examples you direct it towards.
Copilot in PowerPoint: Copilot in Powerpoint easily lets you turn text-based documents into engaging presentations, meaning that you can have professional-looking presentations intelligently filled with information from a given document in seconds. Copilot will be able to create slides and edit slides to adjust their length, tone, and complexity, meaning that you can have your PowerPoint polished to a professional standard with just a few prompts.
Why AI adoption is important in the digital age
There are a multitude of benefits that come with implementing new AI technologies into your organisation, all of which will help take your business to the next level and stay ahead of the competition:
- Productivity and efficiency: AI simply lets you get things done far faster than doing them manually. Where before, it would take hours out of your day to respond to emails, create documents, conduct research, and do everything you need to do to support your work, AI does all of that in seconds, meaning you can focus on other things that require more of your attention.
- Data and knowledge: knowledge is power, and AI has access to a lot of information that can help you. Due to modern language models having access to most of the internet, you can easily get answers to what you need to know in seconds, with accurate, in-depth information.
- Analysis and insights: AI can easily analyse and extrapolate information far more thoroughly and efficiently than doing so manually, giving you access to new insights and information in seconds that would otherwise never be found. This can help you make key decisions with ease.
Microsoft 365 Copilot best practices
Microsoft Copilot is a powerful tool and utilising it effectively can truly help your organisation become more successful than ever.
Here are some of the things you need to know when getting started with Microsoft Copilot:
- Office applications: once enabled within your organisation, Microsoft Copilot will be available in all of the 365 Office applications, such as Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook, etc. Without doing anything, they’ll be enabled into your applications, meaning that you don’t have to spend time accessing Copilot externally when working.
- Suggestions: as you type in Microsoft Copilot, it’ll suggest things based on context. Getting used to these suggestions and utilising them will help improve your workflow. They are also fully customisable in your settings to tailor them to your requirements.
- Fact-checking: over-reliance on Microsoft Copilot could cause errors or inaccuracies, so it’s important to check whatever you do in Copilot to ensure that it’s correct before continuing.
- Automation: using tools such as the Power Platform and Microsoft Autopilot also helps you automate throughout your organisation. Doing so can help speed up everyday tasks and make your workplace even more productive and efficient.
How to get started
Microsoft Copilot is a powerful AI tool that any organisation can use to empower their organisation with the benefits of artificial intelligence and can be used to do a multitude of tasks in seconds.
If you’re looking to get started with Microsoft Copilot or 365 but don’t know where to start, reach out to us today. Our team of expert professionals will be able to help you work out how to move forward with 365 and Copilot and provide you with a helping hand along the way.