Editorial
Copilot is Microsoft’s approach to integrating the power of large language models (LLMs) with Microsoft 365. Through Microsoft Graph — comprising users’ calendars, emails, chats, documents, meetings and more — Copilot will understand and execute natural language prompts. In short: You can just use your words to tell it what you want to do.
Microsoft claims Copilot is “turning your words into the most powerful productivity tools” — a lot to match in action. But with the AI capabilities that already exist today, that vision is achievable — and it’s going to have an impact on the way we work.
AI Will Be Everywhere
Microsoft is putting Copilot everywhere. It is already integrated into a large number of everyday programs such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, OneNote, Loop, Whiteboard and more. Microsoft is also busily expanding its use to even more apps such as SharePoint, Dynamics 365, Power Platform, Fabric and even Windows 11, likely with even more integrations to come in the future.
Related Article: Microsoft Copilot: 5 Productivity Tips for Marketers
The goal of embedding Copilot into all these apps is to bolster productivity. With a text prompt, Copilot can create a first draft for you, collect together information from across your data as needed, add content to documents, summarize text, rewrite sections or an entire document to make it more concise or change the tone, and help you improve your writing with suggestions that strengthen your arguments or smooth inconsistencies.
Changing the Ways We Work
Gone are the days of staring blankly at an empty Word document or struggling to compose an email. Copilot's integration into our Office apps and our data should help us create drafts and content in no time. By understanding our work patterns and leveraging AI algorithms, Copilot is meant to help writers get over that initial block and head straight to the first draft version.
For example, Copilot can help you write emails by suggesting subject lines, greetings, closings and follow-ups. It can also help you prepare for meetings by generating agendas, action items and summaries based on your data and conversations. In Viva Goals, you can use Copilot to generate your OKRs (Objectives and Key Results). Instead of manually scanning through dozens or hundreds of emails, chats, files and apps to collect information about a specific project or customer, Copilot can ideally collate it all for you — so you can spend your time on the actual project you wanted to do, instead of finding documents.
It is incredibly important to keep in mind, though, that Copilot is not autopilot. Copilot is an assistant, helping you to spend less time on routine work so you can focus on the result. It can give you a first draft quickly, so you get to round two ifaster. But your final drafts — your articles, presentations and reports — need careful editing to make sure they convey what you want to convey.
Related Article: Microsoft Build Was All About Generative AI
Artificial intelligence is helping us in many ways. It can help us to achieve more with less, as its proponents often say. It can help us to write better responses, discover insights and more. But artificial intelligence is not a magic wand that can do everything for us. It is a tool that we need to use wisely and responsibly. We need to understand its limitations and potential biases. We need to be aware of the ethical implications and social impacts of using AI in our work. And we need to keep learning and adapting as AI evolves and changes the way we work.
We Need New Skills
Not everything happens automatically. To take advantage of these new capabilities, we will need new skills at work — and the learning curve will be steep. If you have not adapted to continuous learning yet, now’s the time.
While AI may make the work easier in many ways, it can also make it harder. We will need to accept AI and think of it as a colleague — and that can be a massive life for some people. You are going to see that you will be talking more with AI and with your colleagues. We need to learn how to use AI to its available potential. We need to learn how we talk with machines. While you can get started with just your words, the better you can describe and guide the AI the better results you will get. There is already a move to hire “prompt engineers” — or AI whisperers — to gain the edge in tough competition.
And the fact that we do have a lot of digital debt does not make all this easier. If you are interested to learn more, I suggest you read Microsoft’s Work Trend Index: Will AI fix work? Report.
Connected to the Wide Network
I am tempted to say that Copilot will be connected to the metaverse, but that’s not accurate. At Microsoft Build in May, the company announced a list of future Copilot features that will allow organizations to create their own plugins and extensions, enabling the connection to external data and systems organizations often have. This means AI can be used to collect and act with data beyond Microsoft 365 cloud. Perhaps there is an ERP system you use — Copilot plugin can make it accessible from Teams Business Chat. Depending on the plugin or extensions, you can do more than just fetch information. The next step is to make AI part of the process and help get involved in business processes and actions using two-way connections.
Related Article: How Copilot in Microsoft 365 Will Impact Productivity
Artificial intelligence should also be used to help make better decisions and speed up routine processes and procedures. By bringing extensibility to Copilot, Microsoft may be opening a new world of possibilities for improving productivity.
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Preparing for the Future
Microsoft Copilot uses Microsoft Graph to access data, making it even more crucial that keep your data up to date. Copilot will potentially have access to all the files and information in Microsoft 365 (depending on what permissions you set) and will act based on that data, and so it is vital to make sure that information is accurate and relevant. Just as people were surprised by how Delve surfaced information in Microsoft 365, Copilot may potentially uncover outdated or conflicting materials. To avoid such issues, it is essential to plan and maintain your documents and information by archiving old materials.
Businesses that do not soon start taking advantage of these artificial intelligence tools may find themselves left behind as their competitors use these capabilities. Not using AI may mean they are giving their competitors an advantage.
Artificial intelligence can be a game-changer in the way we work, and there is no going back. The rocket has lifted off and is making the future reality today. As we continue to embrace AI technologies like Microsoft Copilot, we could see significant improvements in productivity, decision-making and creativity. AI can help us to achieve more with less, write better responses and discover insights that were once hidden.
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