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Since Microsoft’s January 2023 multi-billion dollar investment in OpenAI, the company has been clear on its intentions to bring generative AI to all of its products.
It has followed through on that promise with a steady stream of roll-outs, not least of which is Copilot for Microsoft 365, which became generally available for enterprise customers across all sales channels on Jan. 15.
Microsoft MOCA and the Attention Economy
With every addition to the Microsoft 365 tool chest, organizations must rethink where and how the new tool can best support work. The launch of Copilot across the Microsoft ecosystem once again raises the question. Microsoft's Modern Collaboration Architecture (MOCA) framework, launched in November 2020, aims to guide organizations through this exact decision making process and it has updated the framework to account for every tool, including Copilots.
Microsoft describes MOCA as a framework which addresses two key challenges:
- To help organizations drive digital culture change across the organization enabled by good attention management practices.
- To address the “What am I accomplishing?” an evolution from the “which tool when?” question for the Microsoft 365 collaboration suite.
With the introduction of Copilot, Microsoft has doubled down on preserving and harnessing attention. As Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella puts it, "What is scarce in all of the abundance is human attention."
The company updated MOCA to include all of the different Copilots that affect individual, team and organizational productivity in early January.
With that, and with its related Leaders Guide to Attention Management, the company positions Copilot as a "game changer" that will help individuals and organizations form better attention protecting practices. And according to research the company published in November 2023, Copilot's affects are already being seen by early adopters, with 70% of respondents reporting the tool made them more productive and 68% claiming it improved their work's quality.
Related Article: Microsoft 365 Copilot Is Now on General Release. Are Your Permissions in Order?
Using Copilot to Protect Attention and Beyond
Copilots can really help with attentiveness in cases where employees are multi-tasking during meetings — sending chats, answering email, doing research, etc. — due to fear of falling behind, said Tom Keuten, VP and head of Microsoft Alliance at Rightpoint.
A Copilot in these circumstances can be used to summarize email messages and draft responses to them or conduct research, so employees can be more attentive and focused in meetings rather than multi-tasking.
Keuten also raised another common attention stealer: notifications. MOCA provides a framework managers can use to help teams be more effective collaborators and to teach them how to schedule focus time without distractions, turn off alerts or use the right communication tool for the right type of communication.
MOCA will become an even more important tool with the increased adoption of Copilots, said Alcion CEO Niraj Tolia. Its support will extend beyond attention management techniques, to helping managers provide a tighter feedback loop for the employees, keeping them engaged, providing help and relevant answers when needed, reducing distractions and helping accelerate work accomplished.
“The combination of MOCA with Copilot can serve as a positive feedback loop for individual employees. This in turn will help improve the productivity of the individual, group and the entire organization,” he said.
In practical terms and moving forward, this means that as Copilots evolve, there will be a growth in collaboration, the instant surfacing of data critical to the task at hand, the reduction in work turnaround times and a marked improvement in work quality.
Grace White, head of design and development at Lilo, also sees Microsoft's Copilots significantly impacting their MOCA program in the following ways:
- Streamlined Workflows: Copilots will automate and simplify workflows, enhancing collaboration and efficiency within MOCA, which focuses on modern work solutions.
- Advanced Security: In line with MOCA's security emphasis, Copilots will offer improved threat detection and response, leveraging AI for enhanced security measures.
- Increased Productivity: Automation of routine tasks will free up human resources for more complex work, leading to greater workforce productivity.
- Deeper Data Insights: AI-driven analysis will provide more detailed and actionable insights, crucial for informed decision-making.
- Cost Reduction: Efficiency and automation brought by Copilots will reduce operational costs.
Related Article: Bothered and Bewildered by Notifications? It's OK to Opt Out
Taking a People-First Approach to Copilots
There are other implications for the workplace too, Avanade CTO Aaron Reich, told us.
Taking a people-first approach to generative AI and Copilots is important, he said. In practice this means looking at the impact of the technology and the massive change it brings before applying it.
He cited Avande’s internal rollout of Microsoft 365 Copilot to its employees as an example. The company followed a three-pronged approach of identifying people/personas, surveying them on a variety of change elements, and then managing the actual change.
“A people-first approach fits in with the MOCA framework because it’s about balancing the use of the Microsoft 365 suite in a way that is more natural to how people work and complete their tasks,” Reich said.
The application of the MOCA framework in this case saved Microsoft Copilot users up to three hours a day, with reported improvements in collaboration, teamwork and problem resolution, he said.
“We anticipate that through more human-centered technology, organizations will realize greater productivity levels from their employees which will lead to cost savings and improved use of resources,” he said. “Products like AI Copilot in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales are enabling this for organizations now and helping to reduce overall workload on task [by applying the MOCA framework] like pulling data together and then using those time savings for more important priorities such as customer engagement."
The focus should remain firmly on the employee, which means companies must first ensure any AI tool is responsible, usable and helpful before roll out. MOCA, in turn, will need to evolve with Copilot technologies, and it must be rethought with the context of a worker and an AI agent working together on a task, Reich continued.
While MOCA provides a helpful framework, every organization will need its own AI guidelines and principles that are reflected in the use of any AI tools, especially Copilots. "The result,” Reich said,” is that Copilot technology application must be even more human-centered to shape the future of work and enable a shift from AI-first to human-first.”
Related Article: Your Microsoft Copilot Prep List
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Jumping the MOCA Gun?
Copilots will remain the focus of MOCA as long as the generative AI tools have the hold over organizations that they have. “That is the nature of marketing an idea like MOCA," concluded Daniel Rasmus, founder and principal analyst at Serious Insights.
“From an actual architectural standpoint, I do not see that they [Copilots] are embedded into the architecture. I see them, at least for now, as bolt-ons to Microsoft 365 and to Windows," he continued.
AI will play a larger role when it becomes hidden, not when it is in the user’s face, he added. People want Windows to be more intuitive, search to be more proactive, and collaboration spaces to be more self-organizing. When AI is applied to those problems in a way that it is about those problems and not the AI, then we will see a breakthrough.
In the meantime, Microsoft has invested too much in AI not to make it the primary topic of everything it does and certainly a centerpiece of modern work, hence the MOCA update.
What Microsoft now needs to do is demonstrate how Copilot adds value to people’s work in a way that external standalone or cloud-based systems sitting outside do not and cannot, because of Copilot's close ties to 365 and Windows, Rasmus concluded, as it hasn't yet made that case.