What is Copilot for Microsoft 365?

There has been a lot of hype in the press lately around Copilot, Microsoft’s new AI tool. But what exactly is it and how can it help you and your business? Our informative blog provides a useful overview:

In today’s rapidly evolving landscape, AI tools are key to staying competitive and driving business success. Copilot for Microsoft 365 represents the latest evolution in generative AI capabilities, building upon the success and momentum generated by ChatGPT.

Copilot has been engineered to work with Microsoft 365 applications, including Word, Outlook, Excel, Teams and PowerPoint. It can scan through all your draft documents, analyse the data and then compose email replies, summarise meetings and create presentations — taking all that manual searching and content-creation work off your hands. This leads to considerable time savings which you can then dedicate to other areas of your business.

5 steps to get your business ready for Copilot for Microsoft 365

To ensure a successful integration of Copilot for Microsoft 365 into your organization, it’s essential to follow a strategic approach. Here are 5 key steps to help you get started:

1. Prepare your data environment: This is absolutely essential. To generate quality AI content, the data that Copilot relies on must be well-organised, current, and of a high quality. Ensuring that your data sources within Microsoft 365 are in tip-top shape, and that the right permissions are in place, is crucial to your success with Copilot. If the data has not been tidied up before implementing Copilot, it will not be beneficial, and it could even have a negative impact; for example, if it accesses an employee’s personal data that is stored on a drive somewhere and makes that public!
2. Build the business case: Before you install Copilot for Microsoft 365, it is highly beneficial to identify the specific benefits that you envisage it bringing to your organisation. A strong business case helps to improve the efficiency and productivity of the tool and also provides you with justification for the cost.
3. Implement robust security policies:Strong security and compliance policies are vital. Establishing clear governance policies, including “human-in-the-loop” validation – where human input and feedback helps to fine-tune the content returned by AI – will make sure that Copilot is only returning data that is appropriate to the queries, and that it continually improves.
4. Create persona matrices:Identify the users within your organization who will benefit most from Copilot and consider prioritising those who generate content, or who work with lots of data. Make sure you have solid use cases ready to share with your users so they can start using the tool effectively as soon as possible.
5. Build a solid adoption plan: You should prepare a plan for the communication, enablement and success measurement for your Copilot roll-out to ensure that you get buy-in from your users from the outset and that they start getting value from it right away.

Minerva are Microsoft Gold Partners so if you would like to find out if Copilot could benefit your organisation in the future, please give us a call on 01707 607100 and speak to one of our friendly advisers, or fill in the short form on our website.