The pace of modern work is relentless - overflowing inboxes, endless meetings, and a never-ending list of tasks. Numerous studies and research indicate that, on average, a working professional dedicates over 25% of their time just to managing their emails. That's where Copilot for Microsoft 365 comes in. This powerful AI assistant is designed to help people work smarter and more efficiently across apps like Outlook, Word, PowerPoint, and Teams. But how does Copilot work? What to use it, where to start and does the data shared is adequately protected?
All these questions are addressed by James Spignardo, Strategic Solutions Consultant at ProArch and Greg Dodge, Strategic Solutions Architect at ProArch’s webinar series Prepare for Copilot for Microsoft 365. They provided an in-depth look at the key features of Copilot and how it can revolutionize your team's productivity. Keep reading for a summary of the discussion and click here to watch the full webinar.
According to Greg Dodge, Gen AI will essentially increase the global economy. He cites estimates suggesting it could lead to an increase in global GDP ranging from 10 to 15 percent, with a specific estimate of 14 percent, by 2030.
Generative AI is poised to revolutionize the global workforce. Despite fears, uncertainties, and doubts, it will create new jobs in robotics, automation, and data science industries. Generative AI will also increase productivity and efficiency of people in their existing jobs, which is the focus today
While sharing how Gen AI is revolutionizing economies, Greg also talked about key components that make up Microsoft's Copilot for Microsoft 365, and how they work together.
The four main things:
Greg emphasizes that the large language model and the internet are separate entities. Language models are curated with significant investment of time and energy, while directly feeding internet data can confuse them and cause issues like hallucinations. From Microsoft's perspective, the language model, data, and internet are kept separate, which is a key point to understand when using the co-pilot.
Copilot for Microsoft 365 accesses data from your tenant's documents, SharePoint, OneDrive etc. while keeping that data secure and private. Copilot aims to boost productivity through tasks like summarization, content generation, and enabling new capabilities via plugins and integrations.
However, users must evaluate its outputs critically as the generative AI can sometimes produce inaccuracies. Effective prompting is key. Copilot continuously expands abilities through model updates and new third-party data source integrations.
If you don't have security and compliance with guardrails around the data, you might inadvertently expose Graph data to the Copilot that the user shouldn't access or use. Your data in Microsoft 365 stays inside your secure partition and is not used to train the models.
According to James, to get the best out of Copilot you need to - clearly state your goal, provide context, include relevant source information, and specify the desired output format. Prompting should be conversational, allowing refinement through natural language interactions.
The recommended approach has four key elements: the goal (what you want Copilot to do), context (why, who's involved), source (emails, documents for Copilot to reference), and expectations (desired output like bullets, tables, code).
Copilot assists with tasks like generating content ideas, gaining insights, translating languages, storytelling, and troubleshooting. Best practices include being clear and specific, keeping prompt conversational, providing examples when needed, and giving feedback to improve Copilot.
This technology works through natural language and a conversational approach to providing information to AI. We call these prompts - part art, part science. Understanding how to create good prompts leads to better responses and greater satisfaction with the results.
Avoid vague prompts, inappropriate content requests, conflicting instructions, and frequently changing topics within the same conversation. Fact-checking Copilot's outputs is crucial, as it can sometimes generate inaccuracies.
When you're writing prompts for Copilot in Microsoft 365, make sure to be clear and specific. Provide the topic, purpose, tone, and required format. Keep it conversational and let Copilot know what you think of its responses to help it learn and improve based on what you like.
In one demo, Jim Spignardo highlighted Copilot's ability to streamline inbox management through the "Summary by Copilot" feature in Outlook.
Spignardo walked through a scenario where an individual faced a lengthy email thread. Instead of manually reading through numerous replies, they used "Summary by Copilot" to generate a concise summary identifying key points, suggestions, and proposals from various team members.
Copilot summarizes email chains in Outlook, highlighting product launches, marketing strategies, and beta testing groups. It revolutionizes productivity by intelligently extracting insights from Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and PowerPoint decks across Microsoft 365. Keep watching our webinar series part —1 for a live demo showcasing Copilot's AI-powered summarization capabilities throughout the suite.
As generative AI grows, understanding how Microsoft Copilot can benefit your organization is crucial. Our Microsoft 365 Copilot Readiness engagement helps you identify the areas where Copilot can drive the most value for your organization.
We'll work closely with your team to:
If Copilot doesn't seem like the right fit, ProArch can help you in other ways:
Contact us today to schedule a consultation and unlock the power of generative AI for your organization.
For more insight, download the full recording and slide deck of the webinar and learn more about our services at ProArch.