What is Copilot?
Copilot is a new AI product from Microsoft that combines the power of large language models with your organization’s data. Copilot works alongside popular Microsoft 365 apps such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, and more. Copilot provides real-time intelligent assistance, enabling users to enhance their creativity, productivity, and skills within the Microsoft 365 ecosystem.
What are the benefits of Copilot and why would users want this?
With Copilot, you can:
- Write emails, reports, and other documents faster and better with Copilot’s suggestions and corrections.
- Create presentations, charts, and graphs with Copilot’s data insights and visualization.
- Generate code, scripts, formulas, and queries with Copilot’s programming and analysis skills.
- Translate languages, write creative text, and explore new topics with Copilot’s natural language processing and generative capabilities.
- Collaborate and communicate more effectively with Copilot’s smart meeting assistance and productivity recommendations.
In recent surveys, employees have shared what they expect from AI tools:
source: Microsoft Copilot Strategy Briefing
As you can see, the needs from employees and the value it can deliver is fully aligned. A second survey was conducted at employees who were able to use Copilot during an extended period of time in their day-to-day job. Some figures out of this survey speak for themselves:
- 70% of Copilot users said they were more productive, and 68% said it improved the quality of their work.
- Overall, users were 29% faster in a series of tasks (searching, writing, and summarizing).
- Users were able to get caught up on a missed meeting nearly 4x faster.
- 64% of users said Copilot helps them spend less time processing email.
- 85% of users said Copilot helps them get to a good first draft faster.
- 75% of users said Copilot “saves me time by finding whatever I need in my files.”
- 77% of users said once they used Copilot, they didn’t want to give it up.
What Can Copilot’s Earliest Users Teach Us About Generative AI at Work? (microsoft.com)
As a summary, enabling Copilot within your organization will clearly benefit your knowledge workers for their day-to-day activities within the Microsoft ecosystem.
How can we help you adopt Copilot?
at element61, we believe that just activating Copilot for you knowledge workers is not the way forward. You should guide these users in adopting this new exciting technology. Before activating and implementing the licenses, we'll need to assess how you can use these tools. After the activation, your employees will need to be coached on how they use these tools in the best way possible.
In order to guide you through this journey, we have created a proven Copilot Adoption Framework that consists of four phases: Assessment, Activation, Implementation, and Learning. We will guide you through each phase and provide you with the following services:
- Assess your current state, goals, and readiness for Copilot adoption.
- we'll focus on three domains:
- Technology: is your technical setup ready for a roll-out. We'll look at infrastructure, security and compliance settings.
- People: what's the level of your employees and are they ready to adopt this new technology
- Process: what are your existing processes and bottlenecks on where this new technology can accelerate your business.
- we'll focus on three domains:
- Activate Copilot for your Microsoft 365 environment and configure it according to your needs and preferences.
- Implement Copilot for your Microsoft 365 applications and customize it for your specific use cases and scenarios.
- Help your end users learn how to use Copilot for their daily tasks and projects and provide ongoing support and feedback.
- we'll coach your teams in making use of these tools. Our coaching contains effort on:
- prompt engineering (Focus on Goal - Context - Source - Preferences)
- preparing documents for better use with copilot
- enhacing your workflow
- we'll coach your teams in making use of these tools. Our coaching contains effort on:
The basis of this framework is based on the Copilot Success Kit – Microsoft Adoption created by Microsoft (why reinvent the wheel 😉)
What is underneath Microsoft 365 Copilot
Microsoft365 Coplit is actually a combination of different services offered in an integrated format. As you can see on the below picture, the setup is not very different from creating your own OpenAI application.
This pictures also immediately highlights the (dis)advantage of Microsoft365 Copilot.
Everything that is within the Microsoft 365 Trust Boundary is not customizable meaning that you'll have to work with what Microsoft offers. If this setup is not sufficient for you needs, we can custom built an OpenAI solution for your exact business need.
How to get started?
If you are interested in our Copilot Adoption Framework service offering, please contact us today. We look forward to hearing from you and helping you unleash the power of Copilot for your organization.