April 12, 2023 Knowledge Center Office 365

Microsoft 365 Copilot: Your AI Partner for Working Smarter Not Harder

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Whether you’ve realized it or not, artificial intelligence (AI) is embedded in many of the applications you use to complete your day-to-day tasks. For example, AI helps generate suggestions for completing a sentence in your emails, underlines words spelled incorrectly or phrased poorly, offers new layouts for slides in your presentations, and more.  

But it’s important to understand that when generating these suggested changes to your content, AI has been operating in an “autopilot” capacity, rather than a collaborative one. Based on one of Microsoft’s most recent product announcements, however, that’s about to change.  

Introducing Microsoft 365 Copilot, the newest large language model (LLM)-powered AI tool! Copilot combines the power of data stored in Microsoft Graphs with the apps in the M365 ecosystem to help you create content more easily, automate mundane tasks, and enhance your overall productivity.  

What’s possible with Microsoft 365 Copilot? 
Microsoft 365 Copilot: Your AI Partner for Working Smarter Not Harder
  • Artificial Intelligence (AI): the development of computer systems that can perform tasks typically requiring human intelligence, such as understanding natural language, recognizing images, making decisions, and learning from experience. 
  • Large Language Model (LLM): a type of artificial intelligence tool that is designed to generate natural language text that is similar to what a human might produce.  
    • Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT): a type of large language model that is specifically designed for natural language generation tasks, such as text completion, summarization, and translation. You may have heard of this in the context of ChatGPT. 
  • Prompt: a specific question, statement, set of instructions, or request submitted to an AI system as a guide to receiving a desired result or output

With only a brief suggestion, question, or request, Copilot integrates with a number of Microsoft 365 tools to make completing your day-to-day work tasks much more manageable. When using Copilot, you’ll have the ability to choose what you want to keep, edit or delete. As a result, you can be more innovative with Word, more detailed in Excel, more creative with PowerPoint, more efficient with Outlook, and more organized in Teams. 

We’ve outlined the capabilities of Copilot in each tool and provided examples of the prompts you can enter to generate your desired result: 

  1. Copilot in Word makes it easier to draft, edit, or summarize content based on a short set of instructions.  
    • For example: Draft a five-paragraph blog post based on the bullet points in [relevant document] and slides two through five in [related presentation] using a professional and informative tone.  
       2. You can analyze, visualize, and envision your datasets with Copilot in Excel. 
    • For example: Model how a change in the growth rate of [first variable] would impact [second variable]. Generate a corresponding graph. 
       3. It’s possible to work alongside Copilot in PowerPoint to create more visually appealing and engaging presentations in seconds. 
    • For example: Reconfigure slide 6 of this presentation to remove most of the text and incorporate more images. Add speaker notes and transitions to every slide.
        4. You can use Copilot in Teams to host more productive meetings, summarize discussions you missed, and highlight key action items.  
    • For example: List the action items identified during the meeting at 1:00 PM and prioritize them according to which ones were discussed with the most importance. Schedule the next check-in for one month from today.  
         5. Finally, Copilot in Outlook allows you to organize your inbox to make communicating more seamless and effective.  
    • For example: Summarize the email messages I received while I was out of the office last week and prioritize them based on urgency.  

The above examples just scratch the surface of what’s possible with Copilot, as it will ultimately help collaboratively generate content that can be modified to best suit your needs. The integration of Copilot with the modern workplace as your automation assistant gives you the ability to control AI technology and use it to your advantage to get more done, faster.  

Related: Microsoft introduces Copilot – your copilot for work 

Are you ready for Copilot? 

Copilot is still in the testing stages and is currently unavailable for use by the general public. BUT, if you want to enable Copilot following the official launch, adopting Microsoft 365 is the place to start. Microsoft 365 is the modern workplace foundation on which Copilot is built, and it brings together all necessary applications, identities, management features, and security tools. 

Be prepared for the launch of Microsoft Copilot and contact us to get started with your modern workplace journey today.