What is Microsoft 365 Copilot and how can it help you?
Microsoft 365 Copilot is a new AI-powered digital assistant that integrates with Microsoft 365 products to help you get more done.
It will change the way you work by boosting your productivity, skills and creativity.
Copilot will save you time, whether you need it to summarise a Teams meeting you missed, pull action points from a chain of emails, locate information that you know is *somewhere* in your documents, schedule a meeting, draft an email, or create a presentation.
Your employees are at the heart of your business and Copilot can support them in their daily activities, helping them achieve their goals and improving morale.
“At HBTech, we value the skills and expertise of our people and this will not change. Introducing Copilot is enhancing these skills and also brings some science into our processes. We have been impressed by its ability to analyse meeting content and data, making presentations easier, and much quicker, to produce. It is an exciting product and we wouldn’t want to work without it now” Carol Evans, Head of Amazing, HBTech.
Microsoft 365 Copilot is your new AI assistant, and it’s not your average AI
Unlike other generative AI programs you may have tried (e.g. Chat GPT), MS 365 Copilot becomes part of your organisation, generating output specific to your business.
Rather than spitting out generic paragraphs of vague text gleaned from various sources, Copilot produces tailored results utilising your organisation’s information.
As well as being able to draw information from the internet (optionally) and its own database, Copilot uses your business’s data and documents to provide accurate and genuinely useful help without compromising your privacy. It does not add your information to its own database, or share it elsewhere.
Reclaim your time
Early Copilot users have reported significant time savings (some over 30 minutes a day, or 10 hours a month), freeing them up to devote more attention to work that requires their own creativity and focus. They also experienced an improvement in the quality of their work.
Copilot can take over boring, repetitive or time consuming tasks, but it does much more than that. By helping to jump-start the creative process, e.g. by analysing information or by composing a first draft, Copilot helps people formulate their ideas faster.
Obviously, increased productivity is very attractive.
Even better, this all adds up to an improvement in employee satisfaction and well-being.
In an age when many workers struggle with an overwhelming onslaught of emails, meetings and digital information, delegating tasks to Copilot can be a lifeline.
It’s no wonder that 77% of early Copilot users said they did not want to go back to working without it.
You’re in control of security
Your data is safe with MS 365 Copilot. None of your data ever leaves your organisation and none of your data is used to train the language database.
Within your organisation, you can control which departments and employees have access to which drives, folders and files.
Copilot’s access to your files and data depends on the security settings and permissions you have in place.
It is important to ensure that any sensitive data (e.g. HR, finance or management) is properly secured to avoid information being inadvertently shared elsewhere within your organisation.
It’s worth taking the time to set things up properly at the outset – for maximum productivity gains, you want to give Copilot access to all necessary information, while making sure that confidential data is kept private. It makes sense to evaluate your existing sharing policies and access controls so that the right people have access to the right information.
Closing the digital skill gap
When employees struggle with digital skill gaps, productivity suffers. Copilot can help you complete tasks faster (and better) by bridging the gaps between the user’s ability and the software’s functionality.
Perhaps you need to analyse complex data, but your Excel skills are not quite up to the task. Or maybe you need to turn a document into a presentation, but you’ve run out of time. Using plain English, you can prompt Copilot to assist you, instead of spending precious time trying to upskill on the fly.
Copilot is integrated into the programs you already use
By integrating with the Microsoft 365 suite, Copilot can provide valuable assistance with everything from meetings and presentations to reports and communications.
Here are just a few of the ways it could help you:
Make Teams meetings more productive with Copilot
Copilot can help you stay on top of meetings.
If you can’t be there, Copilot can attend on your behalf, taking notes and providing a helpful summary of what was discussed and any action points you need to be aware of.
If you join a meeting after it has started, Copilot can bring you up to speed with a summary of what you missed.
Shortly before the meeting ends, Copilot can provide a list of key points and next steps to ensure everyone knows where they stand.
Afterwards, you can ask Copilot questions about the meeting and even instruct it to draft an email or document based on what was discussed or the action points that were agreed.
Tame your inbox with Copilot in Outlook
Of course, Copilot can help you write emails (even using your existing data to produce a draft) as well as giving suggestions on readability, tone, clarity, etc.
It can also help you manage the emails you receive.
Copilot can prioritise the emails you need to act on, summarise chains of correspondence and find key information for you.
It can even take over the task of scheduling meetings, suggesting attendees and checking availability.
Speed up data analysis in Excel with Copilot
Copilot helps you do more with your Excel data.
Using plain English prompts, you can ask Copilot to provide insights, to highlight or sort certain items, and to show trends.
You can even get Copilot to generate charts, instantly giving you a different way to visualise your spreadsheet data.
Produce better documents faster by using Copilot in Word
Copilot can help you get started with a brainstorming boost, an outline or a first draft.
Perhaps you already have a document, and you’d like some suggestions on rewriting a section or maybe a little help converting some text into a table format for some visual appeal.
Or maybe you’d like Copilot to find additional information that you may need, whether that’s data you want to include or some background that helps you strike the right tone.
You can even ask Copilot to summarise the text, extracting main points and key information from a lengthy or complex document. This could be particularly useful for a quick catch-up, a covering email or an executive summary.
Create PowerPoint presentations with ease with Copilot’s help
Copilot can help you create PowerPoint presentations quickly and easily. You can prompt it to produce a presentation on a particular topic, using your existing templates to retain a consistent look and feel.
Perhaps you have a Word document that you want to turn into a presentation. Copilot can generate slides and insert speaker notes from that file, using your existing headings to understand how to structure the content. It will even copy images over from the Word document into the slides it creates.
Getting ready for Copilot – what you need to do
Copilot can support you in your daily tasks, free you from the drudgery of grunt work and give you the freedom and space to create and excel without getting bogged down in busy work.
The time saved quickly adds up and translates into increased productivity, bringing cost savings that outweigh the investment. Not to mention the boost to staff satisfaction and employee well-being when users feel better able to manage their digital workload.
But there are some things you should do to get ready for Copilot.
Make your data available to Copilot
To get the most out of Copilot, you’ll want to make sure that all your data is uploaded onto your SharePoint or OneDrive system, this is where Copilot will look for information to use when assisting you.
Secure your confidential data
With or without Copilot, it’s important that your security and permissions are set up correctly to ensure that the right people have access to the right data.
Before giving Copilot access to your system, you should double check access and permissions to ensure that Copilot does not retrieve confidential information and present it to someone in your organisation who should not see it. HR, finance and management are obvious departments to protect, your organisation may have additional areas where confidentiality must be maintained.
Try a pilot of Copilot
Of course, the best way to find out how Copilot can transform your organisation’s working practices is to try it out for yourself.
Take it for a test drive and see how it can benefit your business.
If you would like some help getting ready for Copilot and want to experience first-hand how it can help you, or if you’d like to discuss whether it would be a good fit for your organisation
