Microsoft Copilot

Pete Filitz and Johan Vennables discusses Microsoft Copilot and its impact on businesses.

Copilot is an AI-driven digital assistant that assists staff with various tasks and activities, like generating content drafts and creating presentations. Johan explains how Copilot integrates with Microsoft Office to make business tasks simpler and less time intensive.

Pete and Johan highlight the importance of the BCN Copilot Readiness Assessment service and Johan shares his personal experience using Copilot.

Takeaways

• Microsoft Copilot is an AI-driven digital assistant that helps staff with various tasks and activities.
• Copilot integrates with Microsoft Office apps and uses Microsoft Graph to provide relevant responses.
• Data organization and protection are crucial before deploying Copilot.
• The Copilot Readiness Assessment service helps businesses identify use cases and explore automation opportunities.
• Copilot is still in the early stages with some potential issues.

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Transcript

Peter: 0:02

Good morning and welcome to today's podcast. This is episode three. We're discussing copilot and AI and what that means to you and your business. Joining me today on today's podcast is Johan Venables, one of our Cloud Solutions consultants and the pioneer within BCN moving things forward using AI and specifically focusing on Microsoft Copilot. Welcome Johan. Thanks for joining us.

Johan: 0:28

Hi Peter, thank you. Thanks for the introduction.

Peter: 0:31

Johan, why don't you give us a little more information about yourself and your role at BCN?

Johan: 0:38

Sure. I'm a cloud consultant who works closely with our clients to help understand how technology can support their business with growth. We explore areas to boost productivity for staff and look at how we could automate business processes to reduce repetitive tasks. Mostly focused around the Microsoft 365 environment.

Peter: 0:59

Great. Thanks for that overview. Yeah, I mean, I think more and more businesses are keen to explore how they do more with less people, less less time. And obviously, copilot and automation and all these wonderful AI tools can certainly revolutionize the way in which we work on a day-to-day basis. Talking about Copilot today, why don't you give us a brief overview as to what Copilot is exactly?

Johan: 1:23

Yeah, to keep it simple, Microsoft 365 Copilot is an AI-driven digital assistant designed to assist your staff across various tasks and activities. It offers a range of helpful functionalities such as generating content drafts, suggesting alternative wording, inserting images, creating PowerPoint presentations, and empowering your staff to do more.

Peter: 1:48

Wow, that uh certainly sounds like uh a game changer for the traditional workforce, that's for sure. Johan, I think our audience is quite keen in understanding what its functionality and integration with business applications are.

Johan: 2:02

I guess let me let me explain just a quick high-level overview of how it works. So Copilot integrates within your Office app. So that could be Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Teams, your emails, and Microsoft Loop. And what it does is it so basically it uses Microsoft Graph. So Microsoft Graph could be think of it as your database of information. So it's things like your contacts, your emails, uh conversations you're having within Teams, documents, etc. So Copilot, how it works is it receives an input prompt from a user within those apps, you know, like Word or PowerPoint, and then pre-process the input prompt through an approach called grounding, which improves the accuracy of the prompt to help you get sort of answers that is relevant and actionable to your specific task. The prompt can include text from input files or other content discovered by Copilot. And then Copilot sends the prompt to large language models, LLM, for processing. Copilot takes the response from LLM and then post-processes it. The post-processing includes other grounding calls to Microsoft Graph, responsible AI checks, security, compliance and privacy reviews, and command generation. Copilot then basically returns the response to the app, which the end user review and assess the response. It's just very important to note that Copilot only access the data the individual user have access to. So if there's an area that they don't have access to, you know, like sensitive information, Copilot will not provide them with that content.

Peter: 3:42

Yeah, and I think that's that's so important, right? So you've just sort of highlighted a key requirement there, making sure that the data is locked down correctly and only the appropriate people have access to it. Because I think that's one of the biggest concerns is surfacing data to users that they shouldn't have access to. I know we're going to discuss that in in a little more detail just now. We're talking obviously about Microsoft 365 co-pilot, but there are alternative copilots, right? So there is a whole family, so to speak, of co-pilots which are focused on the Microsoft stack of services.

Johan: 4:17

Yeah, absolutely. So I mean you get Microsoft 365 copilot, your personal assistant. That's the first copilot you would start uh using within a business. And then you've got copilot for dynamics, you've got it at a power platform, you've got co-pilot for security, for Windows 11, you've also got copilot for Microsoft Sales, and then you've got the access to Bing Chat. Well, they call it now Copilot for the web. So definitely go and have a look online, see what the capabilities are. If we had to sit here and talk about it now, we'd be here for quite a long time. But definitely, I would say look at the co-pilot in the Power Platform, some amazing stuff there to just give you a quick example, you know, Power BI uh reports. You would generally need a very experienced Power BI person to help you connect your, you know, to your data sources, which is still the case. But the difference with this is you'll be able to get your staff to generate the content they want to see instead of relying on someone to do it for you. So you could just put a simple request in through Copilot and ask it to present you with the data you want to see from your sources, which is awesome because you can do it on a fly, on a go, and it's instant within seconds. But definitely go and have a look online to see all its other capabilities.

Peter: 5:39

If clients want to understand how copilot can add value to their business and understand exactly what they need to do in order to get ready for deploying a rolling out copilot, don't you want to talk us through the co-pilot readiness assessment that BCN have put together for clients exploring this?

Johan: 6:00

Absolutely. So before you deploy copilot, it's essential to take stock of your data, ensure that it's well organized, structured, permissions are applied correctly. You don't want to have an overcomplicated uh sort of structure with heavy permissions, because look, you want data to come in and out as quickly as possible. And of course, you need to make sure it's well protected. This means setting up proper access controls, classifications, and permissions to ensure that only authorized personnel can access that information. We can do this by using Microsoft security services that's already in place, which is uh you know information protection, data governance, data loss preventions, labeling of sensitive data. And our consultancy team can work closely with you to sort of help and guide you on best practices for utilizing these services, which then would move us on to our sort of approach where we've launched a service called Copilot Readiness Assessment. And there, what we really want to do is just try and keep it as simple as possible with the approach. We don't want to overwhelm you thinking this is going to be a you know a long time-consuming project. We appreciate that uh everyone wants to get their hands onto Copilot as soon as possible. And we encourage you to look at getting a couple of licenses just for the sort of key stakeholders in a business, start playing with it, see it for yourself, because it's important for you guys to start getting a good understanding of its use case, and you would be the best persons within the business to understand how your departments can get the most out of it. So, with our co-pilot readiness assessment, the first thing we would do is just look at a demo workshop session where we just want to show you its capabilities, show you a couple of use case scenarios, then collaborate closely with you on how you could potentially use it within your business. Now, the copilot 365 assistant may not be for everyone within your business, but it's important to note that during that discovery phase and our uh co-pilot readiness assessment, we will identify your business use case, whether the AI assistant can help or not. And if there's room for other areas to explore, on because look, you get a copilot for studio, so you can customize and create your own co-pilot, or it could be a case that we've identified there's some parts of the business that we could potentially automate. So it's not just a case of focusing on AI. We really truly want to just understand how we can help your business be, you know, as productive as possible. We want to create efficiencies, lace human arrows, and just get you to thrive within that Microsoft 365 space. So, yes, Copilot will be the top topic, but we'll definitely be focusing on how we can help all the departments within a business.

Peter: 8:48

So, Johan, you've been playing around with Copilot for the past week. I think our audience would really welcome your thoughts and opinions on the technology and what you think of it so far.

Johan: 9:00

So, look, I I find it amazing. It's really good. Basically, I've been using it a lot for recording meetings. That's been proven quite useful. I struggle to multitask sometimes where I'm in a meeting and I have to take notes where sometimes I do not listen to the client to what they said, and I have to ask them to repeat themselves. Where now I can give my full attention to the client without having to worry about writing down notes. We can have a conversation, and I can easily, after the meeting, just ask co-pilot to recap the meeting, and it will give me all the key topics that we've discussed, which I can then copy, paste in an email, and I can get co-pilot to just add more content to that conversations we've had. So I can ask it to summarize what we've discussed, and I can tell co-pilot to make my client aware that these are the sort of next steps, this is what we're going to be doing. So there's a good solid understanding between the two of us on what the next steps and what we've discussed, right? So that has proven quite useful. I've used it to draft up some documents, proposals for solutions that we we sold to our clients, and that was uh for me another big game changer to give you an example. Usually when I write a proposal, starting from having the meeting with the client, identifying their requirements, doing research online to find out what's the best practices, as well as looking at what we do as a business and the services we offer, then getting the proposal done, handing it over to sales, and then creating the PowerPoint presentation to present it to the client. That can take up to two to three weeks. We did a solution for our clients. I've managed to do all of that in a matter of two to three hours. So that is a massive game changer from my experience. But there's one thing that I do want to just highlight, it's still the early days for co-pilots. Microsoft was supposed to launch it in April. They've decided to allow us all to have access to it now. I do see a few sort of server issues where the timeout, especially, obviously, everyone's getting their hands on co-pilot. So Microsoft data centers are getting hit really hard, especially around the afternoon. But again, like I said, it's early days, it is working, and we still suggest you go and sign up for a couple of licenses. You have to give it a go, you have to try it to set for yourself. It's an amazing tool, but we also need to make you aware it's still early days, so it may not be perfect.

Peter: 11:29

Look, it's it's a new service, it's um a new product, as with all Microsoft products over the years, you know, there is always a betting in period. I'm sure you know Microsoft is using this as a sort of case study just to evaluate what is needed to refine and fine-tune the product. I know having spoken to Microsoft last year, one of the biggest challenges they face as a business with the release of this product is being able to supply sufficient computing power to run it because it is a resource-intensive product or technology, so to speak. And if you've got large numbers of people and users adopting it, it's it's obviously going to require massive amounts of computing. So I'm not surprised you've seen those performance issues. I'm sure they're obviously working on it. You know, this is the way it's going, and you need to get on board. If you don't, your competitors will, and uh that will leave you behind. At the end of the day, anything that allows us to do more with less time, less effort, means that we're doing what we're doing ultimately more cost effectively. So I think it's great to see that things are moving in this direction. It might not be for all, as you've said as well, and and as we've seen, but certainly we would encourage businesses to explore this further. And if they want help and guidance on exploring these technologies and the rest of the Microsoft suite, then feel free to get in touch with us here at BCN. I know Johan and his team are excited about the future and what this brings to the table. You know, this has been a big change in the industry that we've been working in for many years. So yeah, please don't hesitate to get in touch. Johan, any final parting words from you?

Johan: 13:31

Yeah, go buy Copilot.

Peter: 13:34

There we go. Heard it from the horse's mouth. Thanks so much, Johan, for joining us today. I hope our audience has found it uh useful and informative. Don't forget to visit our website www.bcn.co.uk for a wealth of information. We've got some great events coming up as well, focusing on not just Copilot, but a wide range of interesting technologies and services that are relevant to businesses in today's world. We look forward to seeing you on our next episode. So stay tuned in and don't forget to like and subscribe. Thanks so much. All the best.

Johan: 14:10

Thank you.