Microsoft 365 Copilot is an intelligent, AI-driven digital assistant designed to streamline your workday. Today, Copilot for Microsoft 365 is only available for enterprise-tier companies; we’re expecting the full release to happen later this year. What makes Copilot for Microsoft 365 so unique is that it is integrated with your organization’s Microsoft 365 and can use your data and files to create communications, presentations, and answer questions about your data. From a security standpoint, you’re already trusting Microsoft with your data, so there is no additional risk using Copilot. Unlike free AI assistants, you can be confident that Copilot isn’t going to share your data with other users.
Here are three examples of how you will be able to use Copilot for Microsoft 365 to make your life easier.
Catch up on meetings
Ever get that overwhelmed feeling from non-stop meetings? It’s not just the constant back-to-backs, but also dealing with double-bookings and conflicts. Copilot in Teams is here to help you sort through the chaos. It lets you prioritize the important meetings and catch up on the ones you’ve missed, no need to watch the whole recording. Here are some sample prompts you’ll be able to use:
- Give me a quick summary of the meeting in bullet points
- Do I have any action items?
Copilot is not just for meetings you missed, it can be used to help you recall or interpret what was said in the meeting.
- What was the feedback on my idea? List the positive and negative feedback separately.
- <X> had a good idea for a marketing campaign next quarter. Can you remind me exactly what she said?
Writing communications and blogs
I’m sure you already know that AI can be used for writing emails, blogs, and other long-form communications. However, you should not just copy what an AI says and run with it, AI-generated text is often word-y and will have a different tone that you usually write with. AI is most effective at creating a first draft to help you get started, you will still need to edit the text and put it in your own words. What is exciting about Copilot is that it can consume data and files across your organization to create communications. For example,
- While writing in Word, you can highlight a paragraph that you’re struggling with and have Copilot re-write it for you – or give you multiple versions to pick and choose from.
- Say you want to send an email summarizing a planning document that you’re working on; ask Copilot to write a succinct summary email for you based on a Word or Excel file.
One limitation of free AI’s like ChatGPT, is that you can’t (shouldn’t) copy private company data into it. Since Copilot is already integrated with your private company data, you gain the benefits of generative AI based on your work without the risk of leaking sensitive data.
Creating presentations
Are you someone that loves creating PowerPoint presentations? No, I thought not. Lucky for you, Copilot will do the heavy lifting for you. Once your organization has Copilot enabled, you can simply open PowerPoint and click the Copilot icon on your menu and ask Copilot to:
- Create a slide deck from a file. If you need to convert a Word doc into a slide deck to present to your team, Copilot will turn your planning document into a succinct and polished slide deck.
- Make edits across your slide deck. You can ask Copilot to change the color of all your title fonts, add an ending slide, or add pictures to every one of your slides. There is much more you can do with Copilot, but you get the idea – it’ll supercharge your presentation building.
We’re excited about the potential of Copilot for Microsoft 365, to transform how teams work and boost efficiency. Unfortunately, Copilot won’t be cheap and successfully implementing AI across your business is easier said than done. To get an idea about the potential drawbacks of Copilot, check out our recent post on the Pros and Cons of Copilot for Microsoft 365.