Microsoft Copilot and AI

Copilot for Microsoft 365 – AI In Your Everyday Applications

Copilot for Microsoft 365 is the foundation of these new AI-powered tools. It brings the power of AI to Microsoft 365 applications that you use every day, including:

• Teams – You can ask Copilot to summarize meetings and identify key points. This allows you to take the most important information from a meeting and easily turn it into action.
• Outlook – Copilot helps you keep your most important and time-sensitive emails in your immediate view. It can also summarize email threads, draft replies, and pull data from other apps.
• Word – Use Copilot to draft documents based on data in your system with the proper branding in place.
• Excel – Make sense of your data by asking Copilot to analyze it for you. You can ask Copilot to show you data trends, create visualizations, and drill down on the specifics of your data.
• PowerPoint – Copilot eliminates the need to compile all of your data, and time spent on writing and proofreading when creating a presentation from scratch. You can use natural language to ask Copilot to create a visually appealing presentation in minutes.

Using AI within these apps streamlines task completion, automates workflows, and increases collaboration across your organizations.

Dynamics 365 Copilot – Increased Efficiency in Sales, Marketing, Service, and Business Processes

With Copilot, you can now use AI-powered tools and natural language processing in all of your Dynamics 365 systems. It’s built natively into your cloud-based systems and can be utilized by all members of your team.

Licensing Requirements for Microsoft Copilot

There are various licensing requirements you need to use Copilot in your various Microsoft solutions. Get in touch with our licensing team for more information.

Microsoft Copilot and the Power Platform

The Power Platform already brings a heightened level of automation and creativity to your business processes. When combined with AI, you can take that a step further. Copilot will further streamline the already efficient tools included with the Power Platform. Let’s take a look at some of them:

Copilot for Microsoft Fabric – in Power BI

Copilot can help you create reports, summarize pages and documents, create visuals of text summaries, and enhance the Q&A visual with synonym suggestions. This feature is in public preview for those who have a paid SKU (F64 or higher, or P1 or higher) in certain geographical regions. It will be officially released in March 2024.

Power Virtual Agents – Now Part of Copilot Studio

Chatbots are at the forefront of many customer service processes. They are often the first line of defense in customer service and can often address customer inquiries before a live agent has to get involved.  Copilot empowers you to use AI with your chatbots to help them be more conversational, access more data sources within your system, and provide service in multiple languages.

Copilot for Power Automate

Power Automate is already a great tool that can help ease the flow of business processes. With the addition of Copilot, you can now use natural language authoring to ask it to design cloud flows for you. This also supports other enhancements like additional actions, connectors, geo-availability, parameter filling, and improved explainability.

Copilot for Power Pages

You can enhance and integrate chatbots into private websites to enable private testing and authenticated content retrieval. This can be beneficial to your team as they can ask the chatbot a question and receive responses from knowledge articles and other data within your system. You can also ask Copilot for insights on your website instead of having to manually search for them. Additionally, you can use natural language requests to create internal or external facing websites.

Copilot for Power Apps

Copilot can help you develop power apps uniquely tailored to your business and your team. Some of the main features include:

• Input text generation
• Express design from design and figma files
• Automating the creation of useful deployment notes
• Build and edit Power Apps in the Power Apps studio
• View app descriptions in the list
• Use natural language to write formulas

Setting Up Copilot – How to Prepare Your Organization for AI

While it might seem like using Copilot is a breeze, there are things your organization should do to ensure you have the proper security and access measures in place to use it to its full potential. This includes:

1. Having a well-thought-out Identity and Access to Management strategy to manage access and permissions for your users
2. Classifying your data and assessing governance to control the flow of data in your system, ensuring team members only access the data they need to do their jobs
3. Configuring and deploying Copilot properly and making sure you have the right licenses in place for all of your users to properly access and optimize Copilot
4. Getting your team on board by having conversations with them about Copilot, highlighting how it will be rolled out, how it will be used, and how it will benefit them. Creating a training plan and ensuring your team interacts with it are vital for a successful Copilot deployment.

Stoneridge Software can help you with the pre-work before using Copilot in your organization with a diverse array of offerings.