Copilot Evolution

Microsoft made a lot of announcements at their recent Ignite 2023 conference, in some cases furthering evolving their position on the word on everyone's lips: Copilot.

As recently as two months ago - the story when it came to Copilot was somewhat muddled - as I let folks know in the "A Flock of Copilots" newsletter. By focusing on applications, Microsoft ensured their products were front and center, but the average person reading the news couldn't understand the difference between Copilot for PowerPoint, Power Platform Copilot, where Bing Chat for Enterprise fit in, let alone what Windows Copilot was going to do.

The good news is that Microsoft has defined a better path forward, and just started showing folks that path at Ignite.

The app-centric view of the world is now in the rear view mirror.

Instead, Microsoft has moved to a skill-centric vision of where Copilot is going. Yes, that still means that there will be a different set of Copilot tools for Security Professionals than Developers, than Sellers - but instead of focusing on the apps - every app used by employees will have a Copilot capability.

At the end of the day, using a large language model (LLM) is a similar experience across applications - and folks expect it to work similarly.

The big distinction now moves from product names to enterprise grade features - consumers can continue to consume Copilot at copilot.microsoft.com, but enterprise organizations, when they visit the same site, will have true commercial data protection, and enterprises that pay for their employees to have Copilot for Microsoft 365 will have access to all the applications and the Microsoft 365 Graph itself.

It's a cleaner, easier story to tell.

It is, still however, a work in progress. Today, if your organization has rolled out Copilot with commercial data protection, it will look different than the consumer version of Copilot. And even more importantly, today, if your organization has paid for Microsoft 365 Copilot, you'll encounter a simple toggle switch (on the web at copilot.microsoft.com, or using an Edge browser) to flip between two different experiences.

What is the difference? In the future - perhaps there won't be. But today - if you invoke the "Web" toggle - or Copilot with Data Protection (nee Bing Chat Enterprise) - it will allow you to perform common tasks we all associate with LLM and generative AI: it will let you generate text or images, using natural language queries. Unlike the consumer version of Copilot - the words you enter into the prompt won't be fed into Microsoft's LLM, or accessible outside of the digital corporate tenant boundary.

By contrast, if you select the "Work" toggle to launch Copilot for Microsoft 365 (nee Microsoft 365 Chat), you will have rich access to the Microsoft 365 Graph that already exists in the popular Microsoft 365 apps such as Outlook, PowerPoint and Teams. There you can ask about your upcoming meetings (or to summarize a meeting you missed!), where folks sit on an org chart, to create an FAQ based on an existing Word document or to draft an email about an upcoming meeting to your team based on a PowerPoint deck you worked on earlier.

It is clear that over time, that experience will narrow. Since both experiences have data protection, there's no clear advantage to having to flip between the two - and today, when using the Microsoft 365 applications, it may be unclear when you ask the LLM to produce an image, whether it is doing so using generative AI, or simply searching the web for an image that looks similar to what you asked for. Expecting regular office workers to understand that an image was built in "Microsoft Designer" using DALL-E3 is too much - we don't all need to be early adopters in order to use AI effectively and get good at the most important skill: writing effective AI prompts!

Consolidation is good for consumers, enterprises and the partners that support them both on their Copilot journey. Folks now expect the time savings of Copilot in their work life, and don't want to have to flip to "a different app" to accomplish their activity. While it isn't fully consolidated yet - it's clear that Microsoft is simply setting up "Copilot" to be that preferred trusted companion, or as I like to call it, the "team of summer interns".

Here at Cognizant, of course, we continue to drink our own champagne and like many of the early adopters - continue to help customers navigate the changing terms and mechanisms of being one of the first to use Copilot.

If you're interested in beginning that journey - reach out and let us know!