For the last few weeks I’ve been trying out Copilot for Microsoft 365 and I wanted to share the good and the bad in my experience so far. If you're thinking about jumping in and buying it, here's a few things you should know.
For starters, if you haven’t heard of it Copilot for Microsoft 365 is the AI assistant that integrates into the Microsoft office tools like Outlook, Teams and Powerpoint. Like ChatGPT, its a large language model that can help you with a range of different tasks from summarising your email through to writing a word doc for you.
Right now, it’ll cost you just shy of ￡300 per year on top of your existing Microsoft licences and that has to be paid up front - no testing it out for a month.
Don’t mistake this for the free version of Copilot you can access for general usage or the one thats integrated into the Fabric platform and Power BI. It can get a bit confusing as they all have the same name!
There’s a few things to really like, but here’s my top 3:
- It super powers search. We have a lot of documents in Sharepoint and searching can be a pain. From Teams, I can go into a Copilot chat and ask it a question like ‘I want an example of a high level design doc’ and it’s able to link me to the relevant documents and even provide a summary of what they contain as well. This is one of the features I use the most and there’s a range of ways you can use it to search your documents.
- It’s a great companion in teams calls. Copilot for Teams is probably my favourite feature. Once enabled during a call (which as a minimum needs a transcript to be running, and you’ll get even more data if you record the session), you can engage with it both during and after you’ve had a call. During a call, I’ve asked it things like ‘who hasn’t had a chance to contribute’ and its given a really good view of interactions so far. After the call I can ask it to write me a meeting summary and what the actions were. Huge timesaver and definitely the best feature so far.
- It can save you time with emails. In Outlook, Copilot can do 3 main things. It can summarise emails which is really helpful for long threads you just needs the headlines for. It can coach you on an email you’ve written, providing guidance on things like tone and clarity to help you write a better email. And lastly, it can reply to emails for you. This last one has its ups and downs. The interface offers some clickable prompts based on the context which can be really handy, like confirming a time for a meeting. You can also adjust the tone and length by picking from a drop down list as well. For now though, replies can be a little too obviously written by AI. Once this learns from my previous emails and mimic me, this will be awesome!
- Powerpoint writing is pretty rubbish (at least for me). So maybe this is just me and I need a bit more practice in how to use it, but right now getting Copilot to write your slides based on some input has not yielded what I would consider usable results. You definitely get better results if you point it at a detailed document as the input and you need to work from some kind of template so it can pick up the right style, but personally I find the results lacking. On the plus side, it’s good at summarising a Powerpoint for you to save you some time reading a long deck.
- You have to use tables in excel. I actually really like the excel functionality, just not its main limitation. In excel, you can open the Copilot window and ask it to do something as simple as ‘add a column that calculates the percentage difference between column a and b’ or something more complex like ‘forecast sales for the next 4 quarters’. The catch? All your data has to be in a formatted table. Not just a table structure, but using the built in table format within excel. This isn’t a huge limitation but I’m often doing things that don’t fit around a table like that which stops me being able to use it
Overall, I’ve got high hopes for Copilot in the future and it’s easy to see how this will get better and better over time. I’m especially looking forward to it getting to know me better - how I write, what my diary looks like, the projects I’m working on etc.
If you’ve had the chance to use it, what’s your experience been like?
Head of Marketing @Frameable
5 个月We had high hopes for Copilot as well; however our team at Frameable had a very different experience in regards to "[Copilot] super powers search." What we’ve found is that information retrieval using Copilot in Microsoft Teams is more often than not inaccurate. Or, Copilot produced zero results. Our team decided to build our own AI Assistant for Microsoft Teams. You can see how AI Assistant compares to Copilot in this short video here: https://frameable.com/ai-assistant
Analista de Planificación
7 个月I've been testing it lately (about a month) and I think it has the potential to become an amazing tool, because if you ask Copilot the right questions, it will also give you the right answers.
Head of Household Claims Admiral Group Plc
7 个月Cairo Silvey Jones
Nick Latocha Re: your question on Twitter
Actuary & Entrepreneur helping clients reduce taxes, protect assets & secure retirements. OPEB & Pension Valuations | 401(k) & Cash Balance Design | Assisting Financial Advisors | Client service | Independent
7 个月Thanks for sharing that. I've been trying to understand the value of it and still seems like a future value unless you're a giant organization. To me the biggest issue is the need to use Sharepoint vs our own network.