Ep 18 - Summer Copilot News Recap
Copilot Connection
Welcome to Copilot Connection, the podcast that explores the world of Microsoft Copilots!
As the days in the UK get shorter, the grass looks brown and tired and the kids looked bored and ready for school, it's time to recap some of the news that has crept out while many were distracted with holidays. There's certainly been a few things coming through as momentum builds towards the second conference season of year. Zoe Wilson and Kevin McDonnell cover some worrying news on hacking Copilot, some positive news on accessing models and some great events coming up.
Latest news
Zoe and Kevin were both renewed as MVPs in July but, and more pertinently to this news later, they were also both awarded to a new Technology Area for this year - Copilot for M365! There are now over 70 MVPs in that area and you can check them out on the MVP Site (you might need to filter on Copilot for M365 in the Technology Area).
Meanwhile, at the start of August, the Black Hat Cybersecurity conference took place in Vegas. This is one of the largest cybersecurity events in the world and this year, Zenity caught the attention of many in the Copilot world. They ran a set of sessions about their investigations in to Copilot and Copilot Studio and issues that they had identified including ways to do prompt injection and RAG poisoning.
Related links:
Meanwhile, GitHub brought out some new features that will help developers to build custom Copilot and AI enabled applications right in the flow of their development in GitHub. With Models in Github, developers can try prompts against different models and even build these into their Actions directly, not only reducing the friction with creating AI powered solutions but also bringing this closer to those not using these tools that exist within Azure already.
Copilot for M365 didn't want to feel left out so batched together a few different updates into a single post - check out the podcast for our favourites of these but here's a few links that we mentioned.
One topic we didn't cover on the show was that there's a new GPT model available, both with OpenAI and on Azure Open AI. While this feels very much like an incremental update, there was suddenly an explosion of an excitement after a Twitter/X account appeared with an image of the lead character from Her (a Spike Jonze movie about someone who falls in love with their AI) and a strawberry (the believed project name at Open AI for the initiative to move towards AGI). The account posted about GPT5 announcements expected and had replies from heavy hitters in the space such as Sam Altman, fueling the excitement further. However, several expected deadlines went by with nothing so rumours of who this was took off with Marie Haynes making some interesting connections. Was this an attempt to get people thinking about fake news or just some impressive viral marketing? Only time will tell.
Finally, a story on Copilot extensibility that isn't about M365! This article shows how Azure Functions can be used to extend Copilot for Security's capabilities.
Community Links
If you are looking for some great content around Copilot Studio and other Power Platform content, Damien Bird has fantastic channel to subscribe to. One of his recent videos took a look at how the Copilot Studio Agent Transfer works which is a vital way to connect the power of a custom Copilot with the importance of human engagement when the Copilot doesn't have the answer or can't take the action.
Another awesome community contribution has been Jamie Maguire's set of posts around Semantic Kernel. If you are looking to build an AI powered service with C#, this is should be on your list of content to read before getting started.
Nominate your favourite community folks at the UK Technology Community Awards -?subtle hint, there's a podcast award… https://www.ukcommunityawards.co.uk/
Sign up for Scottish Summit and plan in for the Connecting the Copilots panel with Chris Huntingford ??, Dona Sarkar, José Lázaro Pinos, Sara Fennah and us - https://www.scottishsummit.com
Zoe is co-hosting a webinar for Syskit with Luke Evans on Copilot for M365 after one year? https://www.syskit.com/company/events/copilot-for-microsoft-365-after-one-year/
New speaker workshop with Sara Fennah, Luke Evans and us -? https://www.communitydays.org/event/2024-09-06/microsoft-community-new-speakers-day? - if you're in the UK and doing interesting things with Copilot that you'd like to share?
Podcast Summary
Watch/listen to the Podcast for our thoughts on the news above.
Copilot powered TL;DR
Independent Microsoft 365 Consultant, Trainer, MCT, MVP, Viva Explorer, Teams Superfan
6 个月This post may read like an award acceptance speech but thanks for another great episode, plus the plug for Community Speakers event and the invite to join you on the panel at Scottish Summit. Anyone looking to register for the speaker workshop can do so here https://www.communitydays.org/event/2024-09-06/microsoft-community-new-speakers-day#home Scottish Summit tickets at https://www.scottishsummit.com/