UPDATED! Everything you wanted to know about Microsoft 365 Copilot
***IMPORTANT*** this article may contain outdated information as it is no longer updated
Hello everyone!
By this time, you must have heard about Microsoft 365 Copilot, the tool that will make you either unemployed or the next CEO of your company. However, with new announcements coming every week, it's sometimes hard to catch up with all the hype around AI. To make life easier for those who consider investing in Copilot in the future, I have collected the most relevant information in this post.
Please note whenever I refer to Copilot, I am talking about Microsoft 365 Copilot.
What is Microsoft 365 Copilot?
Microsoft 365 Copilot is an AI-powered digital assistant designed to help users with a range of tasks and activities on their devices. It can create drafts of content, suggest different ways to word something you've written, suggest and insert images, create PowerPoint presentations from your Word documents and many other helpful things.
What can I do with Copilot?
Tons of things. However, for some great example use cases, I suggest you go through the following announcement - now updated, the list is ever growing:
How does Copilot actually work?
I suggest you watch this short video for a quick, high-level explanation:
In which apps will Copilot be available?
As the product has not been released yet, there is no finalized list. However, upon release, customers can expect Copilot in the following apps: Teams (meetings and chat), Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint (personal favorite), Loop, Microsoft 365 Chat (see below) and more. Please note that this list only contains apps for M365 Copilot - Windows Copilot, Security Copilot and all the others are NOT considered part of Microsoft 365 Copilot.
Update: in September it was announced that Copilot will be also available in OneNote, Stream and OneDrive.
Wait, Microsoft 365 Chat? Do you mean Teams?
No. Microsoft 365 Chat is your digital AI assistant accessible directly in Teams. Imagine this as an embedded Chat GPT within Teams (separate chat window) that can also build upon all your Microsoft Graph Data like your meetings, e-mails, etc. Basically a central entry point for Copilot.
Are there any license prerequisites for Copilot?
Yes. Customers need to be licensed for M365 E3 or E5 Suite (Business Standard or Business Premium for Small and Medium Enterprises)
Are there any technical prerequisites for Copilot?
Yes, there are some requirements for preview, however, there is no publicly available and finalized list of prereqs. There is nothing groundbreaking here - some features use OneDrive (therefore it's recommended you have it activated for users), you also need to have access to M365 Apps and so on.
At the same time, there is a great article and video detailing how to get your tenant ready for kickoff:
Are there customers already using Copilot?
Yes. After the initial closed preview wave, the so-called EAP (Early Access Program) is rolling out with 600 customers involved around the world. And as customer zero, Microsoft has also started rolling out Copilot internally (I am one of the lucky ones :))
Update: since the original post, we have even more customers enrolled in the Early Access Program. Months of active and heavy usage from hundreds of customers help us vastly improve the Copilot experience before the 1st of November release.
What is the difference between Bing Chat, Bing Chat Enterprise and M365 Copilot?
领英推è
Bing Chat is your everyday friend for search, especially for personal / non-sensitive topics.
Bing Chat Enterprise gives you the work equivalent of Bing Chat where you get complete protection of user and organizational data.
Microsoft 365 Copilot is your personal assistant for your daily work, building on M365 Graph data for context, natively available in M365 Apps.
I am concerned about privacy and security. Is Copilot being trained on customers' data?
Copilot does not use customer data or user prompts to train the foundation. For Data, Privacy and Security, please refer to the following article:
Can I extend Copilot to access data from third party sources?
Yes, definitely! While Copilot is already able to use the apps and data within the Microsoft 365 ecosystem, many users still depend on various external tools and services for work management and collaboration. You can address this gap by extending Copilot to enable users to work with their third-party tools and services, unlocking the full potential of Microsoft 365 Copilot.
You can extend Microsoft 365 Copilot by building a plugin or by connecting to an external data source. How to guide:
When is Copilot generally available?
As of October, we now have an official general availability release date: 1 November 2023.
What will be the pricing for Copilot?
As things stand currently, $30/user/month, as announced by Microsoft. This might seem high at first glance, but the potential productivity gain is not comparable to anything we have seen before. This will vary from user to user, depending on the end users' job, tasks, daily responsibilities. In my opinion, it's not for the whole organization. But Copilot can cut massive amount of time spent on creating presentations, drafting documents, writing e-mails, while that time can be spent on higher value-added tasks. Just try to think about how many hours per day / week you can save by the features detailed above. Microsoft will most probably have user-research to back this up after the preview program ends.
Update: we have our first business cases and calculations internally regarding the ROI of Copilot. As expected, it varies based on several factors including geograpric region, industry, position etc. Imagine a CEOs situation - he or she is not going to spend hours making a Power Point presentation, however, most likely everything e-mail and meeting related will greatly benefit the CEO. ROI will also differ based on the wages of the employee, therefore we will see different numbers in different countries / regions / companies. What we can already see is that the value is massive for all employees who work with our M365 tools. For more detailed analysis, you should reach out to Microsoft and we can help you assess the value of Copilot for your business.
How can I stay up-to-date with new announcements?
Microsoft Blog is a great place to start:
The tech community is a place to connect with peers & Microsoft experts:
Update, official announcement for the release date:
https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/09/21/announcing-microsoft-copilot-your-everyday-ai-companion/
That's all for now. I will be updating this post reflecting future announcements. Feel free to reach out or comment!
Sources (in addition to the ones referenced above)
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2023/05/09/introducing-the-microsoft-365-copilot-early-access-program-and-new-capabilities-in-copilot/
https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/03/16/introducing-microsoft-365-copilot-your-copilot-for-work/
Note: this post was NOT written by Copilot and / or Chat GPT
creating business value through IT
1 å¹´Hi Dani, did you write/collect this article or the Coplilot value-added function? :) or just helped you a bit to make it better? By the way, nice article for summarizing the main points. Thanks for sharing.