Microsoft Copilot 101

There is a famous comment in every community event I have attended in the last year '' If we get a euro for everytime copilot is mentioned in a session we would all be millionaires soon''

Copilot is proving to be one of the most innovative application of AI into modern day work that can help employees get time back from technology to focus on more strategic activities and find better work life balance.

Microsoft is leading the industry with rapid innovation and introduction of Copilot in each of their product line. It has been a continous learning and sometimes there is too much information to process and get an overview of where we all fit in the eco system of Microsoft Copilot.

Are you jumping on the band wagon of Microsoft Copilot and want to identify yourself in the big picture?

Are you already an expert on one of the areas of Microsoft Copilot and want to know whats out there and how you fit in?

Are you just curious about Microsoft AI and and what it can do for you?

Read on to know my viewpoint and share your feedback and let me know if I have got all the information (and logos??) correct?

Lets start with Artifical Intelligence..

AI is a piece of software that enables a powerful computer to understand the end users request and the environment it is in and use a large amount of reference data supplied to respond in a way to achive a goal within the rules defined as algorithms within the software.

In essence the most advanced artificial intelligence softwares are expected to behave close to how human brain would to solve problems by reasoning, understanding a conversation or continously learn based on past experience but with a lot more processing power and using large amounts of data and complex descision making algorithms.

There are few things to consider here:

1. Expected outcome of AI: e.g. Generate content (Generative AI)
2. Interaction between the end user and AI: e.g. Prompts and Grounding
3. Reference data used to build the knowledge of AI: e.g. Bing search or Microsoft graph
4. Computational model used to process information: e.g. Large Language Model

Copilot

Question: What is Copilot?

Answer: Copilot is an AI orchestration engine with extremely good processing capabilities that can accept user prompt and process responses using a large language model grounded in data from public web or your enterprise.

(In simpler terms: Copilot is super advanced chat agent that can process a question from an end user using the computational power from a LLM and data from the web or within your enterprise)

There are 2 types of Copilot:

1. Copilot for personal use: AI grounded in data from public web (e.g. via Bing search service)
2. Copilot for organizations: AI grounded in data from the enterprise (e.g. via Microsoft graph)

Copilot for personal use:

Use case: I am personal computing user and have a laptop would like to take help from a AI companion that can help manage my life better (e.g. search for a really good day care for my children based on my preferences)

There are 3 products available for me as a personal computing user:

1. Copilot in Edge: Avialable in the sidebar on Microsoft Edge browser
2. Copilot in Windows: Available directly on Windows laptops
3. Microsoft Copilot Pro: I need additional power and speed to perform more complex or creative tasks

Copilot for organizations:

Use case: I am the CEO of an organization and would like to infuse AI within my organization across various business domains to offload administrative and mundane day to day tasks from my employees and to give focus time to be more efficient and have better quality of work life.

There are few products available here:

1. Microsoft 365 Copilot: Embeded within Microsoft 365 apps (Outlook, Teams, Word, Powerpoint, Excel) that coordinates with a Large Language Model and uses enterprise data that the user has access via Microsoft Graph
2. Role based Microsoft 365 Copilot agents: Extended version of Microsoft 365 focused on specific business domains and related systems within an organization

Sales: Connect your enterprise CRM platform and Microsoft graph to streamline communication, summarize information and generate content

Service: Integrate with external services Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Zendesk along with data from websites, local files and Microsoft graph

Finance: Use data across systems to automate data reconciliation, conduct variance analysis amd share insights

3. Microsoft Copilot Studio: A low code development tool that will help create new Microsoft 365 Copilot agents easily using the existing knowledge within the organization such as a website. It is connected with other low code development tools such as Power Apps, Power Automate flows which will support automate business process flows. New agents can be grounded in data from Microsoft and Non-Microsoft data sources via prebuilt data connectors. Agents can also be connected back to the foundation models or Azure AI service to train them further.

4. GitHub Copilot: Embded within Gitbub AI developer tool that can provide code suggestions based on the context of the project, find relevent information from the organization's knowledge and code base, automate documentation by suggesting description for pull requests and helps the reviewing process and much more

5. Microsoft Copilot in Azure: Embeded within Microsoft Azure, it is AI agent for to manage your cloud infrastructure to generate insights based on your cloud infrastructure, identify unused functionality on Microsoft cloud that can make your organization more efficient, adjust your infrastructure resources for maximum efficiency.

6. Microsoft Copilot for Security: AI based on Microsoft Security Model that helps in identifying cyberthreats before impact, support security teams with practical information to respond to secuirty incidents, support less trained professionals with step by step guidance that can optimize the team members time.

7. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Copilot: Embeded within Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM and ERP applications which focuses on reducing manual data entry, generating content to speed up business processes, automate repetative tasks. Dynamics 365 or Microsoft AI ERP is a suite of solutions involving a number of work loads such as Dynamics 365 Sales, Cusotmer Service, Customer Insights, Marketing, Business Central, Supply chain and Operations, Human Resources and a bunch of Copilot related features are already available for customers to take advantage. My D365 F&SCM Copilot friend Magno Pereira will be writing an article to share an overview of the latest and greatest Copilot features available in Dynamics 365 F&SCM.

Curious to know more? Have any questions?

Always happy to sitdown for a virtual coffee chat - send me a message!

See you in the next one,

Kamal