Microsoft Copilot is About to Change Your World Forever....maybe

In the early part of this year you probably heard about ChatGPT. You may have created a poem about how trains are the greatest invention known to man or asked it to write a Happy Birthday message in the style of Shakespeare?

No? Just me then.

And, now the conversation has moved to how AI is “going to wipe out humanity” and is “more dangerous than nuclear weapons.”?(See previous post on avoiding the news if you’re worried about that one)

Until now you could have pretty much chosen to ignore what’s going on in the AI space.

Microsoft Copilot is about change all that.

Start preparing for a boost to productivity that will shake the foundations of how most jobs will be done.

Let’s have a look at a few of the features coming very soon to MS Office.

The Microsoft Ecosystem has been building slowly over the past few years. Word, PowerPoint, Excel and Outlook have been around for years of course. Teams was added more recently which came just in time to save many businesses during the pandemic.

In the background, Microsoft has built a database that is now agile enough to store the data you create in all these apps. If you have dabbled in?MS Delve?you will have started to see the power of this - but that’s just the beginning.

The final piece of the jigsaw has been to add a Large Language Model on top of this drawing on all the amazing feats we currently see in ChatGPT. Only now, its pointed at all your data in the Microsoft Ecosystem.

Not excited yet?

Ok, let me show you some use cases…..then you might need a lay down!

Managing your inbox

Right, let’s start with a simple one.

Problem:?You’ve been on a conference all day. You open your laptop on the train home and are faced with 100 emails. Where do you start?

Copilot: Opening MS Outlook kicks MS Copilot into action. First, it searches through your emails and find specific questions you have been asked that day in your emails. You can quickly see any actions you need to take and you can work with Copilot to ask more questions to quickly get to what’s important.

So, we’ve already saved a massive amount of time. Until we come to an email thread that has been going on all afternoon.

You take a deep breath.

And, Copilot swings into action summarising the thread into one simple summary. In an instant, you’re up to date.

I’m sure you can already see the time you’re going to save here. It get’s better….that was just the warm up.

Catching up on missed meetings

Problem: Missed meetings are a nightmare to catch up on.

“Hi John, I’m not around for the meeting later. Any chance you could hit record for me?”

I bet you’re on at least one Team’s call each day that is being recorded. But, how many have you actually watched back?

How many people have time to actually watch that meeting back the next day when they have another four or five meetings that day?

Exactly, not many people will watch them back.

So how do you catch up?

Copilot: Help is at hand in a number of ways. Firstly, you can hit “Follow” on the meeting invite and let Copilot do the rest.

Copilot will create a summary of the meeting for you based on what was said in the meeting and it will identify any tasks that were allocated to you during that meeting. In addition, you can search by #topics that were discussed in the meeting.

Problem: You are 15 mins late for a meeting. The conversation is in full flow and you are really struggling to understand what being talked about.

Copilot: You know what to do. You open Copilot and ask it for a recap of the meeting so far. And, there it is on the right hand side below. You’re up to speed.

You can then ask more questions.

“What questions are unresolved?”

“What is the feeling of the attendees about how the meeting is going"?

Yes, it promises to do sentiment analysis too.

It becomes your assistant during the meeting.

Catching up on team chats

Problem: You’ve been away from your desk for a few hours and a Teams chat has kicked into life. Suddenly there’s a long thread which could contain some important information that you need to action. Or, it might not!

Copilot: With one click Copilot will summarise what has been said for you.

Excited yet?

It certainly feels like this could change many aspects of work.

Imagine this….

“Create me a proposal based around [select old tender] using my meeting notes from [notes from client discussion] utilising the template from [insert document] and create a PowerPoint deck based on [old tender presentation] and write me some speaker notes”

This wont produce a perfect document. It will probably get you 70% of the way there. but it gets you off the blank page and deep into creating using content you have already created elsewhere in the ecosystem.

The thing is, how long will it be before tenders written by Copilot will be ingested by another organisations instance of Copilot:

“mark this [tender] based on this [request for proposal] and rank it against the other submissions.”

AI submitting to AI….

The one thing for sure is that this will change the way work is undertaken forever.

Are you ready?

You can take a look at the summary video here....

Remember that AI is probably unlikely to take your job..... but you will probably lose your job to someone else who is using AI.

Lean in and learn what you can. This could be the future.

What do you think?

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