Real Business Benefits from Microsoft 365 CoPilot

Microsoft 365 CoPilot has been around for more than a year, and most of the people I talk to that are using it are barely scratching the surface of what the thing ACTUALLY can do. While M365 CoPilot can "help you do things faster", the REAL value in M365 CoPilot is for it to "do things you completely didn't do before"!

What are the Basics of M365 CoPilot

Microsoft 365 CoPilot is a $30/mo add-on to Microsoft Office, when it first came out last year, Microsoft forced organizations to purchase at least 300 licenses of it to get it, but these days you can buy it 1 at a time.

As an add-in to Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Teams you can have CoPilot help simplify daily tasks:

• M365 CoPilot in Outlook - Can summarize and prioritize an inbox full of email messages to help you triage a bunch of messages, quickly summarize an entire thread of messages that have gone back and forth all day, or help you whip up an email message on any topic you want in seconds (ie: "write me an email to polite decline attending this social gathering on Friday night" or "help me write a response to this email asking for my opinion on xxx, yyy, and zzz")
• M365 CoPilot for Word - Can also quickly summarize a document, help you draft a document, compare a couple documents and provide you insight to the content
• M365 CoPilot for Teams - Can summarize a Teams meeting and write up a list of action items that came out of the meeting, note who's on point for the tasks, and prepare action items from the outcome of the meeting

Etc, etc. Basically doing things for you that you normally do yourself, which can save you a few minutes here, few minutes there, get past writers block, help you get a handful of daily tasks done.

Things M365 CoPilot Can Do That You Just Didn't Do Before

The whole focus of this article is to have M365 CoPilot do things for you that truly improves your week that makes it worthwhile to spend the $$ for the license. Here's the top things our customers are doing...

• Using M365 CoPilot to Turn a Document into a Full Blown Presentation! For anyone that teaches, educates, presents, or do public speaking, M365 CoPilot can take a Word Doc, PDF, handwritten notes, transcribed audio/video stream and turn the thing into a PowerPoint slide deck in SECONDS! In the below example, a professor friend of mine took a 9-page Scientific American article and generated a 17-slide PowerPoint presentation deck out of the thing (summarizing each main point of the article including adding in images/graphics) in less than 30-seconds! That's a 45-minute presentation created in seconds!

• Preparing for an Upcoming Meeting - Busy leaders jump from meeting to meeting, and in the past, searching and reading past email threads can help. But many times there are dozens of emails, plus written documents (proposals, contracts, etc) that could take 10-20 minutes to review (let alone dig around and find). With M365 CoPilot, execs can tell CoPilot to prepare for my next meeting and it goes into emails (Outlook), files (OneDrive), contracts and documents (SharePoint), previous meeting notes (Teams) and within seconds provide a snippet that can read in less than a minute to help prepare for an upcoming meeting!

• Turning Important Notices and Bulletins into Short Readable Snippets - Managers get important notices and memos all the time that are supposed to be shared with team members, and usually they're either simply forwarded "as is" (that no one reads) or are just forgotten (because they know no one reads them). For a large US-based healthcare system, the Chief Administration Officer wanted to get weekly CDC bulletin info shared with her frontline Emergency Room workers. M365 CoPilot enabled the CAO to take a 9-page PDF and summarize it into a 6-bullet briefing in under 10-seconds!

• Generating Request for Proposal (RFP) Responses in Seconds - You can tag a handful of previously written RFP documents and tell M365 CoPilot to create answers to respond to a new RFP that you're working on, that'll grab content/examples from the previous documents you've already written. This has been used in Grant Proposal writing, filling out background information documents, anything that you may have already written answers for (many times in the past) where having CoPilot take that info and write you a new answer!

The list goes on and on of ALL the things we've helped business leaders do things and get direct value out of their use of Microsoft 365 CoPilot that they hadn't done before without it.

Wrap-up

So as much as M365 CoPilot can help write you an email, summarize a meeting, and search up stuff on the Internet faster than you did before, the REAL value is having CoPilot transform the work you do, in a manner you haven't been able to do before, that adds direct value to your business, your team, and your work product!

For months I've been writing pretty exclusively on Microsoft's AzureAI technology, the "other side" of Microsoft's A.I. offerings. The net of the two technologies is it's not a trade off of one vs the other, they each provide specific benefits in use cases where M365 CoPilot does some things really really well, and AzureAI does other things really really well. It's using the right tool for the job, and it takes a toolkit of several tools to get the job done!