Wave 2 of Microsoft 365 Copilot: Insights from Cognizant’s Partnership

On September 16th Microsoft announced “Wave 2” of their “Microsoft 365 Copilot” product – including a host of new announcements and lessons learned – many of which were due to Cognizant’s ongoing partnership with the Copilot product team.

This week is a great time to take stock of our success so far with Copilot – and how as Microsoft iterates to “Wave 2” of their popular product, we will continue to drive shared success.?

It is worth remembering that we began this journey over a year ago – when we committed many resources to the Early Adopter Program to secure early access to both Copilot the product, as well as the product group constructing Copilot to provide feedback to the engineers developing the service. We increased that commitment a few months later when we purchased additional licenses of Microsoft 365 Copilot, along with Copilot for Sales and Copilot for Service.?

Here at Cognizant, we like to say we “drink our own champagne” - validating software while still in private previews – so that when it reaches general availability – we can solve our shared client’s business challenges more quickly. Many of the announcements for Wave 2 – we knew early because we had helped identify the business pain points that required improvements to the Copilot itself.

We’ve worked with Microsoft in some of the research related to Microsoft 365 Copilot through their WorkNext team – identifying changes in organizations that are starting to adopt Copilot. And that’s a key early finding from first movers like Cognizant: the biggest barriers to Copilot adoption will be organizational inertia more than any technology barriers. Trusting Copilot to take notes, generate ideas and recommend solutions is necessary before you can start to go to the next level – which is what Wave 2 is all about!

That trust we mentioned earlier is key: organizations won’t be willing to allow Copilot to act in such a tactical business function unless they know it can be relied upon to act consistently and to perform tasks at least as well as they are being done right now.

That is another lesson of the past six months that is driving success in the following six months: taking for granted the collaboration improvements Copilot has already shown us including:

• Every meeting we attend now has AI generated notes
• PowerPoint decks generated with Copilot have speaker notes included automatically
• Meetings are expected to have an agenda and to have clear follow-up action items assigned to attendees
• Instead of attending meetings to learn a status update – attendees can simply click the “recap” to see a summary of what occurred – less meetings = more productivity

By setting the default for our interactions to be significantly higher than in the past – we’ve created a reinforcement loop that encourages staff to think – before they begin working on a task – whether tools like Copilot can be used to make the task quicker, or to provide a better experience in the end.?

This drives home a related point: knowledge of Microsoft 365 Copilot, as it stands today, is not enough. As the product continues to improve, our “Copilot Champions” are internalizing the changes on a weekly and daily basis, and then going back to their part of the organization and communicating those changes to a broader set of stakeholders. Whether the new PowerPoint narrative builder feature that went live on Monday, or Excel with Python, or Copilot in OneDrive – every new item is often used first inside of Cognizant, then the knowledge is passed to our Copilot Champions who began to evangelize the business problems it solves across the broader organization.?

In many ways – our partnership is bringing our shared focus on driving great business results for clients – and moving to modern more effective ways to collaborate – into greater alignment.?

Microsoft Sponsorship of Cognizant Discovery Americas

We are thrilled to announce that Microsoft is sponsoring the upcoming Cognizant Discovery Americas event. This sponsorship underscores the strong partnership between Cognizant and Microsoft and highlights our shared commitment to driving innovation and delivering exceptional value to our clients.?

Cognizant Discovery is our thought leadership conference for senior executives to discuss rewiring for the AI-enabled future. This year, we’ll talk about the practical ways generative AI is redefining what’s possible – and real-world methods like the Cognizant Copilot journey.?

As part of this sponsorship, Microsoft will be prominently featured throughout the event, providing attendees with insights into the latest advancements in technology and how they can leverage these innovations to achieve their business goals. We look forward to a successful event and continued collaboration with Microsoft.