Microsoft 365 Copilot: Everything You Need to Know

AI is seamlessly woven into our daily lives, from personalized content recommendations to virtual assistants streamlining all your tasks. This new AI era is reshaping our interactions with technology at a fundamental level.

In compliance with your AI-integrated life, Microsoft 365 is integrating new AI features so you can have smoother workflows and increase your productivity.

You can generate AI-powered images effortlessly with Microsoft Designer using plain English prompts. Microsoft AI-powered Bing and Edge browsers can elevate your search experience. Microsoft Editor in Word ensures confident writing, enhancing spelling, grammar, clarity, and readability.

With this, Microsoft has also conceptualized a co-pilot to assist you in navigating any task. This copilot, with generative AI and combining Large Language Models (LLMs) with your data, turns your words into powerful action items.

What is Microsoft 365 Copilot?

Copilot transforms productivity in Word, PowerPoint, Excel, OneNote, and Outlook. Exclusive to Enterprise users, Microsoft 365 Copilot elevates workplace efficiency, and delivering contextual value across Windows applications becomes a cakewalk.

Copilot allows you to stand out with intricately incorporated web context, work data insights, and real-time PC activities for tailored assistance.

This experience is seamlessly available within Windows 11, Microsoft 365 Suite, and web browsers through Microsoft Edge and Bing.

Features of Copilot integration

Microsoft 365 Copilot is only available to Microsoft 365 E3, E5, Business Standard, and Business Premium users.

For a subscription fee, you can access Copilot and integrate it with other applications like Word and Excel.

Here are a few ways to enhance productivity with Microsoft 365 Copilot integration.

Copilot with Word

This integration will assist you in swiftly crafting or refining text on a specific subject. Microsoft 365 Copilot can use existing content in the document to produce concise summaries.

Here are a few key features:

Generate concise summaries from existing text documents.
Offer suggestions for writing tones, ranging from professional to informal.
Present compelling arguments to support a thesis.
Revise sections or emphasize inconsistencies in the content.
Craft initial text drafts using predefined outlines or structures.

Copilot with Teams

Microsoft 365 Copilot integration creates capabilities of condensing details from extensive Teams chat threads and distilling information from Teams VoIP and PSTN calls. It also excels at summarizing pivotal discussion points and recommending actionable steps in real-time during a meeting or after.

Here are a few key features:

Compile a roster of potential discussion topics for meetings.
Formulate the structure of the meeting based on chat messages.
Craft comprehensive meeting summaries for individuals who are unable to attend, arriving late, or seeking a condensed overview.

Copilot with Excel

Copilot with Excel helps you formulate intricate equations in natural language, eliminating the need to remember formulas. This tool can scrutinize datasets and provide insights on particular trends it identifies.

Here are a few key features:

Sift through to identify the most extreme values – invaluable for scrutinizing various aspects.
Initiate preliminary budgets or accounting records.
Generate visually informative graphs.
Formulate hypotheses about sales outcomes and potential growth by manipulating one of the variables.

Copilot with PowerPoint

Copilot with PowerPoint allows crafting a comprehensive presentation, encompassing text and image, leveraging content from Word documents.

Additionally, it can generate a concise summary presentation from a lengthier one, reorganizing and restructuring the content as needed.

Here are a few key features:

Create a new slideshow incorporating details from an alternate file.
Condense and encapsulate the essence of presentations.
Modify the arrangement of a particular slide.
Streamline text content and synchronize it with existing animations in a presentation.

Copilot with Outlook

With Microsoft 365 Copilot in Outlook, you can draft emails and generate summaries of email threads, making communication smooth and effortless.

Here are a few key features:

Compose email drafts using content from other documents.
Condense and outline the key points in message threads.
Highlight the most crucial items or messages.

Copilot benefits and limitations

Since Microsoft 365 Copilot has only now become commercially available, these pros and cons will change as usage grows.

Pros

Streamlining Workflow: You can regain time spent on mundane activities as Copilot provides productivity recommendations and automates tasks. This enables you to focus on high-value activities and achieve more quickly.

Natural Language Interaction: It allows you to interact with systems using natural language, eliminating the need for complex Excel formulas.

Data-driven Decision Making: Copilot's data-driven insights present actionable data, empowering informed decision-making.

Accessibility: It is accessible across all Microsoft 365 applications, potentially becoming the default interface for streamlined interactions.

Enhanced Content Development: Facilitates quicker iteration in developing new content, ideas, and brainstorming.

Integrated Security and Compliance: Copilot, built on Microsoft’s comprehensive security framework, seamlessly integrates into Microsoft 365, inheriting your company’s vital security, compliance, and privacy protocols. Copilot is a trusted AI solution with two-factor authentication, compliance boundaries, privacy protections, and more.

Cons

Permissions Configuration: Improper configurations may grant more access to organizational data than desired, posing security and privacy risks.

Subscription Cost: Microsoft 365 Copilot cost might be too much ($30 per month per user) for some organizations, especially those cautious about becoming "bleeding-edge" users.

Potential Hallucinations: Users must exercise judgment as Copilot, a generative AI, may provide wrong or misleading results.

Language Limitations: Currently, Copilot is available only to a preview audience in the United States and hence understands instructions in English only.

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Updates and future developments

Updates from Microsoft broaden Copilot’s role as an enterprise helper.

It offers enhanced flexibility with the chatbot's output, allowing you to tailor formatting and tone based on personal preferences.

Microsoft also announced updates for Copilot in Teams meetings, allowing real-time use without recording. The bot engages in Q&A, generates live notes, and captures quotes upon request from specific people.

In PowerPoint, you can direct the chatbot to the image library and use Microsoft Designer to make adjustments. By spring, Copilot will integrate Outlook, calendar invites, and documents for your meeting preparation. In Word, it will aid you with document revisions.

Additionally, new Copilot packages are introduced, including Copilot for Dynamics 365, Copilot for Service(coming in early 2024), and Copilot for Sales.

Fill the gaps in productivity with Fireflies.ai

The Copilot update for Teams won't record interactions, so if you want transcriptions for a specific person, the chatbot will “quote” them upon request.

You can easily fill this gap by integrating Teams with Fireflies.ai.

Fill the gaps in productivity with Fireflies

Fireflies is an AI note-taker that joins your Teams meeting as a participant to record, transcribe, summarize, and analyze interactions.

With Fireflies, you can record and transcribe live Teams meetings with an accuracy of 95%+, and these transcriptions can be easily accessed from Fireflies' Notebook. You can also quickly retrieve crucial information using the Smart Search feature.

Fireflies enables you to share Soundbites of key moments with colleagues for more effective collaboration, and the AI assistant Fred provides real-time meeting assistance and post-meeting insights.

In short, you can get more out of your Teams meetings by integrating with Fireflies.