Microsoft have recently announced the release date for their Copilot artificial intelligence engine for Windows and the Microsoft 365 suite, including the Office apps.  The Windows update is already available and will gradually be deployed automatically via Windows update as long as you have Windows 11.  For Microsoft 365 and the Office apps, the release date will be the 1st November 2023.  Note that whilst Windows Copilot will be free of charge, there will be a fee of approximately £30 per person per month for Copilot for Microsoft 365.

You may have already experienced the power of Copilot using latest version of Microsoft’s Bing search engine. However, Copilot for Windows and Microsoft 365 promise a whole lot more. So how can Copilot’s AI help you and your business work better, faster and smarter? Let’s look at a few examples.

Copilot for Windows 11

Copilot for Windows is an AI powered assistant that you can call on at any time to help you customise settings, connect apps and take actions using Windows features.  There are also a host of AI based additions to popular apps such as paint and photos which are being released alongside Copilot and add a huge amount of power to Windows users.

Further development of Copilot for Windows is certain to happen over the next year and at Pro Drive we will be very excited to see Microsoft’s plans.

Copilot for Microsoft 365

Copilot for Microsoft 365 is where the real power lies for business users. At a cost approaching £30 per user per month, it is certainly a costly addition to a Microsoft 365 license. However, it has the potential to save business users very significant amounts of time and add huge value. Here are some examples of what Copilot for Microsoft 365 is capable of:

  • Create a presentation in PowerPoint based on a business proposal written in a word document.
  • Summarise a long email thread on a project in Outlook, that has appeared in your inbox whilst you have been on holiday.
  • Create an automatically generated reply to an email you have received to save you time doing it yourself.
  • Analyse data in Excel and create new data models based on it.
  • Minute and summarise online meetings in Teams – even if you have not attended them yourself.

If you are using other Microsoft business applications, such as Dynamics CRM, Copilot for Microsoft 365 can also pull data from those systems into Office applications and documents.

Business Chat

Business Chat is a feature of Copilot for Microsoft 365 and works across all of your data including your calendar, emails, chats, documents in OneDrive and SharePoint, meetings and contacts, to do things that may take normally take you hours, in seconds.

For example, say you have a new member of staff who wants to know the policy for expenses when travelling. They can ask Business Chat via Microsoft Teams, and it will search all your documents and find the policies and procedures around expenses then explain them back to the staff member.

The ability to get information from your business data so quickly is quite simply a game changer. To learn more about business chat, please watch the video below.

Data security

One of the common concerns about AI is security of data. Copilot for Microsoft 365 protects the privacy of your data by working only within your Microsoft 365 system.  Furthermore, access to data from Copilot is ringfenced to your existing security groups.  So should someone ask Copilot a query, it will only search data that person already has access to.

To discover how AI and Copilot can transform productivity in your business, get in contact with us today by speaking to your Account Manager or using the form below.