If you are a regular follower of this blog or our newsletters, you will have noticed that we have published a lot of content on Microsoft Copilot and more generally on generative AI over the past 12 months.
So why are we so excited about Copilot? Well, generative AI as a whole makes the automation of business processes so much easier to achieve. Whereas automation used to be the preserve of large firms with significant IT budgets, AI and Copilot allow SME firms to achieve similar or better outcomes at a fraction of the cost.
The type of automation opportunities offered by Copilot directly target the kind of administrative and numbers-based tasks that most professional and financial services firms carry out daily. As well as being time consuming, these are usually the tasks people don’t enjoy doing and can also place restrictions on firms scaling up during particularly busy periods.
How Pro Drive uses AI and Copilot
How do we know if it can make such a difference? At Pro Drive we use AI and Copilot extensively. Here are some of the outcomes we’ve achieved.
Faster helpdesk response to clients – when our helpdesk team receives a new request we use AI to triage it, identify its priority, identify any previous occurrences if it’s a fault, and route it to the correct team with the information they need to get started. All this provides a faster and higher quality response from the team for our clients.
Meeting notes – we use Copilot to notetake all internal and some external meetings. This allows all participants to focus on the topic in hand for a higher quality meeting and ensures we don’t miss any action to be taken after the meeting. For internal meetings, it means that people who were not able to participate can get a bullet-pointed summary to ensure they don’t miss any vital communication.
Appointment setting – with a busy team of people, team members regularly visiting clients and hybrid working, finding times for meetings can be time consuming. Copilot now does this for us and saves us wasting time comparing diaries.
Giving access to security and HR policies – we spend a lot ensuring our HR and cyber security policies and procedures are well documented and reviewed regularly. However this now forms many pages of documentation and in the past staff tend not to look things up and instead ask colleagues, who may not know the answers themselves. The team are now able to use Copilot agents in Teams to answer their questions on policies which saves a huge amount of time and means they get an accurate answer every time.
How can AI and Copilot help your firm?
Let’s first dispel a couple of myths. Firstly, many firms still don’t believe that Copilot could make a difference to their business or that it won’t give them a return on investment. The reality is that almost every professional or financial services business can benefit from this technology. In fact generative AI is at its most effectively where lots of words or numbers are being generated or processed, or where a lot of research is required. Take some time to think about your processes and whether this applies.
Secondly, there is a widely held perception that AI is something that is complicated to use and expensive to implement. This is understandable – the very name itself and media hype certainly contributes to this. However in the case of Microsoft Copilot, the opposite is true. In fact one of the main reasons for adopting Microsoft 365 Copilot is to give people the ability to easily use elements of the Microsoft 365 suite they have not been trained on such as complex Microsoft Excel formulas.
A good place to start with generative AI tools such as Microsoft Copilot is to identify administrative tasks or tasks generating lots of words. Examples might be writing letters or emails to clients, summarising documents (such as annual accounts), recording meeting minutes, booking appointments, generating marketing content, and PowerPoint presentations. Also think about any internal documents you keep which people regularly need to reference such as policies and procedures. Try to work out how much time these tasks are taking. Remember, a Microsoft 365 Copilot license costs less than £1 per person a day, so you don’t need to save much time to make it worthwhile.
How can Pro Drive help you get started with Copilot?
Pro Drive has been using generative AI since it became commercially available. As well as using Microsoft 365 Copilot across the business, we operate other chatbots, custom developed AI and other AI tools to help give a better service to our clients.
Being a professional services business ourselves, many of the successes we have achieved with AI are applicable to other professional services firms and we have developed a 3 step programme to help firms adopt this new technology successfully whilst minimising any risk to their data, staff and clients.
Copilot Discovery Workshop
We run a ‘show and tell’ session, aligned to scenarios in your business, to help you understand why investing in AI can be transformative for your firm and see how Microsoft Copilot can optimise your business workflows.
Microsoft 365 Copilot Launch Program
We help you get set up to start evaluating Copilot securely with our hands-on assistance from our experts. This includes implementing some technical controls then running coaching sessions for your team. We then help you build a business case for a cross-business deployment.
Company wide deployment
We help train your staff, configure your IT infrastructure, and implement data management processes to securely roll out Microsoft 365 Copilot across your business.
For further information on our Copilot ad AI services, check out the Copilot services page or get in touch on 0330 124 3599 or hello@prodriveit.co.uk.
