By Raymond Collins, Sales Executive CSP M365 at Braintree.
When Microsoft’s Copilot AI first emerged, it was a sharp junior helping users crush the grunt work, but what’s emerging today is a far more powerful agentic AI that goes beyond assisting and into acting.
Copilot, a generative AI chatbot based on GPT-4, was first introduced as Bing Chat on February 07, 2023. It was integrated into both Bing and Edge as Cortana’s successor, but by September 2023 it was released into the enterprise as Microsoft 365 Copilot as a tool to boost enterprise productivity.
As of October 2023, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella reported that the company had more than one million paid Copilot users across more than 37,000 companies.
By 2025, that number is estimated at hundreds of thousands of customers, according to Nadella’s official LinkedIn account.
The smart Microsoft tool’s uptake has been impressive. Integrated across Word, Excel, Teams and Outlook, it blends generative AI with Microsoft Graph data to summarise meetings, write content, and automate repetitive tasks.
The solution has fundamentally changed the narrative for companies wanting to improve workload management and optimise human talent. Companies are leveraging it to work faster and think better.
Today, Copilot is everywhere – Word, Excel, Teams, Outlook and beyond. And it does more than assist people, it collaborates with them to draft reports, summarise meetings, generate presentations, and automate workflows.
Copilot combines large language models (LLMs) with contextual awareness across calendar invites, Teams messages, SharePoint files and other data to provide users with optimised time and resource management capabilities.
The AI knows your next meeting, the prep doc you worked on, the stakeholder comments that need to feed into the document and the meeting, and the last presentation you shared.
This deep integration allows it to generate emails, write PowerPoint decks and even build Excel dashboards that provide you with recommended insights. And all this is done in minutes, not the hours usually spent on this admin-intensive work.
However, perhaps one of the most profound value-adds is how Copilot has transformed access to knowledge. It is a zero-cost interaction which allows users to retrieve anything. When the right prompts are used, users have access to infinite insights on demand.
Copilot is also no longer just reactive. Users can use Copilot Studio to create AI agents capable of executing multi-step workflows such as emailing reports, updating CRM systems or analysing Excel data.
This agentic approach to AI changes the story from AI that responds to AI that acts autonomously across integrated platforms. Agentic AI is defined by its ability to understand context, chain tasks and make decisions within defined boundaries.
You can instruct an agent to create a proposal, attach key figures to it, and then email it to the relevant stakeholders without any intervention on your side.
The process just gets done with the AI deftly managing the entire action stack. Microsoft’s Copilot Studio allows users to create these workflows with minimal coding which democratises a task that was once only possible with engineers.
While productivity is an obvious gain, there are other, unexpected benefits. You can synthesise internal knowledge as easily as Googling a fact, which is both a cultural transformation and a process improvement.
Other use cases include intelligent meeting recaps, real-time proposal drafting, and internal document search that rivals enterprise-grade search engines.
Companies are now deploying thousands of copilots just to crawl through petabytes of data because the answers they provide are invaluable.
However, the implementation of AI remains challenging. Companies have AI on their strategy list but aren’t sure where to start.
Data is messy, security frameworks aren’t compliant and employees often don’t know how to prompt the AI effectively.
There is a growing need for training that takes people beyond just clicking an AI button and into the realm of understanding the right questions to ask and how to interrogate the AI correctly.
The future of Copilot and AI in general comes down to orchestration. Companies want bespoke Copilots tailored to their workflows and an agent ecosystem that solves their problems.
They also want to create a culture which embraces AI and this means building skills in curiosity, experimentation and critical thinking.
There is a danger in over trusting AI, it has to be validated, challenged and directed to ensure it is delivering value.
Winning at Copilot, or any form of agentic AI, will come down to companies being willing to learn how to ask better questions, explore the potential of the technology, and that are open to learning, failing and experimenting.
These are the routes to finding new ways of benefitting from AI’s capabilities, and ensuring it works hard for the business.
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