Since we began our journey exploring AI, we’ve unlocked the power of AI transformation, learned about the risks of generative AI and discovered how you can keep your organisation secure.
As the official launch of Microsoft’s series of AI Copilots draws closer, anticipation continues to build. The promise of untold changes and improvements to productivity, collaboration, and the way we work is on the horizon – but with so many options out there, it’s difficult to know which AI tool will be the best fit for your organisation.
To help you prepare for the arrival of Microsoft’s Copilot, we’ve put together a guide to give you an overview of all the Copilots that are coming (and no, it’s not just the one). We’ll dive into the features and uses of each so you can make an informed decision when choosing a Copilot – or Copilot combination – for your team.
The flagship Copilot and the one most people have heard of is Microsoft 365 (M365) Copilot. It’s an in-built assistant that integrates into the productivity applications many teams use and rely on every day, such as Teams, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. It aims to streamline your workday and takes on tedious tasks so you don’t have to anymore, such as generating meeting notes, providing draft documents in seconds, and designing presentations in PowerPoint.
As with all other generative AI tools, Copilot draws upon a large language model (LLM). Essentially, it’s trained with vast amounts of data so it can comprehend existing content and generate fresh content.
Who’s it good for?
Any teams whose jobs involve creating content, analysing data, or communicating through collaborative applications. In our opinion, M365 Copilot will be a game changer across almost every industry because of its extensive use cases. We talk to this in more detail in some of our other blogs, but the short answer is – any knowledge worker will benefit from using M365 Copilot.
Formerly called Viva Sales, Microsoft’s Sales Copilot provides a streamlined, AI-powered selling experience, without the need for manual data entry. Like M365 Copilot, it seamlessly integrates into the applications sales professionals use daily, such as Microsoft 365, Microsoft Teams, and customer relationship management (CRM) technologies, like Dynamics 365 or Salesforce. It helps sales teams do what they do best, without the need for notetaking during meetings; meetings can be recorded and transcribed using conversation intelligence technology for accurate summaries.
It can also assist sales professionals in a number of other ways, such as providing feedback and helping develop sales skills, understanding the overall sentiment of calls for helpful suggestions, and tracking conversation KPIs, such as talk-to-listen ratios.
Who’s it good for?
You probably guessed it from the name – sales teams. It’s the ultimate assistant to sales professionals, making sure they’ve got the time to make meaningful connections with your customers without being bogged down by manual admin tasks.
Microsoft’s Security Copilot is a security-specific model also drawing upon LLMs, powered by OpenAI. It helps security teams easily detect, identify, and prioritise threats. Incorporating a growing set of security-specific skills, it’s informed by Microsoft’s unique global threat intelligence, receiving more that 65 trillion daily signals.
Security Copilot provides enterprise-grade security and meets all privacy compliance regulations, as it runs on Microsoft Azure’s hyperscale infrastructure.
Who’s it good for?
It’s not designed to replace humans, but it’s an incredibly helpful assistant to cyber security teams, providing speed and scale for tasks that require significant output like incident response, vulnerability scanning, and patching.
A joint effort by Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI, GitHub Copilot is a cloud-based AI tool design to help developers write code faster. It contextualises based on existing comments and code to instantly suggest individual lines and whole functions. It’s available as an extension for Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio, Neovim, and the JetBrains suite of integrated development environments (IDEs).
Who’s it good for?
Developers who want to streamline processes and generate code more quickly. As it’s trained on billions of lines, it’s able to autocomplete code in seconds, making coding significantly faster – allowing developers to focus on solving bigger problems.
Windows Copilot is designed to enhance the Windows 11 experience, with a focus on aiding creativity and productivity. It integrates Bing search with the Edge browser, drawing upon the OpenAI model and Microsoft’s Prometheus model for a new user experience. It’s another in-built assistant that can offer help by performing tasks like offering tech support, answering questions you would otherwise ask a search engine, or summarising documents.
Who’s it good for?
Windows Copilot is great for anyone working in creative industries, or those who need to do significant amounts of research during their workday. It helps you prioritise bringing ideas to life, collaboration, and working on complex projects, without spending extensive time searching for information and working across multiple applications.
Another Copilot harnessing the power of LLMs, the AI Copilot for Power Apps allows natural language authoring of apps, moving away from the traditional custom code or the recent low-code development environments. By using a few words in natural language, users can interact with this Copilot to describe exactly what they’re looking for from the app, including the data behind it. It’s then automatically created and is adjustable based upon user feedback.
Who’s it good for?
Anyone who has ideas for apps they want to bring to the market but doesn’t have the coding knowledge or experience previously needed to create one. It’s a game changer that evens the playing field, making it easier than ever to create and share new ideas.
Microsoft Fabric, is an analytics product that centralises all of an organisation’s data and analytics in one place. It combines the best of Microsoft Power BI, Azure Synapse, and Azure Data Factory into one unified software as a service (SaaS) platform.
Copilot in Power BI combines advanced generative AI with corporate data to assist users in gaining, and sharing, insights faster. You can simply describe the insight you need, or ask a question about your data, and Copilot will analyse and consolidate the data into a report – turning data into actionable insights, instantly.
Who’s it good for?
Microsoft Fabric and Copilot in Power BI is ideal for data engineers, data warehousing professionals, data scientists and analysts, and business users to harness for seamless collaboration. It assists in fostering a well-functioning data culture across an organisation.
Looking for more advice on how to integrate a Copilot into your team?
Data#3 is Microsoft’s biggest Australian partner, and one of only 600 organisations globally invited to take part in the Copilot Early Access Program (EAP). Contact us today to discover how our M365 Copilot Readiness Assessment can help you prepare for take-off and improve productivity across your organisation.