Hello and welcome to the latest monthly Masterclass. This one is going to focus on a technology that's going to in my opinion change the
world of work for us all. Microsoft Copilot So I guess we better start by saying well what
is Microsoft Copilot? Copilot is generative AI merged with the Microsoft world the Microsoft
graph as they call it which basically means it's AI that has access to your corporate data what
that means is can do a whole host of tasks for you that the likes of Chat GPT simply can't. I
think the best way to kind of explain Copilot is to look at some real world examples of how it can
help a person throughout their day so that's what we'll do we'll look at five things that Copilot
can do for you out of the box. The first thing it can do is write a tender. So let's say I have a
meeting with a client about a new opportunity so I do that in Teams and I record that that meeting
at the same time I take some notes in OneNote around the meeting when that meeting finishes I
can open up Word with Copilot built into it will immediately ask me right what do you want to write
and I'll tell it I'll say well I want you to write me a tender and I want you to do that based on
this meeting and I'll point it to the meeting I recorded and these notes and not only that I want
you to do it in the style of this document which is the tender that maybe I produced a month ago
so I give it that information I hit return and off it goes and it writes me a document now once
it's wrote me that tender document I'm probably not going to be happy with it in its first form
so if I want to amend it I absolutely can do I can do that myself or manually but why do that
when I can have Copilot assist me. So from that I can ask Copilot to write me an FAQ to append to
the end of my document or maybe I want Copilot to change a a particular paragraph make it longer or shorter change the writing style I can do all of that using the power of generative AI
and ultimately produce a tender that's ready for the client and I think one of the key things
that we see with Copilot and how it's going to help people is it's not going to do all of
your work but what it is going to allow is for you to never have to start from a blank piece of
paper from a blank document ever again it's going to be able to do a lot of the heavy lifting
and then you come in to to kind of add the add the finishing touches and tender writing I think
it's a really good example of that now once I've wrote this thing or rather Copilot has helped me
write this thing maybe I then need to present it well again I can use Copilot to help me with
that Copilot is built into all of the office apps so that includes PowerPoint. So I can open up
PowerPoint and I can say right I need you to write me a presentation and I want you to do it based on
this document i.e. my tender document. So I point it to that and it writes me a presentation I can
be more specific I can tell it how many slides I need this presentation to be I can tell it what
the presentation is for so I can say this is a sales presentation so I need you to write one
as such and need to include this sort of image it maybe I don't have the right image I can get
it to create an image for me all using AI. If I want to then send that presentation as an email
and I can open up Outlook and I can utilise the power of Copilot in there to write me an email to
the client describing what's in the presentation and have that completely drafted for me obviously
I then insert a link to the actual presentation I can send that through. There's loads more power
within Copilot as well than just it being able to kind of write documentation for me and I think
Outlook is a really good example of this. So with an Outlook it can act as my personal assistant so
I can get it to summarise emails that I've missed while I was out and flag important items I can
have it to I can have it draft responses to emails already in my inbox I can have it help me prep
for meetings by asking it what I need to prepare for what subject areas it thinks are going to come
up in those meetings based on email conversations that I've been having with the people in that in
that meeting. I can even have it set up meetings for me so I can invite everyone in a particular
email to a lunch and learn about a new product launch it will do all of these things for me just
by kind of typing in using using natural language. It can also really help me out within Teams. So
one of the things that it can do within Teams is it can help me catch up on meetings either
meetings that I miss entirely or meetings that I miss the start of so if I miss a meeting
entirely well I can as long as I know in advance I can tell it and I can say look I'm not going to
be to attend this meeting but I'll tell it and I want that recorded for me and when it records
the meeting it's then going to have access to what goes on in that and I can interrogate that
data so if I want to look at that meeting later on I don't necessary have to watch the whole
thing anymore. I can just ask Copilot the questions that I want answers to which might be
you know what was the sentiment of this meeting, what key topics were discussed, what were the
outcomes, what tasks were created off the back of it. It'll be to give me all that information if I
join a meeting late I can ask it to summarize what I've missed in the meeting thus far and it will
do that I can get it to create a table of pros and cons for a topic that we're talking about
within the meeting I can ask it what decisions were made in the meeting what some suggested next
steps might be really really powerful stuff. One of the other things that Copilot is really going
to help with is around kind of analysing data so one of the things that businesses have lots of
is data but it's often unstructured and if it's unstructured it's not necessarily all that useful
or it may live in lots of disparate areas if I can bring that data into one place i.e. SharePoint
by exporting tables from the various apps that I use on a day-to-day basis into my Microsoft
environment then Copilot can analyse that for me. So I can ask Copilot to analyse sales data
to maybe break down sales by type and channel I can ask it to make projections so I can say right
well based on the last 10 years of sales data how much will I make in March 2024 what are my leading
products what do we sell most of when do we sell most of them what should I promote over the next
quarter what should I do to improve sales of this particular item it can do all that sort of stuff
and it's not just guessing it's doing that based on information that I've got access to. I don't
think there's any doubt that Copilot is going to be a game changer, I don't think it's a matter
of businesses being able to choose whether they go with Copilot or not I think you're going to
have to to stay ahead of the game so it's really important that you consider how to be able to
do that Copilot can deploy itself really easily, but you data has to be in the Cloud so you have to
have migrated it in the SharePoint and OneDrive so if you haven't done that yet now is the time
to be considering that and if you have you need to ensure that it's secure so you need to ensure
that you've turned on all the various policies and procedures that you can do within the Microsoft
world to ensure that your data remains safe and that the right people have access to it and the
wrong people don't so lots to consider but I'm sure you agree really exciting times ahead and
I hope you enjoyed this month's Masterclass