Microsoft Copilot: Benefits for Your Business

Written by Jessica DeForge | May 14, 2024 3:00:00 PM

AI has become impossible to ignore, it often feels like there are new capabilities for AI being released daily. The possibilities seem endless and while the benefits to businesses seem almost limitless it is hard to know where to start and how to best use AI for your specific business needs.

AI can help businesses with a wide range of things like streamlining operations and enhancing team efficiency but, with great power comes great responsibility. Especially for businesses that handle sensitive data such as the healthcare, finance, biotech, and pharmaceutical industries the use of AI comes with the challenge of protecting sensitive data. With so many options available when it comes to AI we’ve decided to focus this blog on Microsoft Copilot.

What is Microsoft Copilot?

As the name implies, Microsoft Copilot is Microsoft’s AI tool that is specifically designed to be a copilot for Microsoft users, assisting them with tasks and increasing their productivity. What’s great about Copliot is the fact that when you use it with one of Microsoft’s business licenses, it allows your business to leverage AI for your internal business data so that all sensitive data stays contained within your Microsoft 365 tenant. What does that mean? Put simply, when you use Copilot in conjunction with a Microsoft business license it pulls from and keeps your data in house unlike a third-party external service like ChatGPT that opens your data to a public platform. ChatGPT is both a language model and a service. When we refer to data security, we are referring to the ChatGPT service not the ChatGPT LLM, which is a public platform that interacts with public servers.

Microsoft Copilot can be utilized by your business in two ways. Copilot can be accessed from your Microsoft Apps like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams to assist you with productivity and increase your skill level. Additionally, Copilot can be used with your data (calendar, emails, chats, documents, meetings and contacts) through Business Chat.

Microsoft Copilot for Businesses

The secret sauce here is that Microsoft Copilot integrates AI powered Large Language Models (LLMs) with your business data. Typically, the data used to train LLMs is general and not specific to any one business or user meaning that they struggle to align with your unique business needs. Copilot’s ability to use and learn from your business data allows it to understand the context in which you are working, providing you with responses that are much more accurate and relevant.

Below we have highlighted some key features of Microsoft Copilot that can benefit your business.

Automated Meeting Summaries: Copilot can automatically summarize meeting notes which helps you save time and enhance your productivity.
Task Management: It can create to-do lists from meeting discussions and email threads to help you and your team stay organized and on target for your initiatives.
Customer Data Analysis: Copilot has the ability to pull insights from your past interactions and data which you can use to enhance your customer relationship management.
Enhanced Productivity: On top of everything mentioned above, Copilot can streamline various administrative and analytical tasks across different departments.
Security & Compliance: To protect your data, Copilot automatically inherits all of your business’ security, compliance, and privacy policies and processes. Copilot’s permissioning model makes sure that your data won’t be leaked onto a publicly accessible platform, and it only allows users to access the data they have permission to access.

If you are interested in incorporating Microsoft Copilot to your business operations reach out to our team. We help businesses like yours get the licensing they need followed by a strategic onboarding process that ensures you make the most out of Copilot.