Microsoft Copilot

The use of artificial intelligence has grown exponentially in the past six months, and Microsoft is now also introducing a range of AI-powered tools for Microsoft 365. Everything from Word, Excel, Outlook, OneNote, and Teams to Microsoft’s CRM system (Dynamics 365) and ERP platform (Business Central) will have fully integrated AI tools.

In this article, we delve into each program and provide more details on how Microsoft Copilot is revolutionizing your daily routine by bringing next-generation AI into your work tasks.

Below, you can find a brief explanation of how Microsoft Copilot works.

Word

Copilot in Word is an efficient co-writer that assists you in writing, editing, summarizing, and structuring documents. Copilot can add content to existing documents, summarize text, and rewrite sections or the entire document to ensure accuracy.

Moreover, Copilot can suggest different tones – ranging from professional to passionate and casual to grateful – to help you find the right tone. Additionally, Copilot can enhance your writing by providing suggestions that strengthen your arguments and correct any inconsistencies

See Microsoft Copilot being used in Word.

Excel

Copilot in Excel assists in analyzing and exploring data. You can ask Copilot questions about your datasets in natural language, eliminating the need to know specific formulas. Copilot can identify patterns, suggest “what-if” scenarios, and provide suggestions for new formulas based on your questions.

Copilot generates models based on your queries, helping you explore your data and identify trends, set up useful visualizations, and even propose methods to achieve your desired outcomes.

Microsoft Copilot enables the use of plain language to execute advanced functions in Excel.

PowerPoint

With Copilot in PowerPoint, it’s easier than ever to create impressive presentations based on your own ideas. Copilot helps transform existing documents into beautiful and professional slides that include notes and sources. You can also start a brand new presentation with just a simple request or a rough sketch. With a single click, you can make long presentations shorter, and you can use natural language commands to customize layouts, change text formatting, and schedule animations.

Create stunning and professional PowerPoint presentations by describing what you want.

Outlook

Copilot in Outlook streamlines your email management. By summarizing long and complex email threads with multiple participants, Copilot provides an overview of the content, different viewpoints, and unanswered questions.

You can quickly respond to existing emails using simple prompts or transform quick notes into precise and professional messages by drawing on existing emails or content from Microsoft 365.

Copilot also allows you to customize the tone and length of your messages through automatic adjustments to your text.

Get assistance in managing your daily emails and make your use of Outlook much more efficient.

Teams

As a user of Microsoft Teams, Copilot can help you conduct more effective meetings, organize key meeting points, and provide summaries so that all participants know what needs to be done after the meeting. In your chat, Copilot can answer specific questions or update you on anything you missed without interrupting the conversation. By adding Copilot to your meetings and conversations, you also get a powerful tool to assist with common tasks such as creating meeting agendas based on chat history, identifying the right people for follow-up, and scheduling next steps. Here are some examples of commands and requests you can try:

• Summarize what I missed in the meeting. What points have been presented so far? Where do we disagree on this topic?
• Create a table of pros and cons for [the discussed topic]. What else should we consider before making a decision?
• What decisions were made, and what proposed next steps are there.

Get assistance in managing your daily emails and make your use of Outlook much more efficient.

Dynamics 365 Sales and Viva Sales

Copilot also provides assistance for a wide range of daily scenarios for a typical salesperson using Dynamics 365 Sales and Viva Sales.

Viva Sales can generate content suggestions based on customer emails, such as responses to inquiries or requests for quotes, including data specifically relevant to the recipient, such as prices, offers, and deadlines. The salesperson simply selects the appropriate option, and Copilot will generate a response for the salesperson, which can then be customized if needed. The response draws on combined data from Microsoft Graph and the CRM system (Microsoft Dynamics 365).

For example, a salesperson can ask Copilot to generate an email suggesting a meeting time with a customer, including a proposed meeting date and time based on the salesperson’s availability in the Outlook calendar.

In addition, a feedback mechanism has been introduced, allowing salespeople to rate the AI-generated content with a thumbs-up or thumbs-down, helping to refine and improve future responses. Salespeople can also improve generated results by providing a new prompt that generates an updated response based on previously suggested drafts and new data.

Here you can see how the AI-suggested answer can be customized to make the response completely accurate for the customer.

Follow up with customers using AI-generated summaries

Salespeople often spend several hours each day on calls with potential and existing customers – and almost as much time summarizing the conversations and scheduling follow-up appointments. Here, Copilot can assist with automated summaries of key topics, issues, and concerns discussed during the meeting.

In Viva Sales, the new Copilot feature utilizes natural language with the help of Azure OpenAI Service to intelligently craft a summary of a call, including action items and follow-up dates based on CRM and meeting data. Summaries can be generated for various types of meetings in Teams, including multi-person and internal calls, helping salespeople stay organized and keep track of important sales meetings that often contain a significant amount of content.

Dynamics 365 Customer Service

Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Service enables customer service representatives to deliver improved and more efficient customer service. Dynamics 365 Copilot generates context-based responses to questions in both chat and email, providing an interactive chat experience where artificial intelligence can pull data from company knowledge bases and individual customer case histories.

Power Virtual Agents

Power Virtual Agents is a “low code” approach to building chatbots using an intuitive visual drag-and-drop method. And like most industrial bot tools, it has traditionally been up to the creator to define conversation topics and configure the dialogue flow.

But that is changing with the new “conversation booster” feature in Power Virtual Agents.

Normally, when a bot encounters a question or response it has not been trained on, it can only respond in two ways: ask the user to rephrase the question or offer to connect to a human agent. Now, with AI, you can connect your chatbot to your latest and most useful data sources, such as internal and external company websites, and the chatbot can immediately start leveraging that data to construct a response.

Dynamics 365 Marketing

By using Copilot in Dynamics 365 Marketing, you can create a new customer segment simply by describing the desired segment in your own words using the new AI-powered “query assist feature.” This can make it much more efficient to create new targeted segments in your marketing efforts.

Marketing professionals can also use Dynamics 365 Copilot to generate inspiring new suggestions for email campaigns based on simple requests. Copilot provides suggestions based on entered keywords, the organization’s existing marketing emails, and a range of internet sources to enhance the relevance of generated ideas.

Business Central

Excellent product descriptions in online stores boost sales by making products stand out from the crowd. However, it can be challenging to consistently produce engaging descriptions on demand, especially when writing descriptions for dozens or even hundreds of similar products.

Copilot in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central helps small and medium-sized businesses bring new products to market faster by generating AI-based product descriptions. This Copilot feature suggests texts for compelling product descriptions that are tailored to your company’s brand using the product’s title and key attributes such as color, material, and size. You can easily customize the text to your preferred writing style by selecting tone and length and making any necessary changes before saving the text. Business Central customers can seamlessly publish the new product descriptions on their Shopify store with just a few clicks.

A New Way of Working

Microsoft Copilot is an incredibly exciting project that has the potential to change the way we work. Copilot is currently in a phase of closed preview sessions to fine-tune and enhance the user experience.

Although access to Copilot is not yet available to everyone, it is a good idea to prepare for this groundbreaking AI technology. We can already start envisioning the potential of AI and identify areas where it can optimize our workflows and improve our results.

Copilot has the potential to become an invaluable tool in our work with Microsoft systems, and we look forward to seeing if the potential is realized when Copilot is finally launched.

We will, of course, provide more in-depth articles as soon as Copilot becomes freely available.