AI was the big topic at July’s Microsoft Inspire Conference. Pricing and requirements for Microsoft 365 Copilot were announced and the Twittersphere and LinkedIn feeds were filled with comments about the costs of the subscription.

Microsoft 365 Copilot is a subscription service that requires users to have a Business Premium, E3 or E5 license as a prerequisite. The Copilot subscription is an additional $US30 per user / month.

I’m not surprised by the costs because it takes some serious computing power to drive the service and a huge investment in infrastructure to support the AI model and service (Azure AI Data Centre talk with Mark Russinovich). As with other subscription services, we really should focus on the value rather than the raw cost. How much are you prepared to pay to save yourself an hour or two a month? What if Copilot can save you much more time?

Earlier this year I did some experimenting with ChatGPT to help generate content. For content creators, AI is a game changer. It can help with brainstorming ideas and generating content far quicker than any normal person can. For content creators there is immediate value, but Copilot goes far beyond this! It will help people who work in Excel infrequently do things only the pro’s can normally do. It can help make your presentations slicker and guess what, it can help you make a beautiful and functional SharePoint site. I am only scratching the surface here!

Copilot can be rolled out in stages allowing you to prove the value in specific areas of your business and with a pilot (excuse the pun) group of users. I asked a few of my clients where they thought Copilot would add immediate value. The responses were all similar and focused on the things we do with ChatGPT already.

Copilot offers so much more. It will help unlock value from your existing content boosting productivity and removing some of the labour-intensive things we do every day:

• Catching up on long email threads
• Creating document outlines
• Accelerating presentation creation
• Supercharging your Excel skills
• Making you more self-sufficient
• Brainstorming

And there is so much more!

Some people expect AI to be 100% accurate. That is unrealistic because of the nature of the technology and the content it is trained with. It is important to understand the Copilot is what its name suggests, an assistant to help you work more efficiently together.

It will be interesting to see where and how people use Copilot as early adopters gain experience.

Why Copilot and not something else?

There are two important reasons to consider Copilot instead of other AI based tools. The first is it works within your Microsoft 365 tenant to address data security and sovereignty concerns. We are already seeing some companies advise against using AI tools with confidential information because it can be a vector for leaking secrets.

Secondly, it works across the Microsoft 365 suite: AI capabilities within your normal workflow and context. This is important for discovering and boosting productivity. Nothing kills productivity like context switching, so having these tools in the flow of work help keep the focus on the job at hand.

We are at the beginning of the AI revolution and Microsoft bet the shop on it. They have the scale and vision to be the leader across their product categories. Outside Microsoft 365 we their is Copilot for Dynamics 365, Power Platform and Azure services for developers.

Get Ready

There are some things to consider before rolling out Copilot. Perhaps the most important is understanding the ability to discover information. This is the same concern many people had when enterprise search tools became available and when the Office Graph started to bubble up documents people around you were working on. Copilot is security trimmed, meaning the permissions we put in place to secure content are important.

In addition, you should develop a governance approach, update policies (not just IT) to include guidance on the user of AI and then create a plan to launch Copilot into your environment and learn! Don’t just turn it on!

Learn more:

To get read for Copilot, Microsoft have released some guidance:

• Microsoft Getting ready for Copilot
• Microsoft Copilot for SharePoint
• CIO: 6 best practices to develop a corporate use policy for generative AI

Disclaimer: This post was written by a human without AI assistance.