Way back at the start of my career over 30 years ago, my team mates would often say GIGO (Garbage In Garage Out) when discussing data quality. Back then we were writing software with COBOL, “4GL” languages and reporting tools. In the age of AI, the same is true.

Copilot and other AI tools are great for all sorts of tasks, however there is also a problem. Your AI tool of choice is only as good as the data it has to work with. If you unleash Copilot on your SharePoint environment, it will do a great job of finding information locked away in documents you wrote in the past, including those documents you didn’t get around to tidying up.

It is no wonder many people say they are getting low quality results with AI and often it is less painful to go “old school”. Garbage In Garbage Out.

If you have vast quantities of content then it can be an enormous job to do the tidy up needed, but all is not lost. What can be done to make the problem smaller? Simple, focus on quality rather than quantity but curating the content Copilot uses. Here are two ways you can do this with Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Copilot in SharePoint

Copilot in SharePoint allows you to create a custom Agent without code. In the data source you can specify specific documents, libraries, SharePoint sites and other data sources such as public websites.

Creating a custom Copilot in SharePoint with the content scoped to a site or library is a great way to use the Quality over Quantity approach. For example, if you need an Agent to help people answer questions related to environmental regulations then you can gather a collection of documents including the local environmental plan, documents specific to the types of work you do and other related material to power your Agent.

Unlike an AI tool that is trained on public content, this solution will provide answers tailored to your needs from known good content. Don’t forget to review the content regularly to ensure it is still current.

This approach has some big benefits, including reducing the time to get a solution up and going. You don’t need to spend weeks or months tidying up old content if the scope is reduced to the content that counts.

Copilot Notebooks

Copilot Notebooks let you select a collection of documents from various locations and curate the notebook yourself. Notebooks are great for people who want to collect documents from different places as the source content prompts.

Creating a Copilot Notebook is quick and easy, all you need is some source documents to upload or links (tip you can link to documents in SharePoint) and you can ask questions or generate an audio summaries (like your own personal podcast of the board report…).

In both cases the content remains in your Microsoft 365 tenant, with all of the security and compliance features you would expect. Microsoft doesn’t training their model with your data and content.

Remember: QIQO (Quality In Quality Out)