In our new blog series, we want to shed some light on Microsoft Copilot – Microsoft’s integrated artificial intelligence, based on OpenAI, for the Microsoft 365 productivity suite. Throughout the process we will test the integration within the various Office applications, and we will close with some insights to the Microsoft Copilot Studio.
Artificial Intelligence is everywhere these days! You find it in all sorts of enterprise software, chatbots, camera’s, machine learning, mobile apps, etc.
There are many aspects to AI like security and compliance, efficiency, reasoning for use, user and administrator training, social impact, correct ethical use and many more topics.
With this blog series we want to inspect the feature set and possible use cases of Microsoft’s Copilot with respect to the integration into your daily work. Ultimately, we want to answer the question “For whom is it advantageous to use Microsoft Copilot”?
…is now available to everyone from one license count onwards. Important to mention is, that those subscriptions are for one year and there are no options for monthly subscriptions at this moment! Additionally, you need to have a certain “base license” assigned to the users who you want to equip with Microsoft Copilot. One of the following licenses will make Microsoft Copilot work: A3, A5, E3, E5, Business Standard and Business Premium.
Microsoft Copilot integrates into a wide range of Microsoft products such as Outlook, Teams, PowerPoint, Power Platform, Purview and many more.
How exactly and how well they are integrated is subject to this evaluation and blog series.
Once you order a “Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365” license you get a new admin section enabled in the Microsoft 365 Admin Center. In this menu you have several options to control how and where Copilot gets activated within your Microsoft 365 tenant. First, you can control which users have access to Copilot (independently of whether they have a license assigned or not). You also have control over how Copilot gets integrated in Bing, Edge, and Windows and you will find an option to improve responses with web content in Copilot for Microsoft 365.
In the Admin Center for Copilot, you have plenty of options to secure and protect Copilot interactions and data across Microsoft 365 using solutions in the Microsoft Purview compliance portal. Microsoft Purview is dedicated to security and compliance experts and represents an important tool within an organisation.
Here are some examples for Copilot security and compliance settings.
Sensitivity labels
Label and protect your organisation’s data that’s processed and generated by Copilot, while making sure that the user productivity isn’t hindered.
Retention policies
Manage your data lifecycle by deciding how long to keep Copilot interactions and whether they should be deleted after a certain time.
Communication policies
Capture Copilot interactions to review potential regulatory and business conduct violations.
Audit
Search for audit records of Copilot interactions performed by users and admins.
eDiscovery
Search Copilot interaction content within your organization, preserve content, and export search results for further analysis.
Following the current global motto “AI for everyone” we will take a deeper look at Microsoft Copilot and all it’s aspects. We would like to understand how and when to use Copilot and ultimately for whom is it advantageous to pay (depends on your license provider) roughly 30€ per user per month in addition to the actual Microsoft 365 user license. In the next part of this series, we will continue with a deeper look at some of the Microsoft applications utilising the Copilot integration.
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