Microsoft 365 Copilot Early Access Program

Microsoft has recently announced the Microsoft 365 Copilot Early Access Program, an invitation-only, paid preview that will be rolled out to an initial wave of 600 customers worldwide. 

Since March, Microsoft has been testing Copilot with 20 enterprise customers, learning alongside companies like Goodyear, General Motors, The Walsh Group, and Avanade. Their overwhelming feedback indicates that Copilot has the potential to revolutionise work. They point to how it is a game changer for meetings and can jump-start creativity. These organisations have also identified areas where Microsoft can do more to help people work in this new way, such as the need for more conversational, multi-turn interactions. 

As Microsoft brings Copilot to more customers, they will continue to rely on this kind of feedback to refine Copilot and help guide users as they adapt to this new way of working.

Introducing the Semantic Index for Copilot

In an effort to empower every customer with AI-readiness, Microsoft is set to introduce the Semantic Index for Copilot, a novel feature accessible in Microsoft 365 E3 and E5 subscriptions. The Semantic Index for Copilot represents a sophisticated framework that comprehensively maps user and company data.

For instance, when you inquire about the “March Sales Report,” it doesn’t merely scan for documents containing those specific terms in their file names or contents. Instead, it possesses the ability to grasp that “sales reports are authored by Kelly from the finance team using Excel.” This conceptual comprehension allows it to discern your intent and assist you in locating the information you require. The Semantic Index for Copilot plays a pivotal role in delivering pertinent, actionable responses to prompts within Microsoft 365 Copilot and also enriches enterprise search results for E3 and E5 customers, regardless of whether they are utilising Copilot or not.

Copilot Integration in Whiteboard 

The integration of Copilot in Whiteboard promises to enhance the creativity and productivity of Microsoft Teams meetings and brainstorming sessions. Through natural language interaction, you can engage Copilot to generate ideas, categorise concepts into themes, craft designs to give life to your ideas, and provide succinct summaries of whiteboard content. Elevate the quality of your meetings by tapping into Copilot in Whiteboard for insights on specific topics. Leveraging the capabilities of Microsoft Designer, Copilot in Whiteboard can transform your concepts into unique visual elements that complement and enrich your textual content. Furthermore, you can easily gather input from colleagues, summarise your work, and utilise Microsoft Loop components to share your collaborative efforts, taking your teamwork to the next level.

Here are a few examples of tasks achievable with Copilot in Whiteboard:

1. Initiate brainstorming sessions to create new marketing slogans based on just one or two initial words or ideas.
2. Utilise Designer in Whiteboard to swiftly visualise and breathe life into your concepts.
3. Automatically organise ideas into key themes.
4. Easily summarise your Whiteboard content in a shareable Microsoft Loop component.

Copilot Integration in PowerPoint

We are thrilled to introduce the integration of OpenAI’s image generator, DALL-E, within PowerPoint. With just your words, you can instruct Copilot to craft stunning, tailor-made images to enhance your presentations and narratives. For instance, you can simply request Copilot to “generate a black and white image resembling a bulletin board adorned with sticky notes and postcards, evoking an artistic photography style,” and witness the rapid creation of such an image right within PowerPoint.

Furthermore, Copilot enhances your PowerPoint presentations by refining your textual content. It can transform bullet points into comprehensive paragraphs or vice versa, condense your text for improved clarity, and generate original titles for your slides.

Here are some examples of prompts to explore:

1. Streamline a text-heavy slide into clear and concise bullet points.
2. Reconstruct your original text for smoother flow and readability.
3. Craft a more succinct and focused presentation.

Copilot Integration in OneNote

Copilot in OneNote seamlessly operates across all your notes, images, and data, allowing you to draft plans, spark ideas, construct lists, and structure your information in engaging formats. All of this occurs while upholding our steadfast commitment to data security and privacy within enterprise environments. Simply by employing your own words, Copilot becomes a versatile aid for enhancing the aesthetics of your digital notebook, reconfiguring content, fine-tuning formatting, and highlighting critical points.

Here are a few examples of tasks achievable with OneNote:

1. Condense notes into succinct bullet points on a fresh page.
2. Identify unanswered questions dispersed throughout your existing notes and aggregate them into a central location.
3. Devise a structured plan to efficiently organise your tasks and projects.

Copilot Integration in Microsoft Loop

The inclusion of Copilot within Microsoft Loop significantly enhances team coordination, offering swift summarization of all content found on your Microsoft Loop page. This aids in maintaining alignment and ensuring effective collaboration among team members. As Microsoft Loop pages become populated with an abundance of ideas and content, you can call upon Copilot to distil your team’s collective efforts, expediting your comprehension of the current state of affairs. Copilot-generated summaries can be edited to include additional details or context, and they can be readily shared with others as Microsoft Loop components.

Here are a few practical applications of page summarization within Microsoft Loop:

1. Effortlessly generate a list of key highlights by placing a summary at the top of the page.
2. Create a summary as a Microsoft Loop component and transmit it to a new team member in Microsoft Teams or Outlook to swiftly bring them up to speed on a project.
3. Enhance a summary by tagging team members to draw their attention to the most crucial elements.

Copilot Integration in Microsoft Viva

In a recent announcement, we unveiled our plans to integrate Copilot into Microsoft Viva later this year. The introduction of Copilot in Microsoft Viva Learning empowers users to craft a tailored learning experience, encompassing the creation of upskilling pathways, the exploration of pertinent learning materials, and the scheduling of time for assigned training sessions.

Here are a few illustrative prompts to demonstrate its capabilities:

1. Enhance my comprehension of neural network operations.
2. Curate a learning collection focused on inclusive leadership.
3. Reserve a time slot on my calendar for the completion of my next learning assignment.

As Microsoft brings Microsoft 365 Copilot to its customers, the company is steadfastly guided by its AI principles and the Responsible AI Standard, drawing upon decades of research in AI, grounding, and privacy-preserving machine learning. A dedicated team composed of researchers, engineers, and policy experts, spanning various disciplines, undertakes the critical task of reviewing AI systems for potential risks and proactively implementing mitigations. This multifaceted approach includes the refinement of training data, the enforcement of filters to minimise the presence of harmful content, the blocking of queries and results related to sensitive subjects, and the application of Microsoft technologies like InterpretML and Fairlearn to detect and address any data biases. Clarity and transparency are paramount in this system, as Microsoft strives to elucidate the decision-making process, highlighting its limitations, providing source references, and encouraging users to review, fact-check, and adjust content based on their subject matter expertise.

Read more about Copilot in our blog and learn about cost, implementation and whether all these AI features are worth it for your business … 

Images taken from Microsoft