Optimising business processes with Microsoft Copilot
How can the AI-powered productivity tool Microsoft Copilot optimise your business processes, and what risks could it pose to businesses? AI plays a crucial role in driving innovation and change in many industries. Benefiting from artificial intelligence brings great competitive advantages, but there are also concerns about how AI will affect our businesses in the future.
– The future is certainly interesting. AI will have a huge impact on the way we work, and many tasks will be done much faster when you have constant suggestions and support in your work. Some tasks will probably no longer need to be done, and people who have been in the labour market for a long time will probably experience AI in business as a kind of revolution,’ says Tobias Sahlin, Business Developer at Nordlo.
AI can perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making and language translation. A tool that can be used to create smarter business flows and optimise processes.
What is Microsoft Copilot?
Microsoft Copilot is a productivity tool based on generative AI that uses language models, user-generated data and Microsoft 365 apps to optimise business processes in the workplace. The tool started to be rolled out to test users in November 2023 and will be launched widely in Sweden in spring 2024.
We are convinced that AI will change many traditional job roles, making it important to implement AI in a safe and responsible way to protect our privacy. But how will Copilot affect our work?
AI in your regular applications
Copilot integrates with the productivity apps in M365, such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams. The AI assistant can, for example, summarise meetings in Teams, write drafts in Word, put together presentations in PowerPoint, formulate email responses in Outlook or analyse and visualise data in Excel. The AI tool should also be able to be used in the Power Platform to easily automate repetitive tasks, create chatbots and develop new apps in minutes.
Examples of prompts you can ask your digital assistant:
- When writing: “Make the third paragraph more concise and change the tone of the text to make it more relaxed.”
- When you need to develop your points in a presentation: “Create a draft slide based on this rough outline.”
Introducing Business Chat
In addition to the embedded features of your regular productivity applications, Copilot can also be used as a business chat where you can ask questions about your organisation and get answers. For example, you can ask for a status update based on this morning's meetings, chat threads or emails.
Examples of questions you can ask and get answers to in the company chat:
- “Summarise chats, emails and documents about [customer] from last night.”
- “What are the next steps in [project]? Have any risks been identified? Help me brainstorm a list of potential actions.”
“It is important not to be
afraid of AI, but to be informed
and make sure to reassure and
inform employees”
Information extracted from your company data
Copilot generates results and answers about your organisation. The tool pulls information from company data, documents, meetings, chat threads, contact lists, calendar and email conversations, and combines it with the current context. It can include your location, whether you are in a meeting or your recent chat conversations to give you relevant data and information.
Opportunities to improve efficiency with AI
There are many benefits to using Microsoft Copilot and AI to make business processes more efficient. For example, Copilot uses machine learning to suggest and generate code suggestions, helping developers save time and reduce errors. AI can also provide suggestions for automated processes and analyse data for better decision-making capabilities to the organisation.
There are many examples of processes that can be optimised using Microsoft Copilot and AI. For example, SharePoint and OneDrive Copilot can be used to create new documents, add content from other sources, and perform other tasks with commands. Other examples include automating customer service processes with chatbots, using predictive analytics to optimise supply chain management, and using AI-powered tools to improve marketing campaigns. By incorporating these technologies into their operations, companies can streamline their processes, reduce costs and improve their overall performance.
Risks of AI and Microsoft Copilot
When using AI, we need to have control and understanding of what rules, ethical principles and laws are affected. AI has the potential to impact privacy and data protection, making information classification and data quality important when implementing in the business.
Of course, giving Copilot access to all the data your company holds in the cloud also carries risks. When Copilot retrieves information based on your company's Microsoft 365 tenant, it gains access to all organisational data. So far, there is no possibility to classify data in order to strengthen confidentiality in Copilot. If the responsibility for security classification of documents is instead placed on employees, there is a risk that they will not know what information they can share with others in the cloud, regardless of the security level of the information.
There is also a risk of employees gaining access to classified information by asking questions to Copilot. How this will be prevented remains to be seen. However, it is clear that it is becoming increasingly important for companies to keep track of accesses and authorisations in their organisation. Your information classification is the basis for secure information security and is more important in the increasingly cloud-based working methods of the future.
Risk of mixing private and corporate data
If employees use company devices for personal data, such as private photos and documents, there is a risk that Copilot will pick up this data if it is deemed interesting to share with the rest of the organisation. Therefore, it is important that all employees use the cloud securely, know what to store there and not use work emails for private conversations. Organisations need to do their homework and separate business information from personal matters.
How to implement Copilot in your organisation?
– It is important not to be afraid of AI, but to be informed and make sure to reassure and inform employees. What we will probably all need to do is update employees‘ basic knowledge of AI and Copilot, introduce new policies where the company's data is not allowed to end up in various public AI and follow the development, because it is impossible to resist it, says Tobias Sahlin.
There are also risks for companies that do not implement AI, such as loss of competitive advantage over competitors.
With the rapid pace of development, it's important to be aware of the risks that can accompany AI in business. If we use AI correctly, there are huge opportunities, while misuse can have a huge impact.