Getting Ready for Microsoft 365 Copilot with Slalom’s Pre-flight Inspection
Many years from now we are going to look back at 2023 as the year of artificial intelligence (AI). Each week it seems is filled with a dizzying array of new product announcements with the major cloud providers all vying for dominance. Microsoft who for many years was playing catch-up in the cloud computing space just made series of incredible moves to leapfrog their competition by first announcing that OpenAI’s models would be made available through a new service called Azure OpenAI and then soon after announcing they would be integrating Generative AI capabilities into their full suite of Microsoft 365 products under a new product called Copilot.
Microsoft 365 Copilot combines the power of large language models (LLMs) with your data in the Microsoft Graph — your calendar, emails, chats, documents, meetings, and more — and the Microsoft 365 apps to turn your words into the most powerful productivity tool on the planet.
Stallbaumer, C. (2023). Introducing Microsoft 365 Copilot — A whole new way to work. Microsoft 365 Blog.
Microsoft is now embedding this Generative AI capability into common tools that you use today including Word, PowerPoint, Excel, etc. as well as the collaboration services in M365 including Microsoft Teams, Power Apps, Power Automate, the Viva Suite, etc. to help streamline how you work, collaborate, and automate. They are also targeting Salesforce CRM customers with their new Viva Sales product which leverages generative AI to summarize and create e-mail messages, coach employees on how to keep moving sales opportunities forward, captures meeting minutes and overall call sentiment, and helps to simplify data entry to ensure data hygiene.
Microsoft 365 Copilot’s Capabilities
While the full list of Copilot capabilities have yet to be announced, if I were to summarize what we know now the main two incredibly powerful features are:
- Content Creation — Leveraging the power of Generative AI to rapidly create new content such as drafting of e-mails, creating summary documents in Microsoft Word, or beautiful PowerPoint slides to help tell a story.
- Content Summarization — Tapping into Copilot’s analytical capabilities to help summarize data such as critical points from a Microsoft Teams meeting, or to gain a handle of what are the highest priority actions from being out of the office for a week, or to confirm next steps from e-mails or meetings.
Getting Ready for Microsoft 365 Copilot!
As Microsoft is working Copilot through its development and quality control steps, there are plenty of things that you can do now to get ready:
People — begin to skill-up your people on prompt engineering, identify areas for reskilling/retraining for those whose workload might shift, and solidify your employee experience program to help keep your workforce engaged
Process — evaluate your business processes and start to reimagine what they might look like with the augmentation of copilot’s generative capabilities
Technology — review your current M365 tenant to ensure that the appropriate data security controls are in-place to monitor sensitive information, ensure appropriate data access, and enable content lifecycle management
Slalom’s Flight Plan for Microsoft 365 Copilot
We have developed the following flight plan to help our clients through preparing for Microsoft 365 Copilot:
Our Pre-Flight Inspection offering is the first step in helping our clients prepare for Copilot and can be started now well in advance of its late 2023 release date.
Slalom’s Copilot Pre-flight Inspection
Our Pre-Flight Inspection is focused on conducting an assessment and providing recommendations for these two important focus areas:
Collaboration Maturity — how your organization is currently leveraging M365 from a collaboration perspective including document & content management, lifecycle management, and communications.
Data security — M365 Copilot will surface content that you have access to which sometimes may include sensitive information. We will evaluate your current usage of Data Security controls & monitoring capabilities and provide recommendations for how you can improve your data security posture prior to roll-out.
We believe that Collaboration Maturity & Data Security are foundational elements for any Copilot implementation because first to unlock the true value of Copilot, your users need to be actively collaborating in Microsoft 365 and using the new Teams 2.1 client (rolling out later this year). Next, much like Delve we believe that when organizations first enable Copilot they are going to find that some of their data can no longer be secured through obscurity within their tenant.
Imagine for instance if a user asked Copilot to create a table of annual bonuses for everyone in your company and there was a compensation spreadsheet out on a Teams site that was accidentally shared with everyone at the company. Copilot would be respecting the security context of that user having access to the spreadsheet and would create the requested output despite the accidental sharing of that file. This would likely result in a rather quick escalation to IT to turn off Copilot within the organization. Rather than wait for that to happen, there is an opportunity now to review how data is secured within your organization to help prevent this from happening.
Engagement Overview
While certainly all clients needs are different — we have modeled this offering to be a 1–2 day workshop depending on the organization with a with a high-level agenda:
Next Steps
We’d be more than happy to partner with you to pilot this new capability by engaging with you through our official offering in the Microsoft AppSource Marketplace You can also reach out to me directly and I can get you connected with the right people to start getting ready for Microsoft 365 Copilot.
