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Taking flight with Copilot
Microsoft Copilot’s marketing is resonating with businesses, promising increased productivity thanks to the power of artificial intelligence and seamless integration with Microsoft 365 tools.
Copilot boasts easy integration and utilization for all users, with new possibilities that will forever change how companies do business. However, as the name suggests, Copilot is designed to assist the pilot, not take over for them. It plays a specific role, and companies should understand it properly before starting to use it.
Is your company ready to change?
Before getting started, it’s important to assess your users’ openness to changing their work habits and using new technologies. Creating a deployment plan that aligns with your company’s level of readiness is essential. Users need to understand why the change is taking place and how Copilot will help them in their daily tasks.
Avoid giving Microsoft Copilot total control
The technical aspects of implementing Copilot in a Microsoft 365 environment are so simple that people often neglect the fundamentals of information security which are data availability, integrity, privacy and traceability. No one should be able to roam around your systems freely, consulting any data they find and using it as they please. The same goes for Copilot and any other artificial intelligence tools.
Your approach to data governance and protection should take this new player into account and clearly establish its scope of action.
Copilot is a user like any other, so it’s important that you determine what it can access and why, because it can connect to anything, but it has no sense of ethics, discernment or judgement. It only follows instructions based on training formulas.
Data governance is built on three essential pillars:
- Data classification and protection, to identify and secure sensitive information.
- Identity and access management, to control who can access what data based on roles and responsibilities.
- Monitoring, to supervise user activity to ensure compliance with applicable policies and regulations.
Once you’ve established these guidelines, a tool like Microsoft Purview comes into play, enabling you to automate and manage this process effectively.
Know your destination before take-off
Copilot is like a plane with a crew that can take you anywhere you want to go, quickly, comfortably and safely, but it doesn’t come with a flight plan. In the real world, when planning a trip, you choose your destination before choosing your airline. And yet, many companies choose to “take off” with Copilot before setting goals and objectives. It’s a major misstep.
With Copilot, you can’t just take off and fly in circles until you decide on your destination.
As you’ve no doubt surmised, you’ll need a clear vision of what you want to accomplish with a project and establish specific goals before getting started. This may be to reduce the time it takes to create and revise certain types of documents. You can also decide to automate note taking and writing meeting summaries, for example.
To build a solid road map, your process should:
- Identify the target users
- Establish potential areas of improvement
- Document the desired user experience
- Define your performance indicators
The possibilities are endless, which is why it’s important to identify and prioritize your initiatives.
Copilot will be as relevant as your data
In a previous article, we presented the The 7 types of artificial intelligence that underscored the importance of determining the maturity of your corporate data before launching any initiatives that involve artificial intelligence. To maximize your chances of success, we’ve noted that:
- The data volume must be sufficient to create strong and reliable models
- The quality of the data is also crucial and must be precise and complete to avoid bias
You first steps in adopting Copilot will be to carefully complete this exercise.
Test your scenarios
Before testing your first models, you must identify the scenarios that Copilot can run. Thankfully, Microsoft has taken out the guesswork by providing several tools to help you in this process. Start by consulting their Productivity Library, which presents scenarios according to specific industries or roles. You’re sure to find some interesting avenues to explore.
Among other things, the Microsoft Copilot scenario library for Microsoft 365 is a guide that illustrates the value chain in its entirety, from basic functions to full integration in business processes. When the time comes to assess the relevance of a scenario, consider these four simple questions:
- Will it resolve an irritant or problem?
- Can it be performed with reasonable resources?
- How many people will this improvement impact?
- What is the expected return on investment?
Identify the key performance indicators for each scenario and how you’ll measure them to evaluate the adoption and success rates.
Start small
Beginning with baby steps is an excellent approach when you want to test Copilot’s limits while mitigating risks and measuring the potential benefits. Any company that wants to maximize their chances of success should opt for a pilot project phase, starting by determining the individuals and corporate functions that could quickly benefit from using Copilot.
A typical pilot project includes:
- A planning phase with clear goals and success criteria
- A targeted implementation phase with regular communication to gather comments and resolve issues
- An assessment phase to analyze the results and adjust the process to prepare for a bigger deployment
Focus your project on the sectors where it can have the greatest impact and fulfill the success criteria. Always remember that transparent and continuous communication with all stakeholders is essential to ensure buy-in and the success of your initiative.
Every improvement project requires careful thought and planning. Consulting with experienced specialists, such as ITI’s experts, will provide you with guidance based on best practices and the highest standards of information management and data security.
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