Transforming your business with Microsoft Copilot
Using artificial intelligence and tools like Microsoft Copilot in the workplace is a hotly debated topic, generating polarizing responses that range from emotional to rational, as it’s essentially a question of ethics.
And yet, the business world is no stranger to this type of controversy. Just consider automation in the 1960s, computerization in the 1980s, and when the Internet gained widespread use nearly 30 years ago.
Today, a revolution is once again underway. Artificial intelligence is impacting how work environments function at a level that’s as consequential as any of history’s major milestones. Strategic planning is therefore essential to position your company’s use of AI and optimize your stakeholders’ adoption of the technology.
What are the pitfalls to avoid in adopting artificial intelligence?
Protect your critical information assets
Your company’s data and intellectual property are competitive advantages and must be protected.
Using generative artificial intelligence without properly securing your data can result in the content produced at your business being disclosed externally, in a response provided to another user. That means users elsewhere in the world who are working on a project similar to yours can draw inspiration from your approaches, methodologies and solutions to improve their own projects. keep in mind that in a public AI model, your work is used in a program that everyone can share.
Therefore, your first step in using artificial intelligence should be to employ a tool that ensures data security, such as Microsoft Copilot, so that your internal data is not shared beyond your organization. You should also consult with professionals to ensure you deploy the technology based on best practices in terms of data protection.
Radical changes to how you work
As was the case when computers first entered the workplace, introducing new technologies can lead to employee concerns about their ability to adapt and integrate these tools in their daily routines.
Change management is an integral part of this initiative and should include a familiarization, learning and testing phase. It will take time to develop these new skills, learn from mistakes and become more efficient.
Powerful tools, but not foolproof…
It’s important to always remember that tools like Copilot aren’t perfect and do not possess the judgement, reasoning or creativity of your human resources. They are assistants and accelerators that require supervision as they can make mistakes or generate inconsistencies, produce content that’s not relevant, or even violate copyrights. You must always check, assess and, if necessary, modify these technologies, rather than trust them blindly.
What are the technical requirements to use Microsoft Copilot?
ITI teams use Copilot every day
To illustrate Copilot’s practical application, we’ve gathered some examples from our teams’ daily use. We hope these demonstrations will encourage you to explore the possibilities that artificial intelligence offers.
→ Marketing team:
a. Copilot helps us speed up the publication of our expert content by generating texts for social networks. We can specify to Copilot which aspect of the text to highlight, the maximum length, the tone of the post, and much more.
b. We can easily transform our content to present it in different formats and reach different audiences. For example, we might ask Copilot to generate a bulleted list, FAQ or “did you know” section from one of our blog posts or case studies.
→ Project management:
a. Microsoft Teams summaries make it easy to extract the key points of a long conversation between our experts and our customers. In addition, we can enrich our meeting notes by asking Copilot to recall what was mentioned on a particular topic during a call. In this way, we guarantee that nothing is omitted and have all the necessary information to carry out the appropriate follow-ups afterwards.
b. The coaching feature in Microsoft Outlook can often assist us by adjusting our emails, ensuring that the information communicated to teams or clients is clear and accurate.
→ HR team:
a. When creating new internal documents such as a new policy or a process review, Copilot will provide us with a draft and a starting point that we will then refine to customize it to our context.
→ Team specialized in Microsoft products:
a. Copilot helps us speed up our general research into Microsoft products that are tailored to the specific situations our customers face.
b. The thread summary feature on Outlook is extremely effective and saves us valuable time.
Copilot FAQ
Copilot is an artificial intelligence assistant that uses a language model pre-trained with thousands of lines of text and code to generate relevant suggestions tailored to your context.
Copilot can be used as a support, editing or creation tool. You can use it to check your solutions, correct errors, improve your style, or create original content. You can also use it to ask questions, explore alternatives, compare approaches, or discover new possibilities.
Copilot uses corporate data the user has access to. It is also trained with a vast amount of public information from various web sources, although it will not expose your internal data publicly.
In Copilot, a prompt is an instruction, question, request, or comment that you write to ask Copilot to help you with. By default, Copilot will respond in the language of your prompt, however, you can specify the language, format, style, content, or goal of the response you wish to obtain from Copilot.
To make precise and effective requests with Copilot, it’s important to follow a few basic principles:
- Clearly express your intention, using natural language and relevant keywords.
- Provide sufficient context so that Copilot understands the domain, goal and constraints of your requests.
- Use examples, comments, tests, or pseudo-codes to guide Copilot toward the expected solution.
- Check and assess the quality of Copilot’s suggestions before accepting or editing them.
Copilot is not infallible and can sometimes generate incorrect or incomplete information. That’s why it’s important to write precise requests and to double check the information before using it. Copilot can also have difficulty managing the consistency, logic and style of complex information or projects. It can also reproduce errors, vulnerabilities or bad practices present in the data sources it uses. Copilot was developed to help humans, not replace them.