Is Microsoft's Copilot the future of how businesses use AI productively? | How It Works

Hi, I'm Jess Jones. I'm the tech and media reporter for CTIAM

And today I'm here with Nick from Microsoft. Great to meet you, Nick

Hi, Jess. Please, can you introduce yourself to our viewers? Of course. Yeah, Nick Hederman, I lead the modern work business for Microsoft in the UK

Today we're discussing a bit about Microsoft's new co-pilot offering for businesses. So could you start by telling me a bit about how Microsoft came up with the idea

of Copilot and what it can do? Well, Copilot for Microsoft 365 is really your AI assistant

It's going to help take all that drudgery out of your day-to-day work and free you up and give you

more time back to really focus on the things that matter, creating things, innovating, and becoming

more strategic in your thinking. And can anyone in the organisation use this software

So you need to be licensed to use Copilot and once you have that, licence, then it comes to life in all of your M365 applications, such as Outlook, Teams, Excel

PowerPoint and Word. And what you'll find is it does two things really well. It helps you speed up

the work that you do and it also helps improve the quality of your work as well. Great. Well, I mean

should we go and have a look and see if you do that? Yeah, let's do that. Yeah. Should we start with a

meeting? So many people often turn up to meetings just to be informed about what's going on. So

Imagine re-architecting how meeting works in your organisation and just have the core decision makers in that room

And then allowing those that have the permission to access that content to come back at any time

after the meeting to interrogate the transcript and really just get to that information layer

I just need a little snippet to know what's going on. So this is an example here where I wasn't in this meeting

There were a bunch of my colleagues who were and they were discussing things

I can go back and I can play the stream of that meeting if I wanted to watch it

but actually, even better, I can see when different people were discussing things

I can see some of the topics that they were also discussing. And even it's been smart enough to create chapters of the meetings as well

So I can just jump in and out here. And what if I wanted to find something specific that somebody said

Yeah, great question. So this is where co-pilot becomes really helpful. So that experience I just showed you is consistent for every single member of the meeting

But now I'm in the environment where I'm showing my co-pilot. So I'm going to say, okay, what

what did, and let's see who was in the meeting quickly so we could, let's go with Diego

Let's see what did Diego say, question mark. And now co-pilot is going to go look across that entire transcript of the meeting and specifically

what was Diego talking about. Here we go. He spoke twice during the meeting and he talked to a little about the technical support team

and he's identified some of the solutions to the action plan with the incident that came up

So as an onlooker for this meeting, I can quickly get to the information

And so what about, for instance, if I was wanting to use, what if I wanted to use copilot in my emails, how can it help there

Well it does a few things really well actually Firstly it will summarise your entire inbox and help you focus on the emails you should start with So it really good at helping you triage all of your inbox especially if you been away from the office for a few hours or you just come back from

holiday. Secondly, if you've got really long threads, it will do a good job of reading all of those

and giving you a simple summary at the top, which is a really way of cutting through

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Can you help me, Jess, question mark. And then you see 25

responses on these. So they're great at doing that. But maybe I'll show you, show you

you my favourite feature at the moment, which is called Coaching by Co-Pilot. So I've got an email here

where it's talking about the festive party plans for my team, which I'm just about to send out

but I thought it might be smart to turn on my coaching feature first. So as opposed to me walking

away from the desk and coming back and rereading it, I've now got a second pair of eyes

taking a look through my email. And it's going to look for things like tone, for clarity of

communications. So everything it's doing here is helping to create a better quality outcome

And how is this different from the, you know, you usually get those sort of pop-up kind of

auto-generated finish your sentence kind of prompts? How is this different from that

This is way more advanced than that. This is generative AI. It's going into the email

It understands language really well and it's going to start not only highlighting some of the

challenges, but also some of the recommendations. So for example, you know, adjust the tone for a bit

formality, it feels like it's a little bit too formal. It's also saying consider the diversity

and inclusion of the team. Not everyone might like festive traditional turkey and crackers. And also

from a clarity point of view, hey, you haven't even mentioned the time, the date, the location of the

party and how teams should our SVP. So I'm lacking some significant detail there. So now

I mean, given that, it's also made some suggestions for how I might improve it. So there you go

At the second sentence at the beginning of the second paragraph, the party will take place on this

date in this location and so I could easily add that in and then once I send it I know I'm producing a

better quality outcome in this case and have you had much feedback on co-pilot yet from businesses

who have already started to use it because I believe that you beta tested it for a while and now

it's now it's fully launched that's right yeah we we had a number of our customers using it

over the summer and we've learned some really interesting things so first of all 77% of the

people that were using it said don't take it away really enjoying this 70% of people said

they're more productive as a consequence. 68% it's improving my quality. And then some other really interesting stats

Firstly, catching up on meetings four times faster than they were prior

So this is really accelerating that meeting follow-up. And then getting stuff, especially the mundane stuff done quicker

28% faster is what we're learning from these initial stats. And then finally, we asked them whether they would rather have a free lunch or co-pilot

And 88% of people said they'd rather take a copilot over a free lunch every month

And how long has co-pilot been in the making? Is it kind of since the pandemic or since when

So we leverage the power of the Open AI large language model

the GPT language model in the background. And as we've seen that's accelerated very rapidly

over the last six to 12 months Microsoft has been behind Open AI for much longer than that and investing to make them our partnership successful That information comes to life through the apps itself

and then starts to bring all of these scenarios no matter the situation

And why do you think the businesses are turning to technology like co-pilot

and other generative AI options? Is it to maximise their profits or are there other reasons for this

Well, it's really at the heart about augmenting human performance. If we can help people to perform better in the workplace, then ultimately that drives competitive

advantage for that organisation and bottom line business growth. You know, there's a direct correlation there

And so what's really refreshing is, especially when we speak to leaders in our Work Trends Index

we speak to a cohort of leaders, the number one thing they say that they would see the benefit

of this technology is employee productivity, employees productivity gains. And how have employees reacted to using this? Because, I mean, one of the concerns that we've heard

a lot recently is that employees are really worried that AI is going to steal their jobs. And this

is obviously big anxiety going around. So how does this, does co-pilot address those concerns

in any way? Well, first of all, it's there to help you and augment you as a human being

It's the clues of the name. It's there as your co-pilot. This is not about automating the job

that you do. And secondly, when we ask people, would they like some sort of AI assistance in

their workplace over 70% of people say yes please this would be great and when you

ask them specifically what sorts of things would you like help with finding

information number one pain point for most people on a daily basis in the

workplace getting on with administrative tasks that I don't want to take care of

helping me be a little bit more creative if that's not my natural flair

organising myself organizing my day organizing my inbox you know these are all

things that are a burden you know this is the digital debt that has built up

over many decades in cases with individuals in the workplace. And so how can I cut through all of that digital debt

And separate the noise that that creates from the actual signals, the insights

the things that really matter. And then once I get to those signals, then I can use that to be creative and generate

something as a consequence. And the companies who use copilot, can the companies who use co-pilot trust that their

data is safe with it? How does the underlying data work there? Yeah, it's a great question

So copilot for M365 adheres to all of the company's existing security, privacy and compliance rules that they've put in place

So it's just a layer on top of their existing implementation. And so all of your data stays within your tenant

It's not used to train the language model. We don't have any eyes on access as Microsoft

It's your tenant. It's your data. So that's fully respected. Okay. And lastly, a couple of more fun questions

What's your favourite feature of co-pilot? Well, quite a lot of them actually

I'll pick two. I love this coaching by in Outlook. It's making me a better communicator

The other thing is I probably know about 5% of Excel. And it not only showing me how to write better formulas because it doing that for me based on what I prompt it with It then teaching me why it coming up with that for me And I learning that as a consequence

I'm actually getting much better at Excel as a consequence of copilot. And where do your teams and Microsoft teams use copilot

Is it mainly when you're in the office or can it be used from anywhere? It can be used anywhere as long as you're connected to the internet on your phone, on your PC

I'd say it's used in lots of different scenarios. is it depends to some extent on your role within the organisation

I'd say the more senior you get, you're typically consuming and summarising more

And it also depends what function you work in as well. So let's say you're in the marketing team and you're writing copy

It's really helpful for that. If you're in the finance team and you're using Excel to get into more advanced ysis

then it's really helpful for that. So we tend to see quite a different number of use cases

And actually, what's really exciting is just how many prompts can people dream up

We've got something called the co-pilot lab that captures all of these prompts and allows people in the community to share prompts with each other

And what's really exciting is when you let this loose within an organisation, you encourage people to just really innovate and test and play

How do you write a good prompt? Yeah, it's a great question. You've got to unwire how you use a search engine in your brain

You should treat it like it's an assistant or someone that works for you

And you should be really directive as what you want to get

set the context, be specific about the outcome you want, be clear about any other information that you want to be included in that

You can reference, for example, file names or file locations if you want to point it towards those

So the more detailed you can be with that prompt, the richer the outcome will be as a consequence

Do you have a personal favourite prompt to ask co-pilot or generative AI in general

I am fast. My prompt library in my head at least is expanding on a daily basis

The one I use a lot, especially if I'm getting ready for a week ahead on a Sunday night

is just tell me what's happening in my week and what are the things I should be spending my time preparing for

It's really good at that because it will go through all of my calendar. It will look where I'm, for example, spending time externally versus internally

It will start sharing some of the files that I might want to read in advance

And so that's a really helpful thing that just gets me ready for the start of a week. Great. Finally, more broadly, how do you see Generative AI changing the future

of the workplace, especially in modern Britain? Well, I think it can certainly help to create innovation in the market

and competitive advantage in the market. If we can free people up, we learn in our study just recently

that people are spending as much as 53% of their time purely communicating with their colleagues

which is only leaving, you know, circa 47% of the time to create. So if we could have generative AI help compress some of that communication element

I mean, you're always going to need to communicate, but let's say you could get it down to 20 or 30 percent. That's going to free up more time to start creating more and innovating more

So I think generative AI can be the catalyst for innovation and therefore companies can really start to grow and flourish as a consequence