Artificial Intelligence (AI) is no longer a concept of the future. It’s here, and it’s revolutionising the way we live and work. From individual tasks to large-scale operations, AI is transforming every aspect of our lives and industries.
One of the most significant breakthroughs in AI is the development of general AI. These systems are capable of learning and understanding any intellectual task that a human being can do. They are not limited to a specific domain and can transfer learning from one field to another. This has opened a world of possibilities and is pushing the boundaries of what we thought was possible.
AI systems are now achieving human-like levels of performance. This is evident in the rapid growth and adoption of AI models like ChatGPT, which reached 100 million users in just three months. This milestone is a testament to the effectiveness and efficiency of these AI systems.
A Copilot for every Microsoft Cloud Experience
Copilot is designed to benefit everyone in the organisation from leaders to IT professional managers, Copilot offers features that streamline tasks, automate flows, and enhance collaboration:
Microsoft 365 Copilot – Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 amalgamates the strength of extensive language models (LLMs) with your organisation’s data – all within the workflow – to transform your words into one of the most potent productivity tools on the globe.
It operates in conjunction with popular Microsoft 365 Apps such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, and more. Microsoft 365 Copilot offers real-time intelligent support, empowering users to boost their creativity, productivity, and abilities.
Dynamics 365 Copilot – Dynamics 365 Copilot can summarise information about your leads and opportunities, help you catch up on recent changes to your records, prepare for meetings, and enrich your leads with information from other sources.
It provides a chat interface for quick summaries of sales opportunities and leads, updates, meeting preparations, account-related news, and much more. Users can seamlessly integrate Copilot with Outlook and Teams for better data management and utilise its generative AI capabilities for record summarisation and email content generation.
Copilot in Power Platform – Copilot in Power Platform revolutionises the way you build and automate workflows. With Copilot, you can construct an app, including the data behind it, simply by describing what you need through multiple steps of conversation. It enables you to generate workflows using only natural language prompts, eliminating the need for extensive coding expertise. Your apps will have copilot-powered experiences built in from the first screen, allowing your users to discover insights in conversation instead of mouse-clicks.
Microsoft Security Copilot – Microsoft Security Copilot amplifies your team’s impact and efficiency with guidance informed by 65 trillion daily signals. It summarises vast data signals into key insights to detect cyberthreats before they cause harm, reinforcing your security posture. It puts critical guidance and context at security teams’ fingertips, enabling them to respond to incidents in minutes instead of hours or days.
The three primary Security Copilot use cases are security posture management, incident response, and security reporting. It uses signals and data from other tools to generate guidance that’s specific to your organisation. It’s embedded in various Microsoft products like Microsoft Sentinel, Microsoft Defender XDR, Microsoft Intune, and more.
Windows 11 Copilot – Windows 11 Copilot is an AI-powered intelligent assistant designed to enhance your creativity and productivity. It’s integrated into Windows 11 and helps you get answers and inspirations from across the web. It supports a variety of tasks, from adjusting your PC’s settings to organising your windows with Snap Assist. Copilot can generate images from your ideas and provide relevant answers quickly.
You can launch it with a keystroke to use its state-of-the-art tools. It’s currently available in preview in select global markets. Copilot in Windows focuses on consumer use cases like research, lookups, and getting quick answers. It can even perform some tasks on your system, like turning on or off the Dark Mode, controlling the sound volume, etc.
GitHub Copilot – GitHub Copilot is an AI-powered pair programmer that’s transforming the software development process. It helps you write code faster with less work. It uses OpenAI Codex, a machine learning model that translates natural language into code. GitHub Copilot draws context from comments and code to suggest individual lines and whole functions as you type. It’s not just for code completion, but also serves as a syntax memory booster, reminding you of the correct syntax in real-time.
It can generate boilerplate code quickly, from setting up RESTful APIs to initiating database connections. It can even understand languages beyond English, which is helpful for developers of all backgrounds. Whether you’re a seasoned developer or a beginner, GitHub Copilot can increase your velocity and confidence as you code.
Microsoft Sales Copilot – Microsoft Sales Copilot is an AI assistant designed to increase productivity and personalise customer interactions. It connects to CRM systems like Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, and can be accessed in tools you already use, including Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Teams. It automatically generates summaries and reports on status, progress, and key changes from your CRM in Microsoft 365 apps.
Reminder on Copilot
- Grounded in your business data: Microsoft 365 Graph has real-time access to both your content and context in Microsoft Graph.
- Comprehensive security, compliance, and privacy: Your data never leaves its secure partition, and it is never used for training purposes.
- Integrated into the apps you use every day: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, and more.
- Always in control: User decides what to use, modify, or discard.
- Designed to learn new skills: Microsoft 365 apps let businesses access more sophisticated tasks and queries.
The key to driving interest
With 64% of people having struggled with finding time and energy to get their work done, the pace of work is outpacing our ability to keep up. In addition, employees have long been met with overloaded inboxes and the pandemic and hybrid working arrangements have further highlighted how communicating too much can harm productivity and hinder employees’ abilities to do their jobs effectively.
In fact, a Microsoft study indicated that 70% of people would delegate as much as possible to AI to lessen their workloads. This represents an enormous opportunity for AI-powered tools.
It’s clear that there is a real need for AI to lessen digital debt in the modern workplace. Work with your customers today to help them build out their own AI transformation strategy, emphasising the gaps and concerns which can be addressed with Copilot.
What do we mean by Copilot-ready?
Once you have identified your key customers who could benefit the most out of Copilot, you should look to prepare them technically and culturally to adopt this technology.
Here are some key questions that you should ask your customer in their preparation for Copilot:
What are your organisational goals for using AI?
- This question helps to align the AI strategy with the overall business objectives. It ensures that the AI initiatives contribute to the strategic goals of the organisation.
What pain points can AI address for your organisation?
- Understanding the challenges that AI can solve is crucial for its successful implementation. It helps in identifying the areas where AI can bring the most value and improve efficiency.
What are your organisation’s current capabilities in terms of AI?
- This question assesses the readiness of the organisation to adopt AI. It includes evaluating the existing technical infrastructure, skills, and knowledge base.
Does your organisation currently have a data strategy in place?
- AI systems rely heavily on data. Therefore, having a robust data strategy ensures that high-quality, relevant data is available for training and implementing AI models.
Does your organisation have the necessary resources to support AI initiatives?
- Implementing AI requires significant resources, including skilled personnel, computational power, and financial investment. This question helps to evaluate if the organisation is ready to make this commitment.
By asking these questions, organisations can ensure a more effective and successful AI implementation. They help in creating a clear roadmap for AI adoption that is aligned with the organisation’s goals and capabilities.
Getting AI-ready is a strategic process that involves careful planning and execution. Here are three key steps to prepare your customers for AI implementation:
- Get Licensing Ready: Choosing the right licensing model is crucial for successful AI deployment. It’s recommended to opt for a Business Premium licence over Business Standard. The Business Premium licence offers advanced features, including higher data storage limits, more robust security measures, and access to premium AI tools. These features can significantly enhance AI capabilities, making it a worthwhile investment for businesses serious about leveraging AI.
- Implement a Secure Data Strategy: Before installing AI tools like Copilot, it’s essential to have a secure data strategy in place. This strategy should ensure the integrity, availability, and confidentiality of your data. A secure data strategy is important because AI tools learn from the data they’re given – if the data is compromised, so too will be the AI’s performance and reliability. The Business Premium licence can assist with this, offering advanced data management and security features to help protect your customer’s data and ensure it’s used effectively.
- Secure Identities and Access: The final step is to secure identities and access. As your customers integrate AI into their business operations, it’s likely they will be handling sensitive data. Therefore, it’s crucial to ensure only authorised workers have access to this data. Implementing strong identity and access management practices is an excellent opportunity to shore up their business’s security. This includes using strong, unique passwords, enabling multi-factor authentication, and regularly reviewing access permissions.
What we know so far
- Copilot is currently in General Availability for Enterprise Agreement customers only.
- It is expected to be available through CSP next Spring (March to May).
- The UK price is currently set at £24.65 per user/per month.
- Copilot requires Business Standard licensing as a minimum.
What to do today
- Deploy Bing Chat Enterprise and Windows 11 to everyone. Start the journey on learning the art of writing great prompts and bringing Generative AI into the flow of work.
- Understand how all the Copilots work across each Solution Area, to get a feel for how they can add value to your and your customers’ business models and offerings.
For more information
As a born in the cloud distributor with a deep technical heritage, Infinigate Cloud continually invest in our teams and evolve our value-add services to ensure we deliver the very best in technical expertise and 24*7 support for our partners.
We can provide support to you in the following ways:
Through GROW, our sales and marketing support, Infinigate Cloud Partners can gain access to ready-to-use marketing campaigns, website audits and sales enablement tools with Copilot-specific content already available in the Go-To-Market Hub.
Through EDGE, our training and enablement program, which provides certified training to our Infinigate Cloud Partners, town halls and monthly webinar series to help get your customers AI-ready.
PRO, which packages up our support and professional services, can help Infinigate Cloud Partners with complimentary presales advice or provide white-labelled professional and managed services to your customers to help fill a capability or capacity gap on behalf of the Partner.
If you are interested in finding out more about how we can help you add value to your business or you would like to know more about Copilot, please contact us and we’ll be happy to chat through any of your questions.