Welcome to Part Three in our series of blog posts designed to inform you how Copilot for Microsoft 365 (available now for every business), can be used within specific M365 apps.
It’s incredibly important that you and your team understand how it will work within each specific M365 app, as the benefits and use cases are different for each app. Understanding the separate use cases will help you to make it real when you’re discussing it with your current & prospective customers.
So… In this series of blogs, I’ll be covering Teams, PowerPoint, Outlook, Word, and Excel – We’ve already looked at Teams and PowerPoint, and now we’re going to dive into Outlook.
The birds-eye-view
Copilot in Outlook is all about unlocking productivity and helping you:
- Catch up on your inbox quicker when you’ve got a lot of items to review.
- Get assistance in creating emails – both new, and in response to a chain.
- Summarise lengthy email chains.
- Get coaching on your emails to help ensure you’re meeting what you’re looking to achieve.
What are the features?
Copilot in Outlook is all about helping you catch-up, prepare and follow up with ease. To make it easier to discuss in this blog, I’m going to put everything into three buckets – ‘Create’, ‘Edit & ‘Catchup’.
We won’t cover absolutely everything, but my aim is for you to have a solid grasp on what the technology can do by the end of this article.
Create
One of the core uses for Copilot for M365 is the ability to create easier and faster, and it’s the same here in Outlook. Granted, there’s less to create in Outlook as we’re a bit pigeonholed into having to create emails, but it does that effortlessly whilst giving you access to sliders and levers you can use to adjust the length and tone of your creation.
The biggest upside for me here is that you’re offered a flexibility of choice which we haven’t had before. Typically, when we jump into Outlook, we have to write all of our responses ourselves. But with Copilot for M365 we have the option to remove some of the mundanity of the inbox, and instead lean on Copilot to write some of the responses for us.
Sure, you may need to go in and change some of the wording, but it’ll get you 80% of the way there without you having to personally consider each word/grammar/formatting choice.
Edit
Let’s say you’ve put together a long email where you’re looking to win some business from a prospect customer… but you’re not 100% on if you’ve nailed it and want a second opinion. There’s no replacing your colleague or manager ultimately looking it through with you, but here in Outlook we can utilise Copilot to coach our emails.
Here, Copilot will take a look through what you’ve already written, and with the context of the full email chain it will make recommendations. It might suggest that your email is coming across too direct rather than persuasive and offer some alternative words/phrases you could use.
Or it might suggest that your email is too vague, and you should elaborate on what you’re looking to portray.
For those emails you send where it’s important to nail it, take a look at Coaching with Copilot.
Catch Up
We’ve all had those moments of dread when we come back in to work after a week’s holiday, knowing that one of the first things you’re going to have to do is sift through your entire inbox to get back up to speed. This is a bigger challenge for some than others, especially if you’re sitting on hundreds of unread emails and you’re back-to-back in meetings.
Using Copilot in Outlook, you can essentially ‘cheat’ and ask Copilot to scan through your unread emails to identify and flag those you’ve not yet seen that require your attention urgently. This can help bring you some peace of mind, whilst getting back into the swing of things.
Or maybe you’ve been brought into an email chain as someone needs your sign off… but at this point the chain is 16 emails deep and each of them are long. Here we can again use Copilot to summarise the entire chain for us, so we can make an informed decision without having to read thousands of words.
Copilot’s ability to recap and summarise fully and accurately is extremely impressive and it won’t take many summaries until you feel you can fully trust in what it’s sharing with you.
Get Started Today
We hope this has given you a better idea of what’s possible in Copilot for PowerPoint!
Copilot for Microsoft 365 is a major opportunity for MSPs in this new era of AI.
To help you get started on defining your strategy, developing your skills, and operationalising your sales engine, we recommend you follow these steps:
- Build your practice and develop your customer offerings.
- Get your customers Copilot-ready, download our Copilot Go-To-Market pack today.
- Tap into key marketing resources, Infinigate Cloud Partners can find ready-to-use campaigns through GROW.
- Upskill and train your staff, EDGE, our award-winning education program includes On Demand recordings, courses and workshops for Copilot and more!
- The Copilot adoption starter kit and the Copilot for Microsoft 365 partner page provide helpful guidance and resources to use with customers and explain the difference between Microsoft Copilot and Copilot for Microsoft 365.
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.
If you are interested in finding out about how we can help you add value to your business or you would like to know more about Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365, please contact us and we’ll be happy to chat through any of your questions.
By becoming an Infinigate Cloud partner, you will be allocated a dedicated Account Manager, access to world-class support, an integrated provisioning and billing platform and a training and enablement program that can help you to spark your growth.