Confused about the different Copilots? Let's clear things up...

Posted by Steve Brown on Apr 15, 2024 04:22:42 PM
Confused about the different Copilots? Let's clear things up...
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While much of the buzz surrounding Microsoft’s new AI companion has centred on its flagship M365 offering, there are in fact no less than 15 Copilots ready and waiting to increase efficiency and boost productivity across your teams’ daily activities. Here’s a rundown of what the various Copilots are called, and what exactly it is they do...

Copilot for Microsoft 365

Word – Copilot in Word combines the power of large language models (LLMs) with your Word content to draft new text, generate summaries, rewrite existing material, and transform text into tables. You can also chat with Copilot capabilities in real-time to help you stay in the flow of ideas and be more productive. Ask questions about your document, get ideas about specific topics, or even request suggestions for alternate ways to rewrite your content.

Outlook – Combining the power of LLMs with Outlook data, Copilot helps you stay productive in the workplace. The system summarises email threads (also known as conversations), pulling out key points from multiple messages to see, for example, what decisions have been made and what actions have been suggested by others. You can also prompt Copilot to draft a full-length email or even reply to a message. It can also present feedback on your drafts, offering guidance on tone, reader sentiment and clarity.

Excel – Explore, analyse, and understand your Excel data better. Copilot helps you effortlessly sort, filter, highlight and visualise data in seconds, using simple natural language prompts. And if you’re just not ready to let go of those formulas, you can call up suggestions for complex calculations or just ask the assistant to work it out for you.

PowerPoint – Create high-quality presentations in a fraction of the time it would take to pull something together on your own. This powerful tool also helps users transform existing presentations and provides helpful actions based on specific content or obtains additional content from outside resources. Stuck for ideas? Copilot is on hand for research, ideation, or to help iterate on possible content.

Teams – Building upon the AI-powered features in Teams Premium, Teams Copilot is a virtual assistant that can bring you up to speed on what you’ve missed, create summaries, action items, and help you generate a list of insightful questions to ask in a pitch meeting or creative brainstorming session. It can also pull out and organise tasks, deadlines, and owners from meeting conversations/notes, generating a clear and actionable list of next steps for you and your team. The Teams functionality is also enhanced with the ability to chat directly with Copilot in-app.

Loop – The Loop Copilot aims to solve the challenges of omnichannel collaboration by nurturing co-creation and innovation across various tools and devices. As well as helping users get started with brainstorming and content drafting, Loop facilitates real-time collaboration. It also allows users to embed components in email, Microsoft Teams, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and other apps, so that updates are logged and synced universally.

OneNote – Copilot in OneNote helps you understand, create, and recall information at the click of a button. It generates relevant and useful content based on your prompt and context, and unlocks endless ideas with its open chat capabilities. It also generates summaries, creates to-do lists, analyses your ideas, and rewrites your notes for more clarity.

Copilots outside Microsoft 365

Copilot for Edge – Copilot can be accessed in the Microsoft Edge sidebar. You can chat naturally, ask complex questions and find inspiration. Beyond generating a list of relevant links, it consolidates reliable sources across the web to give you a single, summarised answer. You can also ask questions based on the page content or a PDF open in the browser. Moreover, in the Compose tab, you can generate text, emails, social media posts, or ideas.

Dynamics Copilot – Taking advantage of recent advancements in generative AI to automate tedious tasks such as manual data entry and notetaking, Dynamics Copilot instead unlocks the full creativity of the workforce. Putting CRM and ERP to work, it accelerates the pace of innovation and improves business outcomes across sales, customer service, marketing, and other business teams.

Fabric Copilot – From data preparation to insight generation, Microsoft Fabric Copilot acts as an interactive aide, lightening the load on engineers, scientists, and data professionals, and expediting the journey from raw data to meaningful conclusions. It provides intelligent code completion, automates routine tasks, and supplies industry-standard code templates to facilitate building robust data pipelines and crafting complex analytical models. It also offers contextual code suggestions that adapt to the specific task at hand, helping users code more effectively and with greater ease.

Security Copilot – A natural language, assistive copilot experience that helps support security professionals in end-to-end scenarios such as incident response, threat hunting, intelligence gathering, and posture management. Copilot for Security leverages the full power of OpenAI architecture to generate a response to a user prompt by using security-specific plugins, including organisation-specific information, authoritative sources, and global threat intelligence. By using plugins as data point sources, security professionals have wider visibility into threats and gain more context more quickly.

GitHub Copilot – GitHub Copilot utilises the capabilities of OpenAI's Codex model to suggest code and entire functions in real-time, right from your editor. Specifically optimised for programming languages, it can understand, interpret, and generate code in multiple languages. In a recent study conducted by GitHub and Microsoft, it was discovered that developers witnessed a remarkable 55% surge in productivity while employing GitHub Copilot for real-world projects and tasks.

Power Platform Copilot – Power Apps Copilot streamlines the process of creating applications. In fact, it helps build apps faster than ever before. Multiple Microsoft Dataverse tables can be added and edited using Copilot directly within the Power Apps Studio, making it possible to work on more sophisticated apps with the power of natural language assistance. Copilot can also answer app-building questions that include terms, jargon, and formulas – in addition to helping directly edit and update app properties.

Azure Copilot – Copilot for Azure helps design, operate, optimise, and troubleshoot cloud infrastructure and services. Combining the power of cutting-edge LLMs with the Azure Resource Model, it enables rich understanding and management of everything that’s happening in Azure, from edge to cloud.

Windows Copilot – Integrating seamlessly into the Windows 11 OS, Copilot takes the form of a handy tab that helps increase productivity and efficiency by performing a wealth of actions: from adjusting a user’s PC settings to answering questions and generating images.

The choice is yours

As you can see, there's a Copilot to help almost every function within a business – so it’s no wonder this AI companion has captured the attention of enterprises large and small. And whether you’re interested in one Copilot or a half a dozen, the experts at FluidOne are on hand to help you benefit from this transformative tech with advice and guidance, alongside a readiness assessment to ensure you’re getting the most from your investment. Get in touch with the team today to find out more.

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