Thoughts on using Microsoft Copilot in your business

Brian Madden,Workplace AI Consultant & Analyst

This page was last updated on June 21, 2024.

“Copilot” is an umbrella brand Microsoft uses for several LLM-powered orchestration tools which combine AI with Microsoft 365, Office, GitHub, Azure, and pretty much every other product Microsoft has.

There are many (130+) different tools under the Copilot brand, though when the term “Copilot” is used by itself, it refers to the Office-based tools which integrate with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Teams, Outlook, Edge, etc. (Note that the “pilot” part of the word is lowercase, e.g. Copilot is correct, CoPilot is wrong.)

The Microsoft Copilots leverage OpenAI models as well as Microsoft proprietary ones. (The exact blend of which models are used varies based on the product, your region, your subscription, availability, load, etc.)

For the rest of this section, when I use the term “Copilot”, I’ll be talking about “Office Copilot.”

What does Microsoft say you do with Copilot?

Microsoft has a huge list of things you can do with Copilot. I won’t retype them all here, you can check the features for yourself directly from Microsoft.

What can you actually do with Copilot?

I have been using Copilot every day for months, not as a fake test, but as a paid subscriber as part of our corporate Microsoft 365 subscription. Based on that, I can summarize Copilot like this: “early preview, has potential, not there yet.”

I believe it’s worth getting Copilot subscriptions for a few employees in your company to try it out. It’s important to follow the developments and start to understand how it works. But I can’t imagine rolling it out in a “production” capacity to all your users yet.

Luckily you can buy single-user subscription add ons, and it only costs about $30/month. So if you have an employee who’s really excited about it, I’d say sure, buy it for them, but make sure you keep them in the feedback loop. (More on that in future chapters.)

Things to keep in mind before trying / judging Copilot

As I share thoughts and opinions based on my actual experience using Microsoft Copilot, keep the following things in mind:

• Copilot changes often. The release cycles are continuous and frequent. The information on this page is up-to-date as of the date at the top of the page, but even if you played with Copilot a month ago, things could be different now.
• Some changes are baked into new versions of the Office apps (and require an app update to get), while others are transparency applied to back-end cloud services updates.
• The Copilot experience is different using local Office apps versus the web apps.
• The Copilot experience is different depending on the language. (The LLMs are better with some languages than others, and some features only work in some languages.)
• The Copilot experience is different depending on the region it’s being used in. For example, Microsoft must respect different regulations in Europe versus the US. Also, different regions have access to different compute clusters, different underlying models, etc.
• The general speed and performance of Copilot can vary for random reasons, such as availability and load of nearby cloud compute, maintenance, rain, etc. Even as a regular user, my experience can be different from day-to-day. Something that worked yesterday might not work today, etc. (Usually when I’m showing something to a colleague that suddenly doesn’t work.)

Thoughts on Copilot today

Ok, standard disclaimer that my experience might not be the same as yours based on all the points above.

As I mentioned previously, the actual capabilities of Copilot (today) are quite limited compared to its potential and what you might expect. Even doing many of the things Microsoft mentions in their Copilot marketing material often requires taking specific non-intuitive steps.

I’m sure this is temporary. Microsoft is jokily known for shipping buggy and incomplete “version 1” products, and while Copilot doesn’t have traditional version numbers, Copilot today is solidly a “Microsoft v1.” But Microsoft is also known to keep plugging away until their products eventually get there, and I expect these limitations will not exist in the next year or two. (I’ll keep this page updated with the latest updates.)

The way to frame what Copilot can (and can’t) do today is to make this your mantra: Copilot is based on an LLM which works with text. That’s it.

Put another way, anything you can do via cut/copy/paste in of the ChatGPT chatbot interface is something that Copilot can do too. Anything you can’t do there, Copilot won’t be able to do either.

Microsoft does an ok job of building some automations around these capabilities which make using Copilot feel similar to an old-school expert system.

For example, the oft-demoed “create a PowerPoint from this Word doc” is really doing something like:

1. Use Copilot’s text processing capabilities to create a PowerPoint-ready outline of the presentation text content.
2. Send that outline to the PowerPoint Designer to actually generate the slides.

It should be noted that Designer is not a Copilot feature and doesn’t even need Copilot. It’s a “smart designer” slide beautification capability which is part of standard Microsoft 365 subscriptions.

You can apply similar thinking to everything Copilot does within the Office ecosystem.

When Microsoft claims that Copilot can write emails for you, they literally mean just the writing part. I can’t type “Send an email to Vincent” in the Copilot chat box in Outlook. (Actually there isn’t even a general Copilot interface in Outlook.) Instead, I need to follow the standard new email process, fill in the To:, Subject:, etc., and then when I have the blinking cursor in the email body, that’s where Copilot wakes up to help you draft or rewrite your content.

So this saves some steps for sure, but from a raw capabilities standpoint, it’s no different than you visiting ChatGPT and prompting it “Write an email to my coworker named Vincent to tell him I will be late today.” The Copilot capabilities do not yet have the ability to scan my complete inbox, understand who vincent is, or know my writing style. If I tell it to help me draft an email about “the upcoming meeting”, the email will literally use the phrase “the upcoming meeting.” It can’t look at the calendar and see what meeting I’m actually talking about.

here are buttons within the Copilot generator for me to tell it how verbose it should be and let it know what tone I would like it to use, but again that’s no different than how I could prompt any standalone LLM.)

That said, Copilot is able to squeeze quite a bit of capability out of “only works with text” which from a practical standpoint means it can:

• Generate text from prompts.
• Edit text: Change tone, add or remove sections, offer suggestions, rewrite to change the length or tone, etc.
• Summarize text.

Keep in mind that each bullets has many practical applications within the Office suite. For example, the simple skill of “summarizing text” is used for all sorts of things, like:

• Summarizing Word docs & PDFs
• Summarizing Teams meetings (creating summaries, that “catch me up” feature when people join late, etc.) The meeting transcript is just long text that Copilot summarizes.
• Summarizing email conversations
• Scanning your inbox and telling you what emails are important (Copilot just looks at all your recent unread emails which are nothing more than, wait for it... long text to summarize!)
• Generating the slide content (nested lists of bullets) from other things (meetings, Word docs) works well, because, again, this is just another form of summarizing text.

Tips

• Copilots can find everything. Remember Microsoft Delve, and how employees can find secrets that they had access to but didn’t know about? This is 10x worse! Now they can just ask “What is the salary of my boss? What are our secret layoff plans?”
• OneDrive / SharePoint / cloud required. Copilot is not running locally, so when you have it summarize a Word doc, that file needs to be in the Microsoft cloud, because the Copilot engine running in the cloud accesses that file via the cloud and then just delivers its results down to your Office app. So if you try to work with a local file, Copilot won’t function until you copy to OneDrive.

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