Artificial Intelligence (AI) is likely to impact the business environment in Australia.
The introduction of ChatGPT, currently the world’s most popular AI-powered assistant, has led to a race among tech companies to launch their own AI solutions, and businesses in Australia are rapidly embracing the change by seeking to integrate AI into their operations.
Microsoft Copilot is the tech giant’s version of an AI-based assistant . What sets Microsoft Copilot apart is its integration with Microsoft 365 applications like Word, PowerPoint, and Excel.
Leveraging AI-powered assistants like Microsoft Copilot may assist Australian businesses with the view of helping businesses in obtaining a competitive edge in an evolving and competitive market. It seeks to increase efficiency, improve user experience, and spark organisational growth by supporting decision-making and helping with data analyses and exploration.
This blog aims to explore the potential benefits and practical applications of implementing Microsoft Copilot into your organisation — how may it assist your organisation in attaining a competitive edge? Let’s find out!
Understanding Microsoft Copilot
Copilot for Microsoft 365 is an AI-powered solution that seeks to assist businesses to automate tasks, analyse large amounts of data, streamline workflows, and improve collaboration, particularly across remote and multi-national teams.
Microsoft Copilot may be customised and further enhanced according to business needs with training data and plugins. It seeks to adapt to your organisation’s requirements as it grows.
Microsoft Copilot is powered by Azure’s AI supercomputer infrastructure. It’s based on tens of thousands of advanced GPUs designed and manufactured by NVIDIA. This huge computing power is what enables Microsoft Copilot to respond to user prompts and process complex deep-learning models. Microsoft Copilot is built around multiple foundational models that are capable of generating text, voice, and graphical responses.
Microsoft uses orchestrations tools to enhance interactions between users and Copilot. These tools act as an intermediary layer, interpreting user prompts to ensure accurate and compliant responses are produced.
Moreover, Microsoft Copilot integrates a user experience layer, which is basically the chatbot-like user interface that users can utilise to start a conversation with Copilot, which seeks to mimick human interactions.
Possible Benefits of Microsoft Copilot for Australian Businesses
Microsoft Copilot may introduce some benefits for Australian businesses. These include assisting Australian businesses with the view to achieving the following:
Efficiency and Productivity
Microsoft Copilot offers several features that may assist with efficiency and productivity for Australian businesses. It’s capable of automating redundant tasks, which helps free up some of your team’s time to focus on strategic initiatives and other tasks that require their complete attention.
For example, in MS Outlook, Microsoft Copilot drafts suggested email replies and summarises long email threads, which may enable your employees to spend less time going through their inboxes.
In Microsoft Power Platform, you may use Microsoft Copilot to help reduce application development time by automating routine tasks and creating assistant chatbots.
Innovation and Creativity
Microsoft Copilot helps promote innovation and creativity by facilitating ideation and knowledge sharing. It seeks to provide relevant suggestions based on historical data and insights pulled from across your M365 environment, with the view to provide more than just a starting point for your team to brainstorm some great ideas.
What’s more, Microsoft Copilot has a function that helps pull key topics from online meetings in real-time, assisting in providing summarised recaps after the meeting. With Microsoft Copilot, it seeks to assist your team in having more fruitful and productive meetings that focus on brainstorming and problem-solving rather than note-taking.
Microsoft Copilot may also help your employees experiencing creative dry spells with a feature that allows automatic creation of suggested initial drafts in Word, Excel and PowerPoint. For example, if your company is preparing for an upcoming product launch, your marketing team may seek to tap on Microsoft Copilot to help generate ideas for advertising copy and messaging.
Improved Decision Making
Microsoft Copilot utilises advanced AI/ML algorithms to collect and analyse large amounts of data from multiple sources which help enable you to detect patterns and trends and pull actionable insights that support decision-making. However, it’s important to train the model with high-quality sources of structured and unstructured data to improve its accuracy and minimise bias.
For instance, you may use Microsoft Copilot to help define and calculate KPIs based on your company’s goals and needs. Additionally, you may utilise Microsoft Copilot to help create forecasts based on historical data analyses in Excel.
What’s more, you may integrate Microsoft Copilot with existing business intelligence tools such as Tableau, Power BI, and QlikView. Using APIs and connectors, you may customise your Microsoft Copilot to allow it to pull data from your preferred business intelligence platforms to generate recommendations and insights.
Enhancing Collaboration
Microsoft Copilot may assist in improving team collaboration and communication in remote and hybrid work environments.
With Microsoft Copilot’s real-time tracking capabilities, users may track conversations and action items in Microsoft Teams, assisting team members to be on the same page with reduced effort.
It also has an ability to create conversation summaries to assist team members in recalling key points from the meeting and focusing on meeting outcomes.
Additionally, Microsoft Copilot helps facilitate knowledge-sharing processes by allowing users to easily share their updates and findings with other team members using chat discussions and document sharing functions. It also helps coordinate team workflows by allowing assignment of responsibilities and organisation of tasks while providing real-time project tracking capabilities, which assist in keeping everyone aligned and minimising miscommunication.
Not to mention, effective coordination in turn helps with meeting project timelines, deliverables, and deadlines..
Overcoming Challenges
Implementing Microsoft Copilot may introduce some challenges for your business. Many Australian businesses lack the AI knowledge needed to make the most out of Microsoft Copilot or to customise it based on their requirements and objectives. To counter this, you may wish to invest in internal AI knowledge and work with partners that may assist with Microsoft Copilot adoption and deployment.
Another challenge you may face is data explosion. To leverage the full potential of Microsoft Copilot, there may be a tendency for one to feed it with huge amounts of high-quality training data. This may lead to data sprawls and silos, as well as potential data security concerns.
You may try to mitigate the effects of data overabundance by setting data governance and classification policies. It’s also important to train your employees on data handling best practices to help maintain data security and compliance with data security standards.
Further, adopting AI technologies such as Microsoft Copilot may disrupt your team culture. Some employees may be hesitant to use AI in their jobs, especially due to the potential learning curve. Nevertheless, Microsoft Copilot seeks to provide a user-friendly interface, and companies may further customise it to help adapt to different employee preferences and work styles.
Staying Ahead of the Curve
Adopting AI models may assist in giving you a competitive edge over your competitors. For Australian businesses, Microsoft Copilot may assist in their positioning in the industry with its ability to assist in improving productivity and sparking creativity and innovation.
With Microsoft Copilot, it assists with streamlining workflows, reducing unnecessary management costs, and maximising profitability. Additionally, Microsoft Copilot may help with improving the customer experience by allowing you to focus on your customers’ needs and creating personalised products and services while it assists with time-consuming tasks in the background.
You may wish to stay updated with Microsoft Copilot news and evolution by engaging with Microsoft and its community of partners, system integrators, and MSPs. The AI industry is evolving rapidly, and Microsoft Copilot, in particular, is at the top of Microsoft’s agenda, so it is likely that you’ll find new updates monthly.
To recap, Microsoft Copilot may assist you in attaining a competitive edge for your organisation, particularly in terms of helping with productivity, cost efficiency, and predicting future trends.
At FUJIFILM CodeBlue, we encourage you to further explore Microsoft Copilot and understand how it may be tailored to your business’s specific needs and goals.
Read our free White Paper (“Navigating the Copilot Future: Top Challenges Australian Businesses Face with Artificial Intelligence”) or book a meeting with one of our Microsoft Copilot experts to discuss a one-time complimentary Microsoft Copilot readiness workshop for your organisation.
