For most organizations AI starts with Microsoft Copilot, your everyday AI companion across work and life. Copilot has foundational capabilities like the ability to answer questions, to create content, to reason over data, and it has web grounding, so it always has access to the latest information. There’s one other notable thing to highlight: when you sign into Microsoft Copilot, commercial data protection is automatically activated. That means that you can use Copilot at work, knowing that your business data is always protected. With commercial data protection, chat data isn't saved, Microsoft has no eyes on access, and your data is never used to train the models.
Microsoft conducted quantitative and qualitative research, from surveys to empirical studies, to really get in and understand the impact of Copilot among early users. Here's the headline: Copilot makes people more productive and more creative. In fact, 77 percent of people who use Copilot told Microsoft that they just don't want to go back to working without it. Here's some more stats for you: 70 percent said that they were more productive; 68 percent felt it improved the quality of their work. 64 percent spent less time processing email; 75 percent spent less time searching for information in files; 71 percent saved time on mundane tasks. Based on quantitative research studies, Microsoft found that overall, users of Copilot were nearly 30 percent faster on a specific tasks, 30 percent faster - and they caught up on missed meetings nearly four times faster than those who didn't have Copilot. The best Copilot users saved more than 10 hours per month using Copilot. Just think about what you would do with an extra 10 hours each month!
Now, let's take a look at Copilot from Microsoft 365. It includes those same foundational capabilities and web grounding. It has the same commercial data protection promises. But Copilot for Microsoft 365 takes it a step further. Copilot for M365 is enterprise-grade. It inherits your existing M365 security, privacy, identity, and compliance policies. Your data is logically isolated and protected within your M365 tenant, and you are always in control. Copilot doesn't change any of Microsoft’s data residency or data-handling promises. Copilot acts on behalf of an individual user, so it can't access information that you don't have permission to see. But what makes Copilot for M365 so different, is Microsoft Graph, that has access to your entire universe of data at work and of course, it's integrated into the M365 apps that millions of people use every day. It's this combination, this amazing combination of the Graph, on one hand, and the apps, on another that makes M365 Copilot such a powerful AI assistant at work.
Copilot is your copilot. It knows you. It knows your data, your content, and your context. It is personalized to you. But what happens when Copilot becomes a full participant in your work, when it joins your meetings, when it participates in your brainstorms, when it contributes to the conversation? When you give Copilot a seat at the table, it goes beyond being your personal assistant, to assisting the entire team. Copilot will facilitate human interaction and the exchange of ideas in ways that we've never experienced before. It's like that well- organized colleague that takes detailed notes, tracks decisions and action items, and helps steer the conversation.
To use Copilot, your organization must meet some technical requirements and have some features enabled. Copilot users must have licensing, and an Entra ID account, which gives them access to the Microsoft 365 apps and services that work with Copilot including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneDrive, Outlook, Teams, and more.
Microsoft 365 Copilot uses your existing permissions and policies to deliver the most relevant information; this means it is important to have good content management practices in the first place. For many organizations, content oversharing, and data governance can be a challenge. Content oversharing is when content is shared beyond the needed audience either intentionally or accidentally. Organizations need to detect and prevent oversharing.
Microsoft 365 Copilot follows these foundational principles: built on Microsoft’s comprehensive approach to security, compliance, and privacy; architected to protect tenant, group, and individual data; and committed to responsible AI. Copilot experiences use the organizational content in your Microsoft 365 tenant, including users’ calendars, emails, chats, documents, meetings, contacts, and more – all from within the Microsoft 365 compliance boundary. Copilot does not use customer data or user prompts to train the foundation.
Copilot experiences do not use OpenAI’s publicly available services. Instead, all processing is achieved using Azure OpenAI services. Copilot LLM calls are routed to the closest datacenters in the regions but can call into other regions where capacity is available during periods of high utilization. No customer data is written outside the user’s home region.
The richness of the Copilot experience depends on the data sources indexed by Microsoft 365. Tenants with the most abundant data in Microsoft 365 (Exchange, OneDrive, SharePoint, Teams) will get the best results from Copilot. With access to comprehensive organizational data, Copilot can suggest more relevant and personalized content based on the user’s work context and preferences.
Taking the first step toward AI can seem daunting. But with Cloud Road as your trusted partner, we can leverage our experience and proven adoption methodologies to bring your business into the future of work.
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