In all the hype about Microsoft Copilot—and there’s been a bit—it can be hard separating the sizzle from the steak. It’s a challenging position to be in if you’re the one that’s making decisions or administering Copilot.
Fortunately, wrapping your head around Copilot prerequisites, settings, and data protection is pretty straightforward. In the same vein, how your team and business can get value from a Copilot implementation are just as easy to grasp. Let’s dive into Copilot to find out what IT teams need to know.
This is either the most obvious bit of info in the world, or the most enlightening one. Copilot isn’t just your garden variety AI chatbot, even if it does include basic “ask a question, any question” functionality. What makes it special is its ability to scour data stored in your M365 tenant to deliver query results. So that means you’ll need an M365 or Office 365 Enterprise license as a Copilot requirement.
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You’ve got your M365 tenant, you’ve got Copilot, and you’ve deployed it to your end users. Great, but one issue: Copilot training data comes from anything it has permissions to within your storage. That means files publicly available in your tenant can be scraped by Copilot. And that’s a double-edged sword.
It makes for an incredibly powerful tool. Ask Copilot about a new product you’re launching, and it will comb through internal docs to give you a succinct explanation of what it does. But that also means Copilot might serve up answers from docs that weren’t meant for company-wide eyes. Think salary info or financial projections or anything else with open permissions that absolutely shouldn’t have open permissions. It’s the modern-day equivalent of accidentally forgetting to pick up a paystub sent to the office laser printer.
This is why pre-deployment housekeeping is so important. You can keep confidential information out of Copilot’s reach by using sensitivity labels or archiving. Your cleanup should also include what might be called “zombie docs.” When people are querying Copilot for info, they probably want the most up-to-date info. But with old, unarchived zombie docs hanging around your tenant, Copilot might pull info from them. That of course, along with security concerns, means the work you do for Copilot readiness is essential and will pay off with fewer heart attacks.
It handles queries that search the wider web as well as anyone else, but does a great job of finding insights within your org. And it will only get better as time goes on. But for now, don’t be the lawyers who submitted a brief with made-up citations found using ChatGPT.
Make sure people in your org understand Copilot’s limitations. All AI technology is in its infancy, so double-checking important info is, well, important. Thankfully, Copilot includes links to any source documents it’s pulled info from, so verification is only a click away. So at least for the time being, a “trust and verify” approach should extend to Copilot.
Scouring the web and the Word docs, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint decks, and PDFs in your tenant makes for a powerful tool. There’s so much more to Copilot, though. Not only can it take on the web and docs, but also chats, emails, and Teams meetings. You can also view all these types of communication as treasure troves of info. So watch your language on calls, but more importantly, tap into all of the information in your team’s communication.
Any recorded meeting is ripe not only for transcription, but also AI-generated notes. Copilot will pull from both, so dream big. Don’t worry about furiously typing or—ouch—scribbling notes by hand. Couldn’t make the meeting, or need a recap? Just ask Copilot.
Oversharing, stale data, and provisioning woes are always a problem, but Copilot turns up the heat. Problems that might have been relatively minor—or at least contained—become much bigger when you have AI software indexing data at warp speed. So if you’re thinking of bringing Copilot to your business, now’s the time to shore up your data governance and security.
There’s quite a bit to consider and implement here. But even if you weren’t readying for a Copilot deployment, it would still come down to security best practices. It’s easy to let your tenant, its workspaces, and its data protection drift away from where they should be. So think of getting these items in order as work that’s already on your backlog—and worthy of prioritizing.
By this point, it’s becoming clear that Copilot, even in its early stages, is a force to be reckoned with. Realizing ROI on such a new tool is easier than it should be, and Copilot is a great example of how “the future is here.” It’s a win-win for businesses, IT admins, and end users alike. So when are you going to jump on the Copilot train?
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