With all the hype about artificial intelligence (AI) out there, it can be difficult for small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) to know what’s useful and what’s not—what’s just buzz and what’s truly here to drive efficiency. Here’s a tip: anytime something is categorized as “AI-based” look to see if its core functionality takes repeatable tasks off your plate, makes mundane work faster, and/or gives you time back to be more creative. Those are three important markers for a truly functional AI-based tool.
And those are exactly the benefits Microsoft has brought forth in Microsoft 365 Copilot—a next-generation AI tool that uses large language models (LLMs) and your business’s data to inject more productivity and creativity into your operations. Here’s how it works and why it’s a powerful tool for SMBs.
Integrated Across Your Microsoft Ecosystem
Embedded in your Microsoft 365 apps like Teams, Excel, Word, PowerPoint, and Outlook, Copilot offers many ways to be more productive inside those tools. For example, in Word, Copilot can create outlines or even full drafts of content to give you a head start and to inspire your final piece. Similarly in PowerPoint, Copilot can produce presentation drafts given the right prompts and edit them according to your instructions. It’s also faster and easier to create data visualizations and to analyze that data using Copilot in Excel.
In March 2023, Microsoft announced another way to leverage Copilot: through Business Chat. Business Chat takes in your natural language prompts and performs actions such as summarizing a long email thread, scheduling a meeting, sending emails, and more. It’s an additional avenue to accessing the AI-based capabilities of Copilot and to command it to create, edit, or complete tasks.
These capabilities enable SMBs to skip the busy work associated with much content creation. Gone are the days of writer’s block, wasting hours fixing margins in PowerPoint, or wrestling with functions in Excel. You can get to the heart of what you want to create faster with this powerful AI-based tool.
Note that Microsoft 365 Copilot is only available for Microsoft 365 E5 customers at the time of this writing, but it will be priced at $30 per user, per month for Microsoft 365 E3, E5, Business Standard, and Business Premium when it becomes broadly available.
Rooted in Data Security Best Practices
As with any AI-based system, users naturally have questions about its security and about how it’s leveraging data. Microsoft has integrated Copilot into Microsoft 365, so it inherits all the security, compliance, and privacy policies your business has implemented into your system. With Microsoft’s permissioning model, your data does not leak across user groups, and individuals are only able to access what they’ve been given permission to access—just like with everything else in Microsoft.
It’s important to note that Copilot is only as powerful as your business’s data, so giving it access to content and context in the Microsoft Graph is the key to securely leveraging the productivity capabilities of this tool—with compliance and privacy intact.
The Next Generation of Productivity for SMBs
Many SMB leaders tend to think that these new product rollouts from giants like Microsoft are only for large enterprises. At Point Alliance, we’re regularly showing SMBs that the opposite is true. As a cloud solution provider specializing in Microsoft, we’ve seen first-hand how tools like Copilot change the game for SMB productivity and efficiency. After all, SMBs are the ones that stand to gain the most from handing off busywork to computers instead of people. Get in touch with us today to learn more about how you can benefit from this AI tool.
