What is Copilot technology? In-depth overview
This year has marked the start of an exciting chapter with the much-anticipated arrival of the Microsoft Copilot.
The revolutionary AI assistant is arousing widespread enthusiasm and promising unprecedented productivity. With this AI solution, you control the workflow, but enjoy more creativity, analytical capabilities, and efficiency in your daily work.
What is Copilot in simple terms?
“What is Copilot?” – a new question being asked as interest towards applying artificial intelligence is increasing.
A Copilot is an advanced tool that applies artificial intelligence to provide real-time assistance and empower greater productivity across operations.
Microsoft’s Copilot is designed to combine the power of large language models with information being stored within the Microsoft 365 cloud-based platform – tasks, documents, calendar events, and other digital assets. Microsoft Copilot is working alongside popular MS applications, including Word and Excel, PowerPoint, Teams, and more.
But let’s get into more detail.
How is Copilot different from ChatGPT?
Both Copilot and ChatGPT were designed to untangle everyday processes and facilitate greater productivity. While seeming pretty similar, those have great differences.
Let’s start with defining the technology:
- Microsoft’s assistant, integrated into Microsoft 365, uses large language models or LLMs to provide personalized assistance, making interaction with applications more intuitive and efficient
- OpenAI’s ChatGPT, a chatbot and state-of-the-art virtual assistant, using autoregression to generate human-like responses to engage in conversations
The assistant is using artificial intelligence and integrating business insights to facilitate day-to-day workflows. The technology is embedded in popular MS applications to assist with transcription and summarization, content generation, email management, and more.
OpenAI ChatGPT is using machine and deep learning, and natural language processing to engage in dialogues. The chatbot is mimicking human interaction by comprehending received instructions or comments to provide engaging responses.
What is Copilot’s divergence among competitors?
Google Duet
Both Copilot and Duet are generative AI solutions that facilitate workplace collaboration and communication. They provide similar features, but shouldn’t be perceived as interchangeable.
The choice between those will depend on your ecosystem preferences:
- Copilot is working within Microsoft Office, including Word and Excel, PowerPoint, Teams, and Outlook
- Duet is operating within Google applications – Docs, Sheets, Slides, Meet, and Gmail
Microsoft Copilot has more advanced features – text and voice input, image handling, style options, and more. The solution might accelerate customer service, sales activities, efficient collaboration and communication between employees, and similar business operations.
Google’s Duet has less advanced functionality, but being constantly updated to enable greater performance. This solution might streamline everyday productivity and programming.
GitHub Copilot
What about GitHub’s Copilot, another popular AI solution?
GitHub Copilot, a tool by GitHub in cooperation with OpenAI, is a coding assistant that utilizes GPT capabilities. The solution is designed to help software developers by understanding provided natural language descriptions for automatic code completion, advanced chat, knowledge bases, and pull request summaries.
And what is Copilot used for?
How good is Copilot in terms of handling domain-specific processes?
Healthcare industry
- Data processing and management – the solution can handle data analysis to provide quicker diagnosis and personalized treatment programs to revolutionize healthcare operations
- Appointment scheduling and reminders – the solution can handle administrative processes to simplify appointment scheduling and rescheduling, automatic reminders, and more
Retail industry
- Behavior analysis – the assistant might provide behavior analysis to determine customer preferences, thus improving shopping experience and transforming retail processes
- Sales forecasting – the assistant might perform market analysis to predict future trends and demand, thereby enhancing everyday operations and eliminating potential overstocking and stockouts
Finance and banking industries
- Risk management – talking about finance and banking operations, MS Copilot can assess market risks by analyzing large datasets and predicting potential problems
- Fraud detection – and more, MS Copilot can detect strange patterns and potentially fraudulent activity to secure financial transactions
Education industry
- Personalized programs – the assistant can analyze student progress to create personalized programs, thus empowering business leaders and customer in the education industry
- Interactive materials – the assistant can create interactive materials and presentations, making classes more engaging and informative
How much does MS Copilot cost?
The assistant is free to use all across the web, in Windows, macOS, iPadOS, and mobile Copilot applications. When utilized within other Microsoft applications (Word, Excel, and others), the assistant is bought with a monthly subscription and integrated into your business tools.
To focus on the main differences:
| Free account | – GPT-4 and GPT-4 Turbo access during non-peak times – Text, voice, and images for advanced conversational search – Image generation, enabled through AI algorithms, with 15 daily boosts – Additional plug-ins |
| 30$ subscription | – GPT-4 and GPT-4 Turbo access during peak times – Intelligent assistance all throughout Microsoft applications – Image generation, enabled through AI algorithms, with 100 daily boosts – Custom GPTs to cater individual needs and interests |
How to activate MS Copilot within your environment?
The assistants in the lineup span Microsoft’s applications and toolkits and offer specific services and features. The options now available are Microsoft and Dynamics 365 Copilots, the Copilots for Service and Sales, Windows Copilot, Security Copilot, and Copilot for Viva.
Not to turn this into another user manual, we will focus on how to enable Copilot within your Microsoft 365:
| The prerequisites | – Monthly subscription – Entra ID – OneDrive account – Network configuration – Personal accounts within the Microsoft 365 – Microsoft Whiteboard |
| The features | – Within Word: draft and revise documents, get suggestions for improvements – Within Excel: gain more deep insights, visualize information, detect patterns, create workflows – Within PowerPoint: create presentations using natural language instructions – Within Outlook: align and organize emails, get suggestions for responses – Power Platform: receive assistance while prototyping and creating low-code applications with automation and guidelines – Business Chat: compose content, navigate events, and create work plans |
How does Copilot work?
What is Copilot so prominent for?
We would all love to focus on our core objectives, but 80% of our work agenda is consumed by repetitive everyday processes.
That’s where implementing Copilot might take business operations, no matter the industry, to the next level. Managing documents and sheets, crafting presentations, and more – with Copilot, resource-intense processes become straightforward, thereby benefiting business leaders and employees.
From easily drafting emails to quickly outlining threads, the assistant can clean the inbox in minutes, not hours. Cool, right?
But is Copilot safe?
The solution is compliant with the General Data Protection Regulation and the California Consumer Privacy Act. This means sensitive information is processed and managed in accordance with recognized legal standards.
First, Copilot is following already set-up data permissions and policies to eliminate data breaches and leakage. Second, Copilot is using data anonymization to remove any personally identifiable information from datasets being utilized for training.
Microsoft Copilot: The steps to ensure smooth integration
The integration should encompass essential elements, from preliminary environment analysis to assessment. These enable business continuity, desired efficiency and performance, long-term sustainability, and, naturally, regulatory compliance.
To ensure smooth implementation, you should be sticking to the following stages:
- The validation of prerequisites and preliminary environment analysis
- The review of established access and security settings
- The evaluation of risks
- The deployment to the pilot group & documentation
- The adjustment of parameters
- The deployment to the target group & assessment
Microsoft Copilot: The prospects and concerns
What is a Copilot in AI, and can the technology be applied without endangering your infrastructure?
Microsoft’s Copilot vividly demonstrates great transformations in applying and exploring artificial intelligence. By using machine & deep learning, recursive neural networks, large language models, and large image datasets, the assistant is transforming everyday workflows to future-proof critical operations.
But what are the potential risks?
While Copilot might provide greater efficiency and performance across industries, the concerns are weighty – data leakage, unauthorized access, data misuse, insecure access and storage, monitoring challenges, and more. When integrating the solution, you should also implement robust mechanisms to eliminate the potential security vulnerabilities.
How we can help
Microsoft’s Copilot is more than just OpenAI’s ChatGPT successfully embedded all throughout Microsoft 365. The complex processing and orchestration engine working behind the scenes to facilitate more productivity, Microsoft Copilot, is now publicly available for both business leaders and individuals.
“We believe in a future where there will be copilots for everyone and everything you do.” – Satya Nadella.
Abto Software, Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, can deliver enterprise-level products empowering leaders across industries – healthcare, distribution & retail, finance, education, and others.
Our journey has showcased how integrating artificial intelligence into workflows can drive overall productivity. Increased efficiency, decreased oversight, straightforward communication and collaboration, and consistency – by leveraging advanced algorithms, we deliver robust solutions meeting core business goals.
And using Microsoft Copilot along with domain-specific expertise, our engineers can facilitate code generation, context awareness, thorough testing and debugging, prototyping, hackathons, and more.
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