Welcome to Grow with Copilot, a new series where we curate relevant news, insights, and resources to help small and medium organizations harness the power of Copilot. In this edition, we take a look at the round up of recent product enhancements shared during today’s quarterly Microsoft 365 Product Connect for CSPs (on-demand available on May 22), Small and Medium Business (SMB) customer spotlight on Morula Health, SMB insights from the latest Work Trend Index, and resources to help organizations of every size get more out of Copilot.
ICYMI: Spring 2024 round up of product enhancements
Microsoft continues to invest in expanding Copilot for Microsoft 365 availability to more audiences, adding and refining Copilot experiences and how the product leverages data.
Reaching more customers
Expanded language support: we added Tier 2 languages including Arabic, Chinese Traditional, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Hebrew, Hungarian, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, to Copilot bringing the current total to 27 that you can find here.
Expanded SKU eligibility: we added Business Basic as a pre-requisite in April. That means whether you use Business Basic, Standard, or Premium, you can purchase Copilot for Microsoft 365 without a minimum seat requirement.
Increasing your digital efficiency
Copilot in Forms: Simplify creating surveys, polls, and forms with Copilot for Microsoft 365. Copilot will provide relevant questions and suggestions, and then you can refine the draft by adding extra details, editing text, or removing content. Learn more here.
Copilot in Stream: Get information quickly about your video content through Copilot in Stream, and catch up on the latest Teams meeting recordings, town halls, product demos, how-tos, or onsite videos. Learn more here.
An image depicting Copilot in Stream
Help Me Create: Let Copilot suggest the best format to bring your content to life, whether it’s a white paper, presentation, list, or quiz, and more. Learn more here.
Copilot in OneDrive (web): Get information about files in OneDrive without opening them, Copilot will provide you with smart and intuitive ways to interact with your documents, presentations, spreadsheets, and files. Learn more here.
Improving reasoning over data
Graph-grounding for Copilot in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook: Copilot can now ground prompts in Graph content from within Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook, expanding context for responses and creating a more cohesive experience. Learn more here.
Improved usage reports: The Usage reports in the Microsoft 365 admin center now include usage metrics for Microsoft Copilot with Graph-grounded chat. This allows you to see how Chat usage compares with Copilot usage in other apps like Teams, Outlook, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, OneNote and Loop. Learn more here.
An image of the Usage metrics dashboard in the Microsoft 365 admin center
Adv. Data Residency + Multi-Geo: New commitments covering stored content of interactions with Copilot for Microsoft 365 have been added to existing data residency commitments for Microsoft 365, including the Advanced Data Residency and Multi-Geo Capabilities add-ons. Learn more here.
Restricted SharePoint Search: Interim measures to secure your data as you roll out Copilot for Microsoft 365. Admins can protect their most critical data without having to slow down user enablement while getting their tenant ready for Copilot. Learn more here.
Product enhancements are covered in our monthly What’s New in Copilot monthly blog, and you can always refer to the Microsoft roadmap to see what’s coming next.
an image of the What's New in Copilot blog series
SMB Customer spotlight: Morula Health
Morula Health, a UK health provider of under 50 employees, provides regulatory and clinical medical writing solutions to global clients in the healthcare sector. We recently sat down with Philip Burridge, Operations & Strategy, and Jayshwini Sanghani, Marketing, about their experience with Copilot.
A quote from Philip Burridge, "It gets our writers past all the repetitive tasks those reports require so they can focus their time and effort on understanding the data, which actually enhances the quality of our documents and what we’re trying to achieve"
Why was Copilot the right solution for your company and how does Morula Health use Copilot for Microsoft 365 today?
Jayshwini: Copilot is in the tools like Word, PowerPoint, Outlook that we were already using. So, the fact that Copilot can integrate so well with those kind of platforms, it made it so much easier. I didn’t then have to take all of that content across to a different platform. It was all available there.
Philip: We would in no way ever go near any of these early AI tools that were being released if we weren’t 100% confident that our data and the data that we are using from our customers is kept 100% secure. With Copilot, we know that none of this data is going back to the language models, nor is any of our data even going to leave our environment. We know that when we sign CDAs and NDAs with our clients, that they can be 100% confident that we are adhering to those and that they can trust us with their information.
What are some ways Copilot for Microsoft 365 is helping you be more effective?
Jayshwini: Copilot gives me new fresh ideas that I can then go and work off instead of just, you know, starting at a blank screen. Prior to Copilot, a blog draft would normally take about 3 weeks to write up, to finalize, and then to post. Whereas now with Copilot, I feel like it’s really possible for me to get two blog drafts out in a week.
Philip: I can be completely engaged on calls and focus on how to steer this call in the right direction to get the best out of everyone on that call. I make a few notes on my notepad of the specific topics that were discussed and ask Copilot to recap after. Not only does Copilot transcribe everything perfectly from our calls, but it's able to pick up highly specific terminology relevant to our particular industry.
How has this ultimately changed the way people work?
Philip: We've started actually recognizing what prompts work near enough every time for each different section of a report that we need to write, so we're building them into our template so our medical writers know immediately here’s a particular prompt that will help you to get started on this particular section. And what that actually does is it frees up our medical writers from the repetitive tasks, so they can focus on understanding what their data is trying to say and enhancing the quality and the strategy of what we’re trying to achieve with that document for our clients.
Check out the full customer story and other customer stories here.
2024 Work Trend Index Survey: Insights from SMBs
In the dynamic landscape of small and medium businesses, the integration of AI is not just an option—it's a strategic necessity. The 2024 Work Trend Index Survey show that 78% of SMB workers across the world are already employing AI tools. With 71% of SMBs finding daily tasks energetically taxing and 67% finding innovation and strategic thinking burdensome, the pressing need for AI solutions is evident. A substantial number, over 50%, feel overwhelmed by data retrieval tasks and endure a lack of dedicated focus time.
The productivity benefit is huge. Small business productivity is only half that of large companies, raising it to top-quartile levels relative to large companies is equivalent to 5 percent of GDP in advanced economies and 10 percent in emerging economies, according to this month’s McKinsey Global Institute report.
Download the Work Trend Index - SMB executive summary. See how the data compares for small and medium-sized businesses and in US metropolitan areas. Read the full report on WorkLab.
AI for every business
While leveraging AI offers SMBs an advantageous edge, a conspicuous training deficit exists – only one third of SMB AI users have received training. To bridge the training deficit, we continue to publish resources to help every role, in every business, get more out of copilot wherever you are in your journey. Check out these recently published resources:
- The Right Way to AI: What we’re learning about successful AI adoption from companies getting it right. A checklist you can follow with your AI rollout. Read more here
- Training for every role: We host webinars for Executives, Sales, Marketing, IT Professionals, HR and more. Register for one (or more!) here.
- “Prompt Like a Pro”: a new monthly blog series from the Microsoft Teams Tech Community that will teach you how prompts can help you can transform the way you work with AI by taking advantage of Copilot in Microsoft Teams
- Copilot Skilling content: Copilot Academy offers self-paced training from familiarizing yourself with Copilot capabilities to learning how to prompt. We recently published the new 4000 series of courses that cover topics across end users, admins, and trainers. Check out MS-4004/5/6/7 courses on AI Learning Hub
Thank you for reading. Let us know in the comments how you use Copilot for Microsoft 365!
Footnotes
1 Copilot for Microsoft 365 may not be available for all markets and languages. Review current eligibility here.
2 We surveyed 31,000 people across 31 countries, identified labor and hiring trends from LinkedIn, analyzed trillions of Microsoft 365 productivity signals and conducted research with Fortune 500 customers. These insights are detailed in the (2024) Work Trend Index.
3McKinsey report (May 2, 2024): McKinsey Global Institute report.
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