Microsoft 365 Copilot GCC generally available starting December 13th
We’re excited to announce that Microsoft 365 Copilot GCC generally availability (GA) is Dec 13, 2024, for qualifying GCC environment customers. Also at GA, the Microsoft 365 Copilot Service Description will be updated for GCC feature availability. Microsoft 365 Copilot combines large language models (LLMs) with your organization’s data to enhance productivity and innovation in the public sector. Microsoft 365 Copilot capabilities are designed to complement and extend human expertise, and they still rely on human judgment and oversight for optimal results. For more information on how Microsoft 365 supports trustworthy AI, please visit Microsoft 365 - How Microsoft 365 Delivers Trustworthy AI. Security and Compliance: Our Top Priority Security and compliance are at the core of our commitment to public sector customers. Microsoft 365 Copilot GCC is built on the secure foundation of Microsoft 365 Government GCC, adhering to all existing privacy, security, and compliance commitments. Data Handling and Privacy: Copilot operates within your Microsoft 365 GCC tenant compliance boundary, ensuring that sensitive information remains protected and that all AI-driven processes are conducted securely. The system is designed to maintain the highest standards of data protection, ensuring compliance with FedRAMP, CJIS, IRS 1075 and other key regulatory frameworks. Microsoft 365 Copilot GCC will be delivered with web grounding OFF by default. This is required to help protect US government sensitive information which should not leave the GCC compliance boundary. Microsoft 365 Copilot Business Chat will reason over a GCC user's Graph data (SharePoint, OneDrive, Outlook, Teams, etc.) an individual has access to. With web grounding OFF, Copilot will not query the web to get live real-time web content. Admin controls to turn on Web Search availability has been updated. See Controls available to manage web search to learn more (Dec 13, 2024) Roadmap ID # 415097 - Microsoft 365 Copilot GCC general availability -- the product referenced in this blog. Bringing Microsoft 365 Copilot GCC, your AI assistant for work in the GCC environment. It combines the power of Large Language Models with your work content and context, to help you draft and rewrite, summarize and organize, catch up on what you missed, and get answers to questions via open prompts. Copilot generates answers using the rich, people-centric data and insights available in the Microsoft Graph. Microsoft 365 Copilot GCC is available in Teams (Chat and Channel) excluding Compose, Outlook (includes mobile), Word, PowerPoint, and Excel as well as other surfaces, including microsoft365.com. Service description will be updated prior to general availability here (April 2025) Roadmap ID # 464984 - Microsoft Copilot general availability for GCC Microsoft Copilot with enterprise data protection for the GCC environment is available at no additional cost for Microsoft 365 GCC users who sign in with their Microsoft Entra account (no Microsoft 365 Copilot license required). For users signed in with a Microsoft Entra account, Copilot offers enterprise data protection (EDP) and a simplified, ad-free user interface designed for work, powered by the latest large language models with optional web grounding. The general availability of this release will be delivered to the users with web grounding OFF by default to meet US Government requirements. This will help protect sensitive information which should not leave the GCC compliance boundary. Current information for WW/Ent environment on differences between these two products can be referenced here. The below information on this blog is roadmap dates and subject to change (*). Also, Copilot in Planner (**) is in Preview in the WW Enterprise Environment and more information will be shared about the availability in GCC via www.microsoft365.com/roadmap. Dec 2024 update: Web Search (web grounding) is OFF by default and admin controls to turn Web Search on will NOT be available at GA and will be coming soon, and more details will be shared soon via Product Documentation: Controls available to manage web search to learn more. More information on feature availability for Phase 1 and Phase 2 will be published on the Microsoft 365 Copilot Service Description at GA. Agents in SharePoint was added to Phase 2 below. Microsoft 365 Copilot GCC will be rolled out in two phases, delivering key functionalities upfront and additional features in the following months. Phase 1 (12/13/24*): Business Chat (BizChat): a central hub that brings together all your data —right in the flow of your work. Quickly access relevant department data, policies, or citizen inquiries without extensive searching. This AI-powered chat feature leverages your organization’s Microsoft 365 data to provide personalized, relevant information and insights directly within your chat experience. Microsoft 365 App Copilots (Word, Excel, PowerPoint): Embedded within your favorite productivity apps, these intelligent assistants help you craft documents, analyze data, and create presentations faster and with greater precision. Outlook (Mail and Calendar): Manage communications and interagency meetings efficiently. Copilot in Outlook streamlines email and calendar management by drafting responses, summarizing email threads, and suggesting optimal meeting times. Teams Chat/Channel Copilot: Enhance collaboration across departments. Integrate AI into your daily team interactions, summarizing threads, and helping manage conversations with contextual awareness. Intelligent Meeting Recap: Automatically capture key points from important policy discussions or public hearings, capturing crucial details facilitating transparent governance. The Intelligent Meeting Recap feature generates a comprehensive summary of your meetings, including key points, action items, and decisions made. Phase 2 (Q1CY25*): The second phase will introduce Copilot in additional services to further streamline workflows: Teams Meeting Copilot uses AI to enrich your meetings by generating real-time summaries, identifying action items, and tracking follow-ups. Use copilot during a meeting without retaining transcript and ask copilot any questions about the meeting. OneNote enhances your notetaking by using AI to generate summaries, organize information, and suggest relevant content, helping you efficiently capture and recall key insights without sifting through extensive notes. Stream automates video content management by generating AI-driven transcripts, summaries, and highlight reels, making it easier to find and share critical information from recorded meetings or training sessions. Planner** simplifies task management by using AI to optimize project timelines, suggest task prioritization, and automatically adjust plans based on real-time changes, ensuring your projects stay on track with minimal manual input. OneDrive for Business enhances file management by using AI to help you quickly locate, organize, and share documents, ensuring that your team always has access to the most up-to-date information without wasting time on manual searches. Loop accelerates collaborative work by using AI to help you co-create and organize dynamic content across teams, streamlining project updates, brainstorming sessions, and real-time feedback into cohesive, actionable plans. SharePoint agents prebuilt or creating your own, help users quickly find information and insights on SharePoint sites, pages, and document libraries. SharePoint agents access your organization's data the same way Copilot in other Microsoft 365 apps does, responding to users based on their access permissions to the data. These additional tools will deepen AI integration within your organization, enabling more advanced task management, content creation, and collaboration capabilities as you continue your journey toward digital transformation. Transforming Public Sector Workflows Microsoft 365 Copilot GCC is designed to enhance productivity and streamline workflows across various public sector use cases. Here are some potential public sector use cases to consider: Policy Analysis: Quickly synthesize vast amounts of data to inform decision-making. For instance, public health organizations could use Copilot to analyze public health trends and draft evidence-based policy recommendations, allowing them to respond more effectively to emerging issues. Citizen Services: Improve response times and accuracy in addressing citizen inquiries. Copilot can help draft personalized responses to common questions about government services, permits, or regulations, ensuring that citizens receive timely and accurate information. Resource Allocation: Optimize budget planning and resource distribution. Finance departments can use Copilot in Excel to perform complex budget scenario analyses and generate easy-to-understand reports for stakeholders, making the budget process more efficient and transparent. Project Management: Streamline the management of large-scale government initiatives. Copilot can help create project timelines, assign tasks, and generate progress reports, keeping multi-agency efforts on track and ensuring that projects are completed on time and within budget. Training and Knowledge Sharing: Facilitate continuous learning within your organization. Use Copilot to create training materials, FAQs, and knowledge bases, ensuring your staff stays up to date with the latest procedures and regulations, and fostering a culture of ongoing professional development. Support and Resources: Empowering Your Team We are committed to providing comprehensive support and training resources to support adoption of Copilot within government workforces. Our readiness and adoption guide for the public sector, along with US Gov-specific Copilot scenarios content, will help you navigate the implementation process. Documentation and Admin Controls: Detailed documentation and admin controls will be available to help you manage and configure Copilot’s features effectively, ensuring that your deployment aligns with your security policies and operational requirements. Training and Resources: To facilitate a smooth adoption process, we’d encourage you to connect with your account team and one of our adoption specialists to walk through the resources available to prepare, scope, plan, and deploy Microsoft 365 Copilot. Some new resources include: Microsoft 365 Copilot GCC – Readiness and Adoption Guide for Public Sector Microsoft 365 Copilot GCC - US Gov specific Copilot scenarios content Videos: Short explainer videos Microsoft 365 Copilot data security and privacy commitments Technical Whitepaper: Microsoft 365 - How Microsoft 365 Delivers Trustworthy AI Data, Privacy, and Security for Microsoft 365 Copilot (current Enterprise Cloud service documentation) Microsoft Purview data security and compliance protections for generative AI apps Apply principles of Zero Trust to Microsoft 365 Copilot Ongoing Support: Our commitment to your success extends beyond the initial deployment. We’re offering ongoing support through Microsoft account teams, channel partners, Microsoft support, and FastTrack, ensuring that you have access to the resources and assistance you need to resolve any issues and maximize the value of Copilot for your organization. Our Government Solutions team will be on hand to provide continuous support and enable a smooth and successful experience with Copilot. Looking Ahead: Future Updates and Roadmap As we approach the release date, we’re committed to working closely with government partners at all levels. Your feedback and insights will be crucial in refining Copilot to meet the unique needs of the public sector. Microsoft 365 Copilot GCC represents a significant leap forward in empowering government agencies to work more efficiently and serve the public more effectively. By automating routine tasks, providing data-driven insights, and enhancing collaboration, Copilot frees up valuable time for public servants to focus on what matters most—improving the lives of citizens. We invite you to envision how Copilot can transform your agency's operations. Together, we can harness the power of AI to drive innovation in the public sector, always keeping in mind our shared goal of serving the public good. Get ready to experience the future of public service with Microsoft 365 Copilot GCC. The future of efficient, data-driven governance is now!Breaking the Search Habit
In today's fast-paced digital world, digital workers of all kinds are constantly seeking ways to streamline their workflows and enhance productivity. One of the most exciting new tools available is Copilot, an "answer engine" that goes beyond the capabilities of traditional search engines. To help illustrate the unique benefits of Copilot, I recently hosted a game show-style event showcasing its ability to synthesize information from multiple sources and provide comprehensive answers, saving time and energy. The best part? I used Copilot itself to help me create the framework for this gameshow in just a few minutes. I'll include the prompts and responses I used at the end of this article so you can see just how easy it was. A special thanks to all those who attended our recent Tribal Nations conference and learning event where leaders from some of America's most tech-forward tribes come to explore what Copilot could do to bring greater productivity and equity to its members and business interests. So, why a game show format? I believe that engagement == better learning so the game show format was designed to be interactive and quasi-competitive, making it easy and fun for participants to grasp the differences between Copilot and standard search engine experiences in a memorable way. The event featured a series of fun activities and challenges that highlighted Copilot's conversational ease and ability to provide composite answers. For example, participants were asked to solve complex queries using both Copilot and traditional search engines, demonstrating how Copilot's approach simplifies the process. For extra fun, Copilot also provided me with taglines, slogans, and even a fun graphic, all in literally just a few minutes. I went from idea to implementation, all in under 20 minutes. Copilot is an Answer Engine Unlike traditional search engines that require multiple queries and manual collation of information, Copilot acts as an answer engine, synthesizing data from various sources to provide a single, comprehensive response. The game show showcased activities where participants experienced firsthand how Copilot can save valuable time and effort. By leveraging Copilot, information professionals can focus on more strategic tasks rather than getting bogged down in repetitive search queries. I find this an incredibly important distinction for a couple reasons... First, we've all adopted search syntax as a second language. When we sit down at that search prompt we choose the right key words, in the right order, and heck… we've gotten pretty good at it. But the same string of keywords sent to Copilot frequently disappoint in results. It can be a challenge to trust the natural language capabilities of Copilot to hear and understand (and communicate back!) without using stilted search syntax tricks. Second, part of how Copilot differentiates itself from standard search queries is that it can actually retrieve information from disparate sources to compare and collate its response. The more specific and natural-language your question the better it seems to response. An example that seemed to resonate with folks during the gameplay: "I am a 49 year old cloud solution architect with 27 years of experience in the IT field, living in the Seattle area and I'm considering moving to Tampa Bay Florida. What can I expect in terms of changes to my cost of living and compensation?" What's important to note is that both contestants are likely to generate an answer, but Copilot excelled by doing it faster and more comprehensively. Collating and presenting data from several different searches as a complete answer, and it self-cites so you can quickly vet your information sources! Most importantly, it invites follow-up questions in a conversational manner that lets you dig further into details or compare more broadly in the abstract. Here's a quick screenshot of the reply generated in just seconds: Breaking the Search Habit The tagline "breaking the search habit" captures the key takeaway from the event. Copilot offers a different experience, emphasizing conversational ease over specific search syntax. Participants learned that talking to Copilot is more intuitive and efficient, allowing them to obtain the information they need without the hassle of crafting precise search queries, and then stitching together data from across a dozen different web results. This shift in approach can significantly enhance productivity and streamline workflows. Conclusion The game show event was a resounding success, providing participants with a fun and informative way to understand the benefits of Copilot. By breaking the search habit and embracing Copilot's answer engine capabilities, they unlocked new levels of efficiency and productivity. I encourage everyone to explore Copilot and experience the difference for themselves and hope that this approach can be a fun and engaging way to help folks in your organization add a powerful new capability to their toolkits. As promised, here are the handful of interactions with Copilot that produced everything I needed to make this fun game show in just minutes...95% Efficiency creating Contract Renewal J&A with M365 Copilot
Episode 1: “The COR Files – Automating the Annual Grind” In the world of federal procurement, Contracting Officer’s Representatives (CORs) are the unsung heroes. Managing contracts, ensuring they contracts are executed effectively and in compliance with the FAR. Among their many responsibilities, every contract requires full and open competition unless "the agency head determines that it is not in the public interest" (FAR 6.302-7); or maybe it's due to use of brand name (FAR 11.104). No matter the reason, when an exception is required the COR will prepare a Justification and Approval (J&A) document showing salient physical, functional, or performance characteristics of the solution. During a recent Prompt Design engagement at the Microsoft Innovation Hub, Washington DC, a COR walked us through the process they have to do for each of the 800 contracts their office manages. Each year, as many as 800 contracts go through a J&A. Depending on familiarity with the contract this can take 4-5 hours of research, organization, documentation, and even creating a presentation. We have over 100 people who, as a tertiary responsibility, must create these or risk a contract being lost and the organization has to start from zero in bidding the solution again. However, in 30 minutes of brainstorming and testing, their Prompt Design team developed the following M365 Copilot prompt. The COR then used Copilot in PowerPoint to automatically generate a slide deck from the output, applied the agency PowerPoint template, and they were done. The result? What normally took half a day was completed in under 30 minutes. Under 5 minutes to create the salient characteristics and the PowerPoint slides, the remaining time reviewing the content and validating its accuracy. “As a Contracting Officer's Representative, I want to develop salient characteristics about [NAME OF TECH] to write a justification and approval using my OneDrive folders [REFERENCE FOLDER NAME OF TECHNOLOGY DOCUMENTATION]. Reference old procurement documents [REFERENCE FOLDER NAME OF SAMPLE PROCUREMENT DOCUMENTS] to help understand the expected format.” When scaled across an agency managing 800 IT contracts, the COR estimates a potential savings of as much as 3,600 hours annually and more than 95% efficiency gained. What ways has your agency successfully used M365 Copilot to gain efficiencies in the annual grind? Copilot+Alt+Gov COPILOT+ALT+GOV is a series dedicated to sharing government use cases for generative AI from real government employees. In the spirit of reproducing these results in as many agencies as possible, we will work to share as much information about the process, the use cases, and the impact of these use cases. If you have a use case YOU want to share, reach out to and me, we'd love to work with you on it! Learn more at aka.ms/copilotgov
