We’re excited about Copilot.
It was announced a few weeks ago, Introducing Microsoft 365 Copilot – your copilot for work – The Official Microsoft Blog and promises to help us do what Microsoft call ‘the drudgery of work on tasks that zap our time, creativity and energy.’ They hope that leaves us with more time to be creative and imaginative.
So, how do you get ready?
Firstly, CoPilot uses LLM technology – that is ‘Large Language Models’. It looks at current data, finds patterns and uses that to generate responses. It uses content you created before to learn your style and emulate it. Within your organisation, it uses something called ‘Microsoft Graph’ to understand how you use data and its relationship with other content. If you have used Microsoft Viva, then you have already seen some of the impact of this analysis. In CoPilot, this content then gets run back through the LLM to generate content for you to use.
1. Check your Security Access Permissions are setup correctly
The first trick is that CoPilot uses your 365 security access. If you haven’t for this well set up, and people have access to content they ought not to, then they could find that data is used when they work with CoPilot – they could accidentally uncover information they shouldn’t have access to.
In any event, modern security practices suggest that the less data people can access, the less harm will occur if they suffer from a cyber-attack.
These are two great reasons to periodically review the access permissions given to people in your organisation and to make sure they are appropriate. People should have just enough access to get their work done.
Use tools like the SharePoint Admin Centre and Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention tools.
Beware – we have read warnings about copyright, apparently because the LLM system is not able to validate if copyright material is being used in any of the content it generated. It would pay to be careful!
2. Work through the PreRequisites
These are in your 365 admin center.
They take you through making sure your users have the right accounts setup, such as Azure AD, Loop, Outlook, Teams and OneDrive.
The full list is available online – https://aka.ms/m365CoPilotPreReqs
3. Assign licenses
The same tool will check your have the right 365 licenses and let you assign licenses.
Note that, based on current indications, you will ne 365 Enterprise licenses to access CoPilot. That’s E3 and E5. There are some indications that it might be available for SMB customers through Microsoft 365 Business Standard or Premium, but we have not been able to confirm that at this time.
We’re excited with the possibility of CoPilot but very aware that this is early days and there is a lot of water yet to flow under the bridge!