Complete transcript below…

Hello everyone. It is 12:10 so I thought we would get started. I am Cathy Coloff. Thanks for joining us today. Today we’re going to spend a little bit of time talking about Microsoft Copilot AI and how you might be able to use it in your business. So, first off, if you have any questions as we go along, feel free to either raise your hand in the chat, ask any questions, of course, I’ll answer some at the end. I tend to talk a little fast, so if I’m going too quickly, please don’t be shy about asking questions or interrupting. One second here. I’m going to just do one thing on the control.

What is Copilot?

All right. Let’s get started. So, first up, I just wanted to spend a little bit of time talking about Copilot. And we’re going to focus primarily on Copilot today. Much of what I say does cross over the different Microsoft platforms that are out there. But Copilot is this little, you may have noticed it in your web browser or maybe inside of some of the Microsoft apps. This is your cue, this is the icon for Copilot.

There are two versions much like some of the other products that are out there. There’s a free one, and there’s also a licensed one. And as you would expect, what you get with the free is somewhat different than what you get with the licensed. They do make the free version available as I said inside of Windows, inside your browser. But if you go to the license–this is the most important part–is that it’s now directly embedded into a lot of the Microsoft apps: Word, Excel, Outlook, things of that nature. And you can do a lot more. It also determines whether it’s free or licensed. One of the main distinctions that I wanted to make is that it determines how much of your environment it can see. If you’re using the free, what it has access to is much less limited in terms of your what’s inside of your Microsoft world, whether it’s your email or your Teams or things like that. If you have a licensed version, now it can see the information that you have within those various environments. You could see the pricing down here and that is the main point I wanted to make there.

In terms of safety and security because I get asked about this a lot. Copilot operates within Microsoft 365. If you have the licensed version following whatever compliance and security you’ve put in place. If you have a licensed version, the prompts and responses are not used to train the public models. If you don’t have a license, then what you put in there is fair game for the public models. That means if you attach a file on the free license, now you are feeding and trading the public license with information, your files and your information. So please, please, please, if you want to leverage it and you want to load in what I would consider company confidential information, please think twice about using the free version versus using the licensed. That same public safety message applies to whether you’re using Copilot or perhaps some other AI tool out there like ChatGPT or Claude or things like that. Some of the risks within your tenant what you may not realize is that it is following the permissions of what the person who has the license can see. So, if you’ve done a good job of locking down your Microsoft world and restricting the permissions, you have nothing to worry about. If you’re not sure, just by giving someone a license to Copilot, you may have actually given them more permissions to things than you thought you did. So, you need to be careful about that. You need to be careful about something called prompt injection, which means it’s putting prompts in and asking questions that you don’t necessarily want the AI to do.

And then the last thing is there are third-party plugins that are out there that you can plug into Copilot and/or into your Microsoft tenant. So I’ve gotten asked for example like ChatGPT has a plugin. Now you got to worry about vulnerabilities within those plugins as well. And, finally, last but not least, and I feel this again applies to all different AI platforms that are out there. What you get may not be correct. And in fact, when you’re talking with Microsoft Copilot, they remind you of this over and over by that little comment down below the chat conversation box, which I’ll show you in a few minutes. So, just remember, always trust but verify any kind of responses or information or analysis that you get out of the system.

How Are People Using Copilot

So, next, I just wanted to give you a few ideas of how we’re seeing people, clients, or ourselves using Copilot. You can use it to help you draft emails and documents, you know, particularly inside of Word and Outlook. It does a nice job of summarizing meetings. I’m sure many of you have experienced this in different platforms as well. It will summarize the meetings. You can ask it to create an action list and it’ll tell you action items, who volunteered or who was “voluntold” to do things and what next steps they’re going to do.

Analyzing and Comparing Data

It will actually analyze data inside of Excel, and I’m going to talk a little bit about this in terms of some demonstration stuff. It can create PowerPoints. In fact, this particular PowerPoint was started initially from Copilot and then, of course, we tweaked it and made it our own. It can do that from Word or PDFs, and you can also add some even more power to it where you add something called workflows and you can use Copilot to help you do that. But what I thought I would do today is spend a little bit of time actually demonstrating some of this. So, I’m gonna push my little presentation out of the way, and I’m going to bring up a web browser. So, there’s a couple of ways I’m going to just mention that you can get to Copilot. It’s an app that gets installed in here. You can see in my case it’s right here. You can also get to it inside the browser. Now, this client or this account is licensed. So, what you’re seeing today is licensed the use of, you know, when it’s a licensed account. If you have an unlicensed account, what you can do is going to be a lot more limited in terms of what you can do. And so, typically, when you go into Copilot, it comes up here in this chat mode…looks like this. You can start interacting with Copilot. It will actually give you some some prompts. If you click on more, there’s all kinds of default prompts that are in here. You’ll notice up here–I’m going to just talk a little bit about what you see inside the web page–You can change it to use GPT5. These are just different large language models that it’s using. It also has to do with the performance of how it does things.

One other thing I’ll mention about the free versus the licensed is you’re going to get a better performance result with a licensed version versus not. You can create temporary chats sort of like Incognito like you’re used to with browsers. This little check box tells you that your enterprise protection is applying to this chat. Okay. So, that’s an important thing to know. And then, if you look under here, there’s some recent pages and things like that. Again, you’ll notice this little Copilot up here. This is the one. If you click it, it brings it up over here on the right. You can do this inside of any web page that you might be on. But for today, I’m actually going to just stay inside of the conversation section. So, on the left side, you’ll notice there’s a search. There’s the chat options. You can create something called agents. The idea behind that is it’s something if you want to kind of do it over and over again. I’ll give you an example. One of our clients has created essentially a Sales Frequently Asked Question agent. And so the agent can now respond to some of the frequently asked questions that the Sales Team is getting within their email. So the agent is there and created to be used for future. It keeps track of all the conversations that you’ve had. These are some of the generic things that come with Microsoft, so I’m not going to go into those today.

But, in terms of what I wanted to show, I did preload some some conversations in here. I’m not going to actually type in, and I don’t want you guys to have to watch me type in all that, but you can actually replay the conversations. So, I thought what I would do is walk you through some that I’ve already done. So, one of the ones that I did already is this is the example of where you’re comparing two Excel files. So, I have some world cup soccer data that I have inside of my Microsoft tenant. So, it’s following my Microsoft permissions. If you look inside of one drive, I’ve got these files here under webinar. So the files that it’s looking at, it’s considering these. In this particular case, I told it to look at these two. It’s just two performance data samples from soccer and they look, you know, they look something like this. They have some stats in here you can see. Now, full disclosure, this is made-up data. I don’t actually know if it’s real or not. I did actually tweak some of this so that you could see differences between year-over-year. But if you look in the conversation, I said, I have, performance data from the two years. And then I asked it, tell me who was the most improved player based on what they could see inside of those spreadsheets. And then what it did is it comes back with here’s the answer. And it gives you the reason why. It came back with Angel was the most improved player. And the reason why was because he jumped from zero to two in assists, which was the single most improvement across the players. It then suggests some additional prompts that you could then follow down if you want. So, I decided to go ahead and say, “Show me the top five improved players.” Within seconds it was, it came back with this response in a table format. And then it shows, you know, it gives you again the logic behind that. It asked if I wanted to create a visualization chart. So, I said “yes,” let’s do that. Create a visualization chart. So, here you go. Here’s the most improved players and it shows it by a chart. Then I asked it to do, you know, instead of looking at it as a players overall, let’s do it by position. It came back with all the results for those–forwards, midfielders, so forth. And then I actually asked it to go out on the web and search for a particular player and compare and contrast what it had inside of our Microsoft tenant versus out on the web. And so here you go, this is the performance data that was out there. It talks a little bit about his injury updates, things of that nature. Gives a little summary. And, as you go on, it asks you, do you want a timeline? I didn’t choose to go down that. I also asked it to identify who was the lowest performing player, and then it came back with this particular response. But, as you look through all of this, what I did here (you can see it says I can’t access it) what I had done here was I was trying to go back and have it pick up the conversation. I had to reload all the files back in there. Okay, so sometimes you can come back and compare, pick up the conversations, but generally you may need to start over again. So, I just want to make sure you’re aware of that.

Creating a Logo

So, the next thing I did was (I’m going to show another conversation that we had). This is our demo account. It’s called My-IT-Radix. I’m logged in as a user ID called Beconnected. If you were to look at it, we did kind of use a little bit of a Disney theme in our naming standards and things like that and plus some silly names like Beconnected. And what I wanted Copilot to do in this particular case was to create a fun logo that ties in. I don’t want it to violate any copyright or trademarks. Obviously, an important thing to do. So, it went through and this is what it came back with: what they can use, what they want to avoid, concepts. And then it asks me a question. Do I want it to be landscape, portrait, or square? Do I want it to be cartoonish, minimalist, or storybook style? And once I confirm my preferences, it generated the image. I answered with square and minimal minimalist, which is hard for me to say, but here you go. So, it created this literally within less than a minute. If I wanted to change the color palette or anything like that, I could do that. I don’t want to spend a ton of time on this. I find that there are other AI tools that might do a better job of graphics for you, but simple things, if you want something that looks, you know, super sophisticated, I’m not sure Copilot is the way to go. But for some, infographics, things like that that are fairly straightforward, I have found that Copilot has done a pretty bang-up job of creating some images. It’s using the designer feature that’s inside of Microsoft. You can download this and use this to your heart’s content.

Generating Infographics

So, then the next thing I decided I wanted to focus on a little bit in terms of conversations was… we were launching a new online payment portal. This was actually last summer, but we said that we are launching a new online payment portal. Could you outline some of the benefits that we can share with our clients about it? And so, it did that. It came back with all of these. Again, you want to proofread these. You want to make sure that you agree what it has to say. Maybe you don’t like some of them or maybe you want to reward them. And then, I also asked it, what are some of the risks of using traditional paper checks instead of using an online payment because it was to outline some of these things. So again, it came back with all these answers and I asked it to create an infographic–and this is what I was talking about with using the designer. And it came up with this infographic which I know it’s kind of small here, but if you were to look at it, it’s actually quite good. You get the idea. The idea here is look what it can do… it did this literally within 30 seconds. I asked it to add a company branding to it. And so what I did, if you remember the branding that I created before, I’m going to just blow this up so you can see it. It put that little Beconnected icon that I had created before, just embedded that right in there, and it actually changed it. You’ll notice the color changes from that green to the color theme that was from the branding created in the previous example. If you wanted to do even more, you could, for example, come in here. I have something that I’m going to cut and paste. Hold on. Give me one second. There we go. Where I’m going to ask it now, okay, let’s draft an email to our clients about the payment portal. And one of the things… this is the key that I wanted to highlight here is… interview me one question at a time for the pertinent details. So, I’m not 100% sure what it’s going to do in this particular case because I didn’t actually pre feed this in here, but what is the main message, you know, and obviously the main message is to encourage clients to adopt the usage of our payment portal. So, there you go. So, then the next question is going to be what tone do you want? And I’m going to just say friendly. It’ll just keep going and it’ll keep asking questions and asking questions until you get to the point where you feel you’re done and then at that point it will draft the email for you. So I’m going to just say, save time, because they gave us a nice little answer there and then click register. So, I will say click register and hopefully this is the last question, and it is. So now you can see–oh no it’s not–we’ve got one more. Just use a placeholder. You notice it gave you some answers there. Use a placeholder. And I’m going to say no. Keep it simple.

Drafting Emails

All right, last question. Here we go. I’m going to just keep it short and focused on the action. And now you can see, it’s going to draft this email. If I like it, I can use it as is. If I don’t like it, I can ask it to rewrite this. It gives you all kinds of suggestions of what you could do. If you like it and you want to use this content, you just hit the copy button here and then you can take it over to an email or you could take it over to a (I’m sorry, I have a blank document here. I have a lot of tabs open as you can see.) And I can just bring it over here and right click and say paste and put it in my Word document. If I had started this chat inside of Word, Copilot would have just put it right in there. I could have done the exact same thing by clicking this little Copilot over here and giving it the same exact prompts that I had put here. So, this is just gives you a little bit of a sense of what it can do. And those are the three items that I wanted to show today just to kind of get you thinking about it. How to use it as a thought partner. Some ways that you can use it, comparing spreadsheets, for example, is a great one. Maybe you’re comparing an invoice month over month, things like that.

Questions from Attendees:

Q:  Is there a nonprofit discount price for the Copilot license?

A:  That is an excellent question and we will have to get back to you.

 

Q:  If you’re using a licensed Copilot and you move to ChatGPT in the upper right, are you automatically in the free version or is it automatically licensed as well?

A:  If you change here from GPT, right now this is I believe GPT4. If you change it to GPT5, this one is still inside of the Microsoft tenant versus going over here to a web browser and going to ChatGPT, which is OpenAI. I’m not going to do that right now, but so they are different. So, as long as you’re staying where it says Copilot over here, this just tells it which large language model engine you should use. And there’s a lot of techy details behind the differences between the engines. Some of them are geared more towards research and number crunching analysis. Some of them are more geared towards language like writing. And so, depending on what your goal is of what you’re trying to do, you might change between these two. But typically I have found just using the default one is more than adequate.

 

Q:  Does anyone use Grok by X? If so, how does it compare to ChatGPT and Copilot?

A:  In this particular case, I have not used it extensively enough to feel comfortable answering that question. So, I’m going to defer that one for now and maybe we’ll come back to that in another webinar.

 

Q:  For the paid version, does having a Microsoft 365 license count or is it a separate license?

A:  It is definitely a separate license. You purchase a Copilot license. And I can bring that slide back up. That was here. It’s $360 per user per year. So generally, the advice that we’re giving to folks is that: ask yourself, do you think you’re going to get $360 worth of efficiencies or savings or idea generation or better results? And then, if you do, then go ahead and get the license. And if you don’t, then don’t purchase it. You don’t have to buy it for everyone in your organization. You can pick and choose who is assigned a Copilot license. And don’t forget, there’s a lot of stuff in the free that you can use. The only thing I would caution you on is please, please, please do not have your folks uploading information into the free one. For example, bills, spreadsheets, proposals, things like that. Once you’ve done that, you’ve now trained the large language model on your internal confidential information.

 

Q:  How could we get folks trained on Copilot? Do you help with that?

A:  We do help with that. We’ve had some sessions either one-on-one or in a group scenario. There are also of course online training options that you can do. Microsoft themselves have actually provided a number of free training items up on their website resources and, actually, that’s how I started to get my training as well. So, encourage everybody to always dig into training when you get a chance.

 

So that’s a wrap. Hopefully, you got a little bit of a hint of how you could improve your productivity. Like to think of it as a thought partner alongside of you. Don’t be afraid to ask it to interview you. The more specific you are on your prompts, the better results you’re going to get. It’s important to understand some of the differences and the security pieces of it. And then also be sure to choose the right licensing model. If you’d like to learn more, we’re doing a quick little assessment on how you could be using AI in your business. There’s no pressure, no jargon, anything like that. More than happy to have conversations with you after today. If you’d like to do a free assessment, you will be sent a feedback form after this call. If you could, please fill that out and give us your feedback. And also if you would interested in taking advantage of this special offer, you can do so there.

Thank you for joining us today and we look forward to having you join us again in the future.