Complete transcript below…

By my clock, it’s 12:10.  So, we’re going to get started because we like to start things on time here.  Thank you for waiting with us.  Just a little bit of geeky IT humor here while we were waiting.  Thank you for joining us.  Today we’re going to talk a little bit about how to use Microsoft Copilot to get more done in less time.  I’m Cathy Coloff and thank you for joining us here at IT Radix.  I have a couple of my colleagues here, Geraldo and Ken.  You might see them on the screen.  If you have any questions throughout (I tend to talk a little fast).  Please raise your hand.  If I don’t notice it, Geraldo will keep me honest and make sure that we get all your questions answered.  But thank you again for joining us today.  And with that, I’m going to get started.

What is Microsoft Copilot?

We’re going to spend a little bit of time on what is Microsoft Copilot.  Going to let you all read these.  But generally, the idea here is that it’s an AI assistant.  They’ve built it into all of the Microsoft suites.  So, you’ll see it in Word, Excel, all of those types of things.  We’ll get into that a little bit later.  We’ll show a demo.  We’re going to do a real hands-on.  You want to use it to help you summarize things, draft things, analyze, and it’s doing that using large language models that it has created based on a myriad of data points.  And the idea here is that you can talk to it.  You will find that it’s very polite.  It likes it when you’re polite and it will give you polite answers when you enter your prompts.  Copilot, depending on your licensing, can work within your organization and the content and we’ll show a little bit of that.  It’s great for just getting things started, accelerating analysis.  If you’re doing something repetitively, busy work or repetitive, it’s a great tool to help you basically work better, smarter, and faster.  It is not intended to replace you, but again, it’s a tool.

Copilot Licensing (free vs. paid)

So, I want to talk just a tiny bit about licensing.  If you have a free license, many of you may have noticed that if you’re in Edge, maybe even in some of the applications, you’ll see a little icon that looks like the Copilot icon.  There is a free version and there’s a licensed version.  And it’s important because it does control what Copilot itself has access to.  So, the free version, you’ll see it inside of the web browser.  It does not have access to your Microsoft 365 tenant.  And when we talk about your Microsoft 365 tenant, that includes your email, your Teams, your SharePoint, anything you’ve put in OneDrive.  All of those types of things are considered your Microsoft tenant.  If you’re just doing things that aren’t really necessarily sensitive, the free license may be good enough.  You can do general Q&A and you can use it with web style help.  You have limited control over what it’s doing and you need to understand that it’s training the large language models that are out there.  So, you cannot consider or expect any sort of privacy.  If you license it, you’ll see it embedded into the various applications as you see listed here.  it is going to, excuse me, it’s going to use your permissions.  So, when it’s crafting the responses, it’s only going to respond with things that you can see and not someone else within your organization.  It’s great for doing work-specific things and also has a lot more enterprise controls around it.  So, where you’re going to see it? We mentioned this, you know, it’s there’s a basic chat.  I’ll show you that in a second.  I’ll show you where it is in Outlook.  It’s in Word, PowerPoint, Teams, and Excel.

I’ll give you some ideas of things that I’ve used it for personally or things that you might be able to use for yourself.  You can see here there’s a bunch of suggestions of prompts.  As with anything with AI, the magic is in the prompt.  The more specific and the more directions that you can give it, the better results you will find.  So with that, I’m just going to remind you, only sees what you have content.  If you have a licensed version only, shows content that you already have access to.  So what that means, if you can’t open the file, neither can Copilot.  Okay.  So keep that in mind.  Be intentional.  So the message here is, be intentional about where you’re putting things and who’s got access.  And if you’re not sure of what the source was of what it used, ask Copilot to give you this, to site the source.  Often it will do that.  You’ll see little footnote like things inside of the prompts, but if you don’t see that, don’t hesitate to ask and ask it to cite.

Copilot Demo

So, at this point, we’re going to do a little demo.  We’re going to talk a little bit about, and I’m going to show you some of these things on how you can draft emails, summarize meetings, and some of these other things.  So, with that, just bear with me while I minimize that and push this off to the side.  I’m going to minimize a few things here.  Wasn’t as quite as ready as I’d like to be.  We’re going to spend time first.  Everyone hopefully can see my desktop and you can see I have an icon here which is Copilot.  You can find that if you need to on the Start menu.  You want the one that says Microsoft 365 Copilot if you’re licensed.  If you’re unlicensed, I believe it will not have the Microsoft 365 in front of it.  It’ll just say Copilot.  Okay, thank you so much.  Let me stop sharing for just a second and reshare.  Thank you, Maestro Geraldo there.  So, let’s see.  I’m going to share.

Okay…  now, you can see my screen? No? Yes! It’s coming.  Just give it a second.  Thank you.  Okay.  So, I’m going to just give it a sec.  So, there we go.  Hopefully, you can all see my screen.  I’ll repeat what I said.  You’ll see that I pinned.  No, still can’t see it? There you go.  You’re good.  Okay.  All right.  So, here it is.  You can see I pinned Microsoft 365.  This is an app just like you might use the desktop version of Word or Excel.  They have a desktop version of Copilot.  I’ll open it up in a second.  I pinned this here.  You can find it on the Start menu just by searching for the word Copilot.  You’ll notice there’s one here that says Copilot and there’s one here that says Microsoft 365.  This is the free version.  This is the licensed version.  That’s the difference.  Okay? When you open it, it’s going to look something like this.  Okay? This is the Microsoft 365 licensed version.  You can also get to this through the web, which is actually where I’m going to spend most of my time today using the web version, but you’ll see this is the desktop version.  You can also pin in so that if you want to jump into the applications, but I’m going to actually just open my Edge web browser.  And here you are.  You can see it looks pretty much the same as what you saw there.  You just don’t see the apps because I don’t have enough real estate on this screen for that.  So, when you sign into Microsoft 365 through the web, this is what Copilot looks like.  If you want to, you know, search within your work content, you notice this little slider here.  There’s one for work, there’s one for web.  So, if you’re directing most of your queries and your prompts and you want the responses to be based strictly on information that it can find out on the web, you point it to the web.  If you want it to include content that’s inside of your Microsoft world, click onto the work.  Okay, so that’s a big thing.  This is the interface of how you can interact with it.  I will show you in other places where you can interact with Copilot, but I’m going to just start here.  You can start a new chat, which is the screen I’m on now.  If you’ve had conversations, you notice I have a whole boatload of them, you can search them and look for ones, the chats that you’ve had in the past, but maybe you started something a few days ago, you were finished and you want to come back to it.  You can click in here and search.  The library is a media library or a content library.  So you can intentionally put things in here if you are looking to do that.  I should also set the stage.  This is a demo environment.  This is not actual IT Radix content.  So you’re going to see a lot of sort of tongue-in-cheek type of data in here.  We use this one a lot for demos and so we’ve pre-populated it with some demo information in here.

You can create agents to do things either repetitively or they have certain types of focus.  So, Microsoft gives you a few out of the box.  You can do some research and you can do some analysis.  I invite you to play with these after the fact, but these are two really good ways.  If you’re doing mostly research, choose the agent that’s a researcher and you can give it a persona.  You can say, “I’m a lawyer.  I’m a doctor.  I’m an IT professional.” You can put whatever you want there and it will help you do research.  Same thing with the analyst.  It’ll put on it’s more of an analyst hat and analyze whatever data you have.  You can create new ones.  I’m not going to show that necessarily today, but if you’re doing something repetitively, you would save that and create what’s called an agent.  Notebooks are where you would put in projects that you have in progress.  So, for example, I will show that in a little bit but basically if you want to create it like a project and then go back to it, the idea of a project inside of Microsoft Copilot is the concept of a notebook.

Copilot in Your Microsoft 365 Environment

So now I’m just going to sort of walk through some of the various places in the Microsoft 365 environment where you can see Copilot in addition to just the basic logging in directly into Copilot.  So you notice over here there’s a chat.  If you click on that, it’ll bring up a sidebar.  Same thing, web versus internal, work versus internal.  You can do prompts in here.  This tends to be more focused on looking as if you’re doing things out in the web, but you can click on the + button here and upload a specific file or something to that effect.  If you do it over here in the new chat and you’re in the work, you can also do the same thing.  You can point them there.  Okay, so now we have a small SharePoint site that we’ve put behind on this tenant.  You’ll see that we have some folders and things like that.  SharePoint sites are way more than just a document library, but in this particular case, we’ve created a whole bunch of just data files that we’re sharing.  It’s data that you share.  This is what it looks like when you’re at the top level.  You can do a lot with SharePoint.  And this is just one that we’ve built for this demo.  We have spreadsheets.  I’m going to spend a little bit of time in here.  I’m going to first go into email.  I’m going to close the Copilot.  So, when you’re in here, you can ask Copilot to summarize things.  So for example, I use this personally.  I’ll come into my email.  I’ll click on this and I’ll say, read all my email, prioritize, look at the ones that haven’t been responded to, prioritize them and draft responses as best as you can.  And it will prioritize those emails.  It will give me some draft thoughts as to how to reply based on content that it’s already looked at inside of my tenant so it’ll be in my tone of voice.  It’ll be in sort of my way of speaking and then if I choose to I can copy and paste and actually just hit reply and put that into the reply to the email.  The other thing you’ll notice (this, by the way, you can slide these so that if you don’t like it quite that big…so, I’m going to just do this) that also it puts up here.  This is something that with the licensed version of Copilot, it does a little summarize this email.  Now, obviously, this is just a marketing email, but it will summarize it and put the responses over here.  So, they’re just letting us know that Adler Aphasia on March 26 had a Bingo.  And it gives you a nice little summary.  You will see this in every message inside of Outlook.

You can also start a new message and use Copilot to help you draft it.  And you can start it here or you can also just come over here in the chat and start it.  So, things you could do is, we used it to help draft an email to let clients know about some new backup changes that we’re doing.  And so I gave it the gist of what was going on in terms of the backup.  And then it actually researched through our environment and knew that we had different flavors of clients and basically said, “Would you like me to draft two different versions of this? One for client type one and one for client type two.” And so Copilot was intelligent enough to pick that up on its own.  I didn’t have to tell it, hey, write a draft for type one client and type two.  Copilot offered that to me.  So you can click in here and just draft up a message.  So the other thing I’ve used Copilot for, back to the just using the web one, is I’ve had it go out and search out on the web on events that might interest me and I can tell it the types of topics that I want and it will go out and scour the web and you can tell to look within a 30-mile radius if you’re trying to do in person versus online.  So again, it’s intended to be a thought partner, not necessarily a replace.  So you have it here.  You can use Copilot here.

You can use it inside of a Word document.  So this is a copy of a script from 2001 Space Odyssey.  I will remind you that it has this summary and insights at the top.  So I’m going to minimize that.  You can see here it’s got summary and insights in here.  And then what I asked it to do was to take the original script and create a slide deck or scene beat deck, which I had never heard of until I was playing with it a little bit.  And it created this outline and I’ll show you that here.  So, I’m going to go back over here.  This is my chat from yesterday.  I gave it the file.  You can see right here.  Here’s the file.  And I said, make a scene beat deck with direct quotes.  And this is what it generated…  all of this.  I’ll do another one for real real time here.  And then it put it into Word for me.  So, I asked it to create this deck.  And then I asked it over here if you follow it through, I told it to only use the scene titles.  And then I asked it to create a PowerPoint.  And this is what it came up with.  So, I’m going to actually do this exact same thing again.  It took a little bit of time to run through this, but I will do this again just so everybody gets the full experience.  So, you get a sense of what it’s going to do.  So, I’m going to just say create a synopsis of this document.  And I’m going to point it to the document which is right here, this Space Odyssey script.  I’m going to hit enter and you’ll see there’s also a mobile app while we’re waiting for it to think.  So, it’s reading it and it’s going to give you a clear synopsis.  You can also load this on your mobile devices as well.  This Copilot 365 app, super handy.  So, this will take a little bit and then when it finishes, it’ll give you some different things, maybe some future prompts that you might want to use to help you analyze the document or dig in a little deeper.  All of this is saved, so if you need to go back to it, you can easily get back to it as you saw here on the right.  And then you can say, it gives you all kinds of prompts of what you might want to do.  But you could continue on using this to create a slide deck, create an outline, whatever you want to do.  Obviously, with anything AI, I’m going to just highlight at the bottom.  AI-generated content may be incorrect.  But the way you can get there is if you open the original document, which is what I should have done in the first place.  So, let me do that.  That was in Magic Kingdom.  Here we are.  So, I’m in the example.  This is what I should have done.  Here we are.  Did it replace my document? Yesterday when we were testing this or is this the really long one?

Whatever you feed it, it will summarize.  So, we’ve had clients, for example, maybe they got an RFP and they need to respond to an RFP.  You feed it the RFP, you say, “hey could you help me respond to this RFP” and if you’ve got other sample ones that you’ve already used, you can also point it to those and say use these as source documents but it will go out and search your content if you’re inside of your Microsoft environment.

The other thing you can do is, let’s say you’re in a spreadsheet.  So, we have a spreadsheet.  This is a mock data again.  There’s a balance sheet and there’s assets.  And so, you can get over here.  Give me a second while it’s thinking.  And I’m going to say, analyze this workbook and add data insights.  So, if you’re looking at a P&L and maybe you want to compare year-over-year, maybe you’re looking at a sales report and you want to create some trend data to see if it’s doing up and down.  Maybe you’re looking at inventory data, maybe you’re looking at market data, market analysis data that you got out on the internet, you can use Copilot inside of Excel.  You just click on that little Copilot icon.  It’ll bring up this little sidebar here and then you can click on the prompts.  And I’m going to actually click on it.  You notice it puts this little short one here, but when you click on it, it puts a lot more information in there on the prompt.  And that kind of reflects the point that I was trying to make earlier about specific is terrific.  You notice that, you analyze this workbook, findings, ask me questions to clarify what you’re interested in.  You can actually ask Copilot to ask you any clarifying questions if it doesn’t understand to get more clarity around what you’re looking to do.  So, I’m going to just click on this.  This one’s going to take a while.  Oh, boy.  Of course, with anything demos.  Let’s see.  I’ll do it again.  Go super slow.

Microsoft, of course, is usually very reliable.  So I am, of course, in the middle of a demo.  Now obviously we were rehearsing this yesterday.  So some of these things were already pre-populated in here.  But generally if you’re doing (there we go.  Is it going to go now? I don’t think so.)

How about we do a different prompt? Let’s do, “what do I need to worry about financially as an owner?” Let’s see what this comes back with.  This is something I just literally made up on the fly.  Who knows if this even really a valid question against this data, but if it has clarifying questions, it will come back.  We’ve had clients take their P&Ls year-over-year, put it in say “analyze the trends.” It will create a dashboard.  I’m sure some of you have seen those little commercials on the Super Bowl and on the March Madness where it’s saying Copilot created the dashboard.  It will really do that.  But you notice here that it puts all of these little comments here about the financial concern, things of this nature, key ratios to monitor, recommended actions.  So, you can use it as a thought partner.  Again, you always want to validate and verify what you see coming out of it, but it does a lot of things.  We’ve done month-over-month comparisons of spreadsheets on inventory items.  We’ve had a lot of different clients playing with this for just watching things like leases, lease expiration dates, things like that.  You can also inside of PowerPoint, same thing, you’ll notice that there’s a little Copilot icon here.  I need to be in edit mode on this, but the Copilot, maybe I don’t like the pictures, maybe I want to change add some more content.  If I click on Copilot, always brings up the little sidebar.  So this is within each of the applications.  So when you’re in the applications, you can click on the Copilot sidebar and it will do it within the context of the application that you’re in.  And again, if you want to focus the search results, you just change it from work to the web and it will change the results in terms of where it’s coming from.

I believe that is we’re kind of at time.  So, I was going to stop here and just see if anybody had any questions.  We do have a a question in the chat.  Okay.  Give me a second.  I see lots of questions in the chat.  Let’s see.

Questions from Attendees:

Q:  Is there a way to generate an email while keep editing the original draft?  It seems once you hit “keep and save,” it will get rid of your original draft that you typed.

A:  That is a good question.  Something I’ve noticed myself.  I find that I usually, no, I believe it will replace.  So, often if you’re looking to not get it to replace your content, often what I’ll do is just copy and paste.  That is something that I believe has been submitted as an enhancement, but I have noticed the same behavior.  So, sorry, I don’t have an answer to that one.

 

Q:  The screen share is very small.

A:   I am sorry.  At this point, I’m not sure that I can change that.  I can try.  Hopefully that’s a little better, but I can do some more.  I do see that somebody tried to answer him.

 

Q:  Does Copilot share any of your data?

A:  So, I I think I just want to reiterate again, if you’re using the one where it’s focused on the web, where it’s on that little icon in the web, which I’m going to go back here just because it’s easier for me to show it.  I’ll make this one bigger.  If it’s clicked here where it’s toggled to work, it is not sharing.  If it’s clicked here and it’s toggled to web, it can share.  It may share that information is also expanding the realm of where it’s going and only giving replies from the web.  It will not give replies from the work.

 

Q:  Do you have to save a result?

A:  So, currently the behavior is a little different.  You notice these Word ones, there’s chats over here.  I’ll pull them up.  It starts with a new one, but you’ll notice in here, we did all of these chats yesterday inside of the document and it saved them.  So, they’re all saved here.  I do not find the behavior the same when you do that in Excel.  So, if you start a chat in Excel and you go back, it you will not.  If you start a chat in Excel, it will keep it as long as the session you’ve had the file open.  If you close it and then reopen it, you’re going to lose it.  So you do need to copy that.  I will point out there is a little copy button down here.  So you can copy all of that and you could paste it, for example, into a spreadsheet or wherever you want to keep it if you want to keep all the information.  But Excel does not behave the same.  Word does.  Word puts everything here.  Excel puts everything here.  So if it’s something that you think you want to save, you could also just start it inside of the Copilot app.  I will show you another place where you can get to it.  So obviously, you can get to it if you add the app and you can run it here.  So you’ll notice the conversations that are here, where it says conversations, are the same as the conversations that are here.  See, they look the same.  Here’s synopsis request, Space Odyssey.  So, all of that they look the same if you want to save the notebook.  So, we did that yesterday, too.  Just to sort of show you what this looks like, we created a a notebook.  We pre-populated it with content.  So, it’s going to show you the content.  Let’s just give it a second.  We pre-populated content in here.  And then you can ask questions about the content that you want.  So, if you really want to narrow it down to just a particular set of files, for example, you can do that.  Now that I’ve changed this, the resolutions, things aren’t showing on the screen.  Here’s the four documents that we gave it as the content.  So you can also quick create content if you like, but if you go in and ask a spec, if you pre-populate the content that you want, so you really want to narrow it down to a smaller set of information, you can create a notebook and then you can have it do analysis on a notebook.  So, where you might want to do this, for example, if you’re doing a financial analysis for a particular client, maybe you’re going to just put just those that client’s data in there.  Maybe you’re looking at a particular product or service.  You can pre-populate or maybe you’re responding to an RFP, create a notebook, which is again along here, and then you can save the content in there.

 

Q:  What if you hit Copilot within an email?

A:  You can use it to draft things.  If you don’t have a licensed version though, it’s going to really just use what it finds on the web to respond.  It’s not going to be necessarily using content you have inside of your organization.  So, you can always use Copilot (I’m gonna close it here to you notice it’s here).  It will do that but if you don’t have a licensed version it’s only using things that it knows and are aware of from the web.  So, if you see the icon inside of these, that does not necessarily mean it’s paid.  They have popped these in here.

 

Q:  If you’re in Word and you see the Copilot icon like that, that does not mean it’s paid?

A:  This is your clue.  If you have this little icon that says work, that means you own a license.  It’s paid.  If you don’t see this little toggle button, that means you’re using the free version.  It’s in every app.  Microsoft has put it into everything now, but they’ve put the free one into everything.  What you want is the paid one.  With a paid license, your data can still be shared.  Once you’ve paid, Microsoft is now giving you some protections and some expectations of privacy.  So, if you’re paying for your license, it is keeping your information inside of your environment.  And there’s not a separate login necessary.  It uses the exact same login that you use to log into your email, your Word, Excel.  So, in this particular case, I’m logged in as, we have a little demo account called Be Connected.  I also forgot to show it in Teams.  The other thing I like here inside of Teams is maybe you’ve got this really long chat conversation going.  You can click on the Copilot icon in there and it will recap the chat.  So, if you don’t want to read through all that stuff, it will recap the chat and so you can use it to help save you some time.  That’s the Copilot icon inside of Teams doesn’t actually have the pretty little colors, but it’s right there.  So you could ask it to recap the conversations.  Now, again, I apologize because there’s not a whole lot of chatting going on inside of this demo unit, but if I pop it up here, I could just say “summarize this chat” and it will do that.  And you can narrow the scope like see, here you go.  It even gives you some, like what decisions were made.  So, if there’s a chat with a group of people, you can pop open Copilot again, see the little paid versus not paid, and what decisions were made, you could just click that.  I’ve even done it where I’m like, okay, just because sometimes we have, let’s just say, Geraldo and Ken and I, we chat with each other a lot.  I’ll say, please just focus on this chat from today.  So, it limits the scope of how far back it’s going in terms of the discussion because we’ve got discussions going back for several years at this point.  You also see it gives you all kinds of soup starter to get you thinking about what you want to do.  But I have found this super handy.

 

I hope this was helpful.  I’m just going to quickly pop back to the slideshow for one second.  I think I need to say here.  So, let me just make sure.  Yes, the other thing.

 

One Last Thing—Copilot Studio…

This is sort of like the freebie at the end.  So, if you’re doing a lot of repetitive things and you want to do more of a workflow, there’s this concept of a Copilot studio.  Now, this is advanced Copilot.  So, I’m going to just let this bring it up.  But what you can do in here is you can create what’s called a workflow.  So, maybe you want it to analyze every month you got to analyze a particular set of spreadsheets.  So, you create the little analysis engine and then of course you feed it each month the spreadsheets that you want it to use, and then it will allow you to do that repetitive thing.  What you do is you click on it, you say I want to run this one, and it’ll prompt you to feed it the files that you want month over month.  We can send out the link to this since I think the webinar is dragging down my computer response time because this popped up, no problem earlier today.  So, this is where you can save repetitive things.  It’s called Copilot Studio.  And that’s included with Copilot.

Reach Out for a One-on-One Copilot Consultation

If you would like to have a little more specific one-on-one consultation about it, please don’t hesitate to reach out.  You can reach out to us and we’d be happy to go through it.  Obviously, I’ve been using Copilot quite a bit.  Geraldo, who’s also on this call with us today, has done a lot of Copilot work.  Plus, we have quite a number of other people inside the company that are using this and we’re using it from everything from analyzing spreadsheets to helping us draft better emails.  And I’m using it for things like “hey, read my inbox and tell me what I missed yesterday.” So, it’s a great tool to help make you work better.

So, that is it.  Thank you so much.  I hope everyone has a happy April Fool’s Day and thank you for joining us.