Microsoft Copilot is a suite of AI-powered tools that are built to natively integrate with Microsoft’s productivity suite. Like Siri for the Apple ecosystem or Alexa from Amazon, Copilot is designed to enhance users’ productivity by simplifying complex tasks, improving security, and keeping your team ahead of the latest Microsoft offerings.
But can it really do anything useful for growing business in Oklahoma? Yes, it can, when it’s deployed properly into the right environment. Let’s take a closer look at some of its most important use cases, and how you can maximize the impact of your AI investment.
How Small Businesses Benefit from Microsoft Copilot?
First things first, let’s look at the why of Copilot by exploring the positive impacts that it will have on your business.
Manage Your Workloads More Effectively
Small business owners know the juggling act all too well. Managing workloads is a constant challenge, especially when your business scales quickly or resources are stretched thin. This constant pressure to keep up with increasing demands can lead to employee burnout and operational inefficiencies.
However, Microsoft 365 Copilot can help. By leveraging AI and its deep integration with the Microsoft suite, it significantly reduces the burden on you and your staff by assisting with routine tasks. Be it drafting emails, managing calendars or creating documents, work becomes a lot easier with Copilot acting as a digital assistant. This boost in efficiency could increase your team’s productivity by up to 50%. By handling routine tasks, Copilot allows your staff to focus on more strategic initiatives.
Enhance Employee Capabilities and Training
The Microsoft ecosystem is vast. Learning the nuances of every application can be incredibly challenging and time-consuming.
Simplifying those applications for your staff is another common Copilot benefit. By providing contextual support with a user-friendly interface, Copilot can help employees navigate and familiarize themselves with any Microsoft applications, without the need for a human. What would have previously required expensive training sessions or hands-on support from colleagues can now be managed with Copilot, which means fewer disruptions, less need for costly training, and more efficient, independent work.
Enhance Decision-Making
Effective decision-making is essential for any business, and data is at the core of those decisions. While businesses today are surrounded by mountains of data, small businesses often lack the means to extract the right insights from this data.
Here’s where Microsoft Copilot makes a difference. It helps you analyze business data and uncover insights that might otherwise go unnoticed. This means your small business can gain the insights they need to keep up and stay ahead of competitors. Simplified data analysis in Excel, for example, allows you to quickly review sales trends, customer behavior, or operational inefficiencies and make timely adjustments. The best part is it all happens in plain English, greatly reducing the need for complex formulas. Here’s a video from Microsoft that demonstrates those capabilities.
A Look at Some of Copilot’s Most Useful Features
Now that we understand the benefits of Copilot, we can look at some of the features that we think are most likely to improve the productivity and efficiency of our local business community here in Tulsa.
Contextual Chatbot
Chats in Teams, emails in Outlook, data in Excel, presentations in PowerPoint, notes in OneNote—the list goes on. There’s a massive number of files and data within your Microsoft 365 suite.
To make all this accessible and useable by your team, Copilot functions as a contextual chatbot within your Microsoft 365 environment. Unlike other chatbots like ChatGPT, Copilot has full awareness of your activities, files, and communications across all Microsoft apps. This means you can ask it to perform specific tasks, like finding files or summarizing meetings.
For example, you could ask Copilot, “Please give me a text recap of the last meeting I had with X,” and it will locate the relevant meeting and provide you with a concise summary. Missed the meeting? No worries, Copilot can also provide access to the meeting’s transcript. This saves time while also ensuring you stay on top of important details without having to dig through your inbox or notes.
Document Creation and Design
Creating documents and drafting emails can be time-consuming, especially if you’re trying to maintain consistency across many documents or document types. Microsoft Copilot simplifies this by assisting in the creation and design of documents based on your previous conversations and inputs. It can suggest ways to reword sentences, recommend images to include, and even help with formatting.
Data Analysis Enhancement
Excel is a powerful tool, and most of your employees probably use it to some extent already. However, realizing its full potential requires a high level of expertise, and the learning curve can seem steep and daunting for many users. Microsoft Copilot bridges this gap by making data analysis accessible to everyone.
From cleaning up data to generating formulas and identifying trends, Copilot empowers your employees to perform complex tasks without needing specialized training. It enhances Excel’s functionality by assisting with intricate data analysis, such as creating formulas, predicting future trends based on historical data, and visualizing insights.
A financial analyst could use Copilot to generate sophisticated financial models for more accurate forecasting and budgeting, while a new marketing employee could analyze ad impressions with ease. This makes powerful data analysis accessible to users of all skill levels.
How to Make Copilot Adoption a Success
Is every business able to make the most of Microsoft Copilot? Not quite. There are some technical and non-technical prerequisites that a business will need to fulfill to ensure a smooth onboarding.
Ensure Your Network Meets the General Requirements
Before integrating Microsoft Copilot into your business operations, it’s essential to ensure that your network infrastructure is up to the task.
Copilot requires a stable internet connection and seamless access to your Microsoft 365 environment to function optimally. It may also increase the flow of data and processing demands, which should be evaluated in the context of your organization’s IT infrastructure. To ensure a smooth integration, some businesses may need to upgrade their internet service, increase bandwidth, or optimize their network to ensure better performance.
As with all Microsoft 365 services, it’s also recommended that customers align their network with the Microsoft 365 network connectivity principles. This alignment will help provide the best experience with Copilot by minimizing latency and enhancing network quality of service (QoS).
Telecommunications Reliability
Given that Microsoft Copilot heavily relies on cloud services, it’s vital to have a reliable telecommunications infrastructure in place. Copilot’s LLM calls are routed to the closest datacenters in the region, but during periods of high utilization, it may access other regions where capacity is available. This makes a strong and dependable internet connection paramount.
Any downtime or slow connections can significantly hinder Copilot’s performance, leading to bottlenecks that’ll have a flywheel effect across your entire organization. To mitigate this risk, you should consider investing in a robust telecommunications setup that includes failover options, such as a backup internet connection.
Employ Permissions and Content Management Best Practices
As with any AI-powered tool, it’s crucial to understand and address security and privacy concerns within your organization when adopting Copilot. Before rolling it out, ensure your data is prepared and that all security, privacy, and compliance controls are in place. This includes following best practices in permissions management and content security, as well as fine-tuning role-based access controls.
Since Copilot will inherit your existing permissions and policies, a proper setup is essential for a smooth deployment. You should also review access for SharePoint sites, documents, and tenant data. And make sure that your policies for data loss prevention, retention, and compliance are solid. By taking these precautions, you can fully leverage Copilot’s capabilities while protecting your business’s information.
We Help Tulsa Businesses Navigate to AI Success
Are you ready to make the most of the coming AI trend, but aren’t quite sure how? The NSN Management team can help you develop a strategic, proactive approach to AI adoption that provides optimal return on investment. Our customer-first philosophy of service quality means we always put your needs first.
Contact us any time at: 918 262 4060
