Understanding Microsoft 365 Copilot for Business | AI Powered Digital Workplace

[@DarrellaaS]

Great explanation and analysis Richard. I know I can rely on you to make sense of new tech like this and clarify it’s business value. 😊

[@RichardHarbridge]

Thank you so much for such kind words!

[@hmdz150]

I told my friends that AI is as transformative to human life as Internet/electricity was. It will help us accelerate our progress in many fields of science and technology, and also help the modern human to deal with such vast fields of knowledge required for the modern life.

[@fredaker8353]

Thank you for the concise explanations and wake up call.

[@jj-bu6yb]

Such great explanation! This will change in my day to day. I struggle a lot with English writing or take notes

[@RichardHarbridge]

Appreciate the praise for the explanation. You should try and use GPT or LLM tools today (no need to wait to get used to it). :)

[@mohammedelbouzidi7005]

Thank you

[@blood-sweat-beers]

This is golden. How can I use you as a resource in my self-directed upgrade of our communication systems in emergency medicine

[@2toLead]

Hi! We're happy you found the video helpful, and we would love to help. 🙂 Simply fill out this form, and we'll get back to you shortly: www.2tolead.com/contact

[@miocid31]

Would love to understand if 2toLead will be offering training for organizations interested in understanding how they can leverage co-pilot. I’m a director of it of grant making institution and have received feedback from staff asking for such training (we are a windows centric operation)

[@RichardHarbridge]

We have been exploring prompt training and more with company comms departments so it's possible but we are determining if that is better than other lower cost options that might be a better fit for general users.

[@robertccorahuasanto9463]

When is it going to be released?

[@RichardHarbridge]

Private preview is coming up shortly. Once that has had time (typically a few months) it will shift to a more open public (or semi private preview) and then GA. This particular technology set will come faster than I think many expect (as it's a HUGE PRIORITY for Microsoft) and they have proven they can move fast with Bing Chat etc. That said no public dates have been disclosed for the targets Microsoft is working towards.

[@RichardHarbridge]

November 1st (updated note here).

[@davecrowley5237]

I will watch this when the copillot feature is available on my planet. On Earth no copilot are available.

[@TheAppleExperience]

When is co-pilot expected to be available?

[@RichardHarbridge]

November 1st! :)

[@jonathanduchesne8437]

will companies pay us more for more productivity or we remain with the same salary? or will we be penalized for being skillful? validation work is important, but as we depend more and more on these replacement tools we will lose critical analysis to validate its output. It could give us a convincing lie. The company can look so dumb?

[@RichardHarbridge]

The idea is to collaborate with AI (humans remain at the center in the near term) so the human is the validation part of the 'work engine' today even in a post Copilot work stream. Hallucinations themselves I think are a solvable problem over time and will become less and less of a risk in every day work (as a mistake has low consequences in some activities, especially with a human able to react and respond). We are seeing (finally) meaningful progress on benchmarking and how we validate output with AI support so there is a lot of potential where AI itself can help here over time (assuming AI Alignment risks are mitigated). There has been mixed evidence based studies so far on job and salary impact. It's definitely something to watch for and definitely worth thinking about and considering. Thanks for the comment (and apologies for my delayed response).

[@brucerogers3495]

How many jobs will it takeover? Looks good, but AI will take many jobs in the years to come. They are not thinking about that.

[@RichardHarbridge]

This is happening irrespective of Microsoft making it more accessible and cost effective for the majority of organizations. I completely agree this is the biggest concern we all have and are working to navigate. The optimistic perspective is that like with invention of writing, the Internet and other major technology innovations increased demand and expectations just means there are new jobs and work for many of us. I like the reading analogy since a long time ago only some people were literate (priests etc) and then when many became literate it uplifted our society and arguably led to alot of our information economy now. Perhaps AI literacy will be similar... Will keep researching, watching and working to navigate but love comments like this as it's a very real concern.

[@merrillfam]

this isnt good people.

[@YYY-GUY]

Microsoft can't innovate because they can't even imitate those that can innovate. Every time there's something new, all they've done is show up with too little, too late, and in trying to improve upon something, all they've done is break compatibility and introduce bugs. I wish they would focus on making something ... ANYTHING ... robust & reliable. They'd win me back in a heartbeat.

[@RichardHarbridge]

Do you feel today Microsoft 365 or Microsoft Teams are not robust, reliable or well timed in most of their core innovations today? I would love to know more specifically where you see gaps or where they are behind as while I see it in some industry spaces, like mobile, or in some consumer spaces I don't often hear of significant gaps (only very specific ones like multilanguage for viva engage VS how workplace by Facebook tackles it etc).

[@YYY-GUY]

​@@RichardHarbridge I have found that Teams over the last few years has been terrible for features, performance, and reliability, compared to its competitors (e.g. WebEx, Google Meet, GotoMeeting, and Zoom). The Teams environment has been awkward and chaotic to find information, video has been resource intensive and lagging, and usability has been crap (e.g. multiple people's names highlighted as being the speaker, even when only 1 person has been talking for the past 10-15 seconds). O365 is also poorly designed in that I have to navigate into Outlook to see if I have any new mail, rather than just look for a counter on the Outlook icon. Then navigating between read messages is always a treat to try to convince O365 to stop highlighting a message as being unread. And between O365, Teams, and SP, they have no cohesive way to share and organize information between them, and information is chaotically strewn everywhere, making it challenging to quickly find something you saw just days before. Note that most of this experience is browser based because we are required to use our client's platforms, but not allowed to install non-standard software on our managed computers. Another area of heartbreak for me is the inability for O365 to handle macro-enabled Excel spreadsheets! Given how Excel has been virtually ubiquitous in Corporate America, the notion of not being able to support the existing multitude of macro-enabled spreadsheets is just lame. So to me, it seems that Microsoft is blindly charging ahead in an endless game of catch-up to include features that its competitors have already matured, yet Microsoft has no coherent design to make these features work well together, nor do they spend adequate time to make these features work well on their own. A typical example of coming to the table with too little, too late is their Sludge ... I mean Edge ... browser. They spent years trying to innovate and improve on industry standards, and all that resulted was years of a buggy browser that didn't work flawlessly with well established web sites, pages, and apps. It was so bad, they abandoned the original Sludge browser, and clownishly rebranded the Chrome engine as their own. If it wasn't so sad, it would be hilarious! I used to be a big advocate for Microsoft, but that was about 10 years ago, and they've been steadily declining since. So why would I continue to recommend Microsoft, when all that is going to do is make me look bad in the end?