Why Copilot will be transformational for AI use

I have to admit, Chat-GPT was something I used last summer to help me with some coding I needed in powershell, have a bit of an explore with its generative tools – but that was it. I even paid for it for a couple of months to try and take more advantage of it.

Colleagues were using it to write policies or get coding answers, and whilst I could see its benefits – I wasn’t sensing such a big change in my life because it was there, other then having to read paragraphs of waffle it had been asked to generate.

Of course, AI is not a new concept. It’s been in systems I’ve been using for years for specific tasks. But this new generative AI, and the adoption of LLMs to bring context alongside natural language is newer, and what is becoming more mainstream.

Copilot for Microsoft 365, is, I think, going to be more transformational than ChatGPT – because of its context with our daily lives and primary data sources such as our email and teams, documents and of course the fact that it’s LLM is bang up to date.

If you’ve seen announcements, and scoffed at the price ($30 a month per user) then you haven’t taken the time to understand the impact of this on your day to day lives if you use 365.

Clearly, the skills of generating prompts is a skill we all urgently need to learn, not least for students, alongside understanding the importance of fact and source checking.

With other AI tools it doesn’t have access to the context copilot for M365 will, and it won’t be baked into your OS, Office or mobile experience either, that seamless ability to use it is the key.

I can see this with our helpdesk platform as well, Freshdesk has the ability to use information from hundreds of thousands of our tickets, helpdesk articles and LLM to support us. It also uses AI to assess customers mood with their tickets allowing us to access another level of understanding of the needs of our customers, within the platform with no additional systems.

I’m excited to get my hands on access to Copilot for Microsoft 365 – and I’ll do some training on it as soon as I have! But for now, to learn more about it, here is the training I did recently: