With the onset of artificial intelligence, businesses are under immense pressure to maximize productivity and minimize costs. However, while 80% of leaders believe they need AI to stay competitive, 60% are concerned their organization lacks the vision and plan to implement it (Source: 2024 Work Trend Index Annual Report, Microsoft & LinkedIn). Our latest webinar, “Level Up with Microsoft 365 Copilot”, showed how companies can level up their business and equip their teams with Copilot. The session covered best practices, real-world examples, and guidance on leveraging Microsoft 365 Copilot to enhance productivity and drive tangible business results.
The Rapid Rise and Adoption of Artificial Intelligence
Afif Achmad, Trusted Tech Team’s Professional Services Delivery Manager, opened the discussion with a deep dive into AI’s growing role in business operations.
AI has become indispensable in today’s competitive market, where businesses aim to reduce costs and improve efficiency. Afif emphasized how AI-powered tools like Microsoft 365 Copilot are transforming workflows, streamlining operations, and boosting productivity. However, the challenge remains: while 80% of leaders recognize AI’s importance, 60% feel unprepared to implement it.
“One of the biggest things that we've been able to identify here within our organization and working with many clients is how AI is really transforming the impact of the current workplace. And if businesses don’t adopt artificial intelligence fast, not only will they fall behind, their workers will find a way to bring it in themselves but that could be a compliance security or data governance issue.”
- Afif Achmad, Professional Services Delivery Manager at Trusted Tech Team
Best Practices for Prompting Copilot
Former Microsoft Senior Cloud Solutions Architect Nick Blackman then took center stage to demonstrate how effective Copilot usage begins with crafting the right prompts. He introduced the common artificial intelligence concept of "garbage in, garbage out," highlighting that the quality of the input directly influences the output.
To optimize Copilot’s performance, users should focus on five key elements:
- Define Clear Goals: Be specific about what you want Copilot to accomplish.
- Provide Context: Include all relevant details about the task.
- Specify the Source: Direct Copilot where to retrieve data, whether from OneDrive, Teams, or SharePoint.
- Set Expectations: State how you want the response to be formatted (e.g., tables, bullet points, presentations).
- Tailor Delivery: Adjust prompts to achieve tailored results that align with business needs.
Through live demos, Nick showcased how these best practices translate into real-world applications, from generating executive summaries to automating workflows across Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Watch the full live demo here.
ROI Improvements with Copilot Across Different Teams
Will Whaley, Cloud Support Manager at Trusted Tech Team, then recommended that companies introduce Copilot to teams rather than select individuals, explaining that this was the best way to capitalize on a broad set of capabilities and to encourage collaboration.
“The true value of Copilot really centers around the time saved from processing workloads more efficiently and generating ideas and content that may be beyond the scope of my IT team's capabilities. Copilot drives value with far less costly investment than traditional methods.”
- Will Whaley, Cloud Support Manager at Trusted Tech Team
He provided compelling examples of how Copilot boosts ROI by optimizing tasks across various business functions. This includes a multitude of real-world applications such as:
- Sales Teams: Sales professionals can use Copilot to streamline outreach, follow up with leads, and generate reports, all while saving time on research and data analysis.
- Marketing Departments: Marketing teams can leverage Copilot to analyze campaign performance, generate content ideas, and pull insights from customer data leading to faster decision-making and more targeted strategies.
- Legal Teams: For legal professionals, Copilot can draft and review contracts, summarize legal documents, and ensure compliance with organizational standards, reducing time spent on manual reviews.
- Finance Departments: Finance teams benefit from Copilot’s ability to generate financial projections, analyze year-over-year trends, and create detailed reports from financial data, streamlining complex analyses.
- IT and Support: IT teams can use Copilot to diagnose system issues, streamline data management, and ensure security measures are properly enforced, allowing them to monitor environments more efficiently.
How to Get Started with Integrating Copilot
When considering Copilot, it is important to align data governance and security protocols before implementation to maximize the effectiveness of Copilot.
The deployment guidance for Copilot consists of the following five main steps:
- Step 1: Start with the optimization assessment, which is an online questionnaire that helps outline your situation, licensing status, and data security posture. Based on the results, you will get a recommendation for the best deployment path for the customer.
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Step 2: If you are not ready to deploy Copilot right away, you can turn on restricted SharePoint search, which is a new feature that reduces the risk of data oversharing by limiting the results that Copilot returns from SharePoint.
This is a temporary measure that allows you to start using Copilot quickly and then work on improving their data security in parallel. - Step 3: Deploy Microsoft 365 Copilot and optimize further as needed.
- Step 4: Once Copilot is rolled out, you can follow the Core path or the Best-In-Class path to optimize the data security posture, depending on the customer's licensing and deployment status. The Core path involves using SharePoint Advanced Management and manually applying sensitivity labels and policies. The Best-In-Class path involves using Microsoft 365 E5 and automatically applying sensitivity labels and dynamic policies.
- Step 5: After the data security issues are remediated, you can turn off Restricted SharePoint Search to unlock the full value of Copilot and enable it to access all the relevant SharePoint sites.
If you're ready to get started with Microsoft 365 Copilot, Trusted Tech Team offers a comprehensive Copilot readiness assessment to help businesses evaluate their current infrastructure and ensure a smooth deployment.
Webinar Q&A
Below is the live Q&A from the attendees during the session. If you have more questions, feel free to contact our team here.
Q: How is Copilot different than Copilot for Security in Entra?
A: Microsoft 365 Copilot is a generative AI assistant that's integrated across various platforms in the Microsoft 365 ecosystem, such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Copilot for Security in Entra focuses more on Identity Security and Governance. It is geared more towards IT Security Teams and Administrators. Providing them with better insights into identity risks, such as which users have risky access privileges or where vulnerabilities might exist in the identity infrastructure.
Learn more about Microsoft Copilot for Security here.
Q: What if data is on local network shares and not in SharePoint or OneDrive, can Copilot search and gather data from local sources?
A: If your company utilizes on-premise file shares, your organization will need to use the Graph File Share connector, which will index your Windows file shares. This will not work for an on-premise Exchange.
Q: How do you decide as a team if you can implement copilot yourself or if you should get third party help?
A: To decide whether to implement Copilot internally or seek third-party help, evaluate your team’s expertise, the complexity of the integration, time constraints, and costs. Consider ongoing support needs, potential risks, and the level of customization required. Starting with a pilot project can help identify challenges. If your team lacks the necessary skills or resources, Trusted Tech Team experts can ensure a smoother and quicker deployment.
Q: Does the Trusted Tech Team Microsoft 365 Copilot Readiness Assessment assist with connecting Copilot to our various SharePoint sites, and would you assist with Copilot’s answer providing results based on their file permissions?
A: In our Microsoft 365 Copilot Assessment, we cover SharePoint access control and sharing best practices to ensure a stronger security posture for the adoption of Copilot. For more information, submit this form.
