Microsoft Copilot Use Cases Helping You Redefine Your Business

In pursuit of digital transformation, businesses are adopting new and futuristic technology platforms to accentuate their operations, enhance customer experiences, and stay ahead in the competitive race. However, even with the latest and greatest technology, there is an overarching need to ensure accessibility, even for novice users, to achieve complete adoptability.

Modern technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) have made accessibility simpler. With advanced capabilities such as Natural Language Processing (NLP), users can define a task in their natural language, and the application interprets the requirement and gives the desired output — without any need for coding.

NLP and Large Language Models (LLM) form the basis for Copilot, Microsoft’s latest technology offering in partnership with OpenAI, which leverages the capabilities of the world’s most advanced supercomputers (hosted on open-source foundation models) and the best of AI development infrastructure. Copilot is a game changer across Microsoft platforms, including Azure, Teams, Power Platform, Microsoft 365, and GitHub. Most importantly, Copilot also provides a significant boost for security monitoring and threat analysis.

Let’s have a look at a few Microsoft Copilot use cases to understand how Copilot has the potential to radically transform business operations.

Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365

Copilot for Microsoft 365 integrates with all constituent applications (such as Word, Excel, Outlook, and Teams, among others) by using GPT-4 and Microsoft Graph. A common way to leverage Copilot in these applications is to type in a task description which then automatically gets executed. For example, if you type in a query to generate analytic reports from raw Excel data, you get the result instantly with real-time visualizations and reports.

Microsoft recently launched an application called Business Chat, which has access to your emails, calendar, chats, documents, and many more to help improve productivity and efficiency in day-to-day communications. To use this feature you can type in a query — such as the status update of the project — and immediately get a report derived from related emails, documents, meetings, and chats.

Here are a few more Microsoft 365 Copilot use cases:

• Create documents from various sources, have real-time edits, change the tone, and rewrite your copy.
• Get instantaneous presentations by aggregating data from various sources.
• Create insightful visualizations and reports from raw Excel data.
• Optimize the time you spend in Outlook, and make communication faster.
• Get real-time summaries and actionable items right within a Teams meeting.
• Leverage the new feature integrations in Power Apps and Power Virtual Agents to quickly work on a low code model and build custom Apps and Automated Chatbots.

The Benefits of Copilot for Microsoft 365:

• Save Time and Resources: You just specify a task and let Copilot handle the execution without having multiple resources dealing with humongous and disparate data.
• Increased Productivity: Rapid execution and accurate output drives faster operations.
• Better Resource Allocation: Get the advantage of moving your team to more strategic operations, rather than working manually on routine office tasks.

With the above features, the Copilot for Microsoft 365 enhances your business operations and makes way for a digitally mature modern workplace.

Learn More About How Copilot Transforms Upskilling > >

Copilot for Security

The Microsoft Security Copilot uses AI capabilities for early threat detection, analyzing the best-suited remediation and enhancing the native capabilities of the application. It helps businesses improve their security posture based on analytical insights and quickly processed signals that discover otherwise unknown vulnerabilities, and then suggests the best incident response patterns. Security analysts can query it in their natural language and get the desired response without coding or manual analysis.

Benefits of Microsoft Security Copilot:

• Faster Response Time: Conventional analysis can take hours or days to provide guidance on proper incident management response. With Security Copilot, you can get insights from multiple sources within minutes.
• Proactive Mitigation: The Microsoft Security Copilot helps in early threat detection and risk exposure and gives predictive measures to mitigate the progress of an incident, as well as recommendations for appropriate countermeasures.
• Integration Capabilities: The tool integrates with Microsoft’s security applications, such as Sentinel, Defender, and Intune, with insights that match your current security posture.
• Skill Enhancement: Help your security analysts stay updated with the latest in cybercrime and incident management, threat detection, and prevention.

Azure OpenAI Copilot

The Azure OpenAI Copilot leverages the GPT-4 LLM and enables users to train the application on a vast vocabulary and code and automatically detect patterns in usage to enhance its language processing capabilities. It generates text and code as seamlessly as a manual user would, with a wide range of requirements such as creating content and code, language translation, custom marketing text, and summarization, amongst other text requirements.

Azure OpenAI Copilot also has image generation capabilities that include creating marketing assets, visuals, and process roadmaps.

Benefits of Azure OpenAI Copilot for your business include:

• Create your own customized AI models.
• Comprehensive enterprise-grade security through Azure.
• Choose the most appropriate data model to upload from Azure Cognitive Search or Azure Blob Storage, or upload files manually to let the application index the inputs.
• Utilize filters to moderate the content that is being requested and generated.
• Save time and resources by automatically generating text or code with enhanced accuracy.

Build your Own Copilot

The Copilot Studio offers a cloud-based platform that facilitates easy building, deploying, and managing of your AI solutions with its constituent tools and services. Copilot Studio helps you create custom apps and Chatbots based on your business data, and users can leverage the Founders Hub or Azure OpenAI Playground to create custom Copilot stacks built on a model such as ChatGPT or GPT-4 with their content and images. 

Benefits of using Copilot Studio:

• Built-in plugins that integrate with third-party data sources.
• Support for structured and unstructured data.
• Flexible subscriptions on a monthly or yearly basis based on “Provisioned Throughput Units,” enabling users to reserve and deploy a defined model processing capacity.
• Compliance with your business regulations for access privileges, security, data sharing and retention, and document tagging.
• Pre-defined throughput for workloads, with consistent prompt and completion sizes and API requests from the reserved processing capacity.

Watch the video below to learn more about Copilot Studio in action.

GitHub Copilot

The GitHub Copilot is an independent tool for DevOps offered in the Azure Data Studio. The GitHub Copilot Chat integrates with the GitHub Copilot and helps users with predicative autocomplete suggestions for writing code. Users can leverage it for code snippets or query the tool in their natural language and get the required code as an output. The tool has the OpenAI Codex as a base, a system recently introduced by OpenAI. It supports coding requirements for C, C++, Python, JavaScript, Ruby, and Go, apart from SQL query generation for databases.

Users can enable and configure GitHub Copilot Chat in a supported IDE and turn it off when required.

Features and Benefits:

• Pre-processed input, which can either be a code snippet or a query in natural language, is sent to an LLM which interprets and generates the required code. This feature works best for rapid coding requirements, saving you the time spent by manual coders.
• The response is either a custom code snippet or an interpretation of the code input. It includes the appropriate code highlighting and formatting to deliver accurate output.
• Users can benefit from automated suggestions and outputs for syntax, test cases, code concepts, debugging, and related requirements.

Microsoft Copilot and Your Business

The above examples show just a slice of the ways that Microsoft Copilot can help businesses save development and operational costs, and help novice and skilled coders query in their natural language and get the desired output. Copilot’s vast set of capabilities have the potential to redefine core and critical operational requirements, and provide the right solution for many use cases.

Curious how Copilot can support your business operations? Contact our Microsoft Solutions experts to book a discovery call today.