Posey's Tips & Tricks
What Copilot 2 Will Look Like
Let's dive into some of the changes coming to Microsoft's GenAI assistant, and what it will mean for your Windows experience in the future
At last year's Ignite conference, Microsoft (not surprisingly) spent an inordinate amount of time talking about Copilot. Even so, things did not play out quite the way that I expected. Being that Microsoft 365 Copilot is a little over a year old, I expected that about half of the Ignite keynote would be spent on Copilot success stories. After all, Microsoft 365 Copilot is not cheap, and so Microsoft has a lot to gain by convincing customers of how great Copilot is. Ultimately however, the Ignite conference was less about celebrating Copilot's past success and more about laying out the future of Copilot.
Much of the discussion around Copilot pertained to what I like to think of as Copilot 2.0. In Copilot 2.0 (which is what I am calling the next generation of Microsoft 365 Copilot, not an official version number), Copilot is indeed getting some cool new features. More importantly perhaps, Microsoft's entire philosophy behind Copilot seems to be changing. I will get to that in a bit. Before I do however, there was one related item that got my attention.
One of the new features that Microsoft briefly mentioned during the Ignite keynote is something called the Business Impact Report. This report, which is currently available in public preview, is designed to help organizations to measure their return on investment (ROI) for Microsoft 365 Copilot.
With this tool, Microsoft is trying to show customers how Copilot use impacts business outcomes. Businesses can define their own key performance indicators (KPIs) related to things like sales, marketing, finance, and customer service. They can then upload their related business impact data and create the report. The report tries to establish a correlation between business outcomes (as defined by the KPIs) and Copilot use. The report also seeks to quantify the degree to which Copilot is being used (high use, low use, inactive, etc.), presumably as a way of making the case that those who use Copilot the most heavily receive the best business outcomes.
I'm honestly not sure of Microsoft's motives that drove the creation of this tool. The first thing that comes to mind is that the tool is likely intended as a way of retaining subscribers. In a recent series of blog postsI explained that any time there is a new and novel technology that is introduced there will inevitably be a lot of hype surrounding it at the beginning, but over time that enthusiasm will eventually fade.
Microsoft 365 Copilot is certainly an example of a new technology that attracted loads of attention last year. However, that hype is not going to last forever. In fact, Microsoft sells Copilot subscriptions on a one- or three-year basis. That means that many of the organizations who rushed to adopt Microsoft 365 Copilot when it was first released are now coming due for renewal. I'm sure that Microsoft does not want to see organizations canceling their Copilot subscriptions now that the initial excitement has worn off. As such, the Business Impact Report may be an attempt to retain subscribers by showing them that Copilot is able to pay for itself.
Another thing that came to mind with regard to the Business Impact Report is that IT budgets can fluctuate wildly. Often times these fluctuations tend to be tied to technology trends.
In short, when new technologies are introduced, there tends to be a lot of IT spending related to that technology. Later though, there is an inevitable pull back and the IT budget shrinks dramatically. I could give you quite a few examples of this from my 30+ years in IT, but think about the .COM crash of the early 2000s. Companies were making massive investments in their digital presence in response to the mainstream adoption of the Internet. At the same time, companies were also spending loads of money on making sure that their software was Y2K compliant. Eventually though, budgets were cut so severely that it resulted in a market crash.
While I am not predicting anything quite so extreme this time around, the last year has seen companies making massive investments in AI. Microsoft probably knows that many companies are not going to spend as much on IT next year and will therefore need to look for ways to trim their spending in response to a shrinking IT budget. Given Copilot's sky high licensing costs, eliminating Copilot would be an easy way for organizations to painlessly reduce their IT spending. As such, Microsoft may be trying to get ahead of that possibility by demonstrating that keeping Copilot is good for the bottom line.
Of course, the Business Impact Report is far from being the only new feature in Microsoft 365 Copilot.
One new feature that you will see soon is that Copilot will be able to function as a virtual user. In a Teams meeting, for example, an Interpreter agent will be able to translate spoken words into another language in real time. Admittedly, language translation services have existed for years. However, there is one thing that is particularly unique about the Copilot Interpreter agent. It will supposedly be able to clone the voice of the person whose words it is translating. For example, if I were in a Teams meeting speaking English, another attendee might hear me, in my own normal voice, speaking French.
Another agent that Microsoft is introducing is the Facilitator app, which will take notes in Teams meetings and do the sorts of tasks that a human meeting facilitator would normally do.
Perhaps the most interesting of the new agents is the Employee Self Service Agent. This agent will essentially act as either a virtual HR employee or a virtual IT employee. Users will be able to reach out to this virtual employee in order to get their questions answered or to make a request. For example, a user might contact IT to ask for a new laptop. In doing so, the agent would automatically start the workflow that gathers all of the required approvals. Similarly, a user might contact the HR department’s agent to ask a question about one of the organization’s policies or to request time off.
Another thing that Microsoft has announced is Copilot Actions. One of the presenters at Ignite described Copilot Actions as being similar to Outlook rules, but for Copilot. For those who might not be familiar with Outlook rules, they automatically take action on inbound emails. For example, I am a member of one particular group that sends out a huge volume of messages. Since those messages are rarely urgent, I have an Outlook rule that sends all of the groups messages to a dedicated folder.
While there are similarities between Copilot Actions and Outlook rules, Copilot Actions are more flexible and dynamic than Outlook rules. You can, for example, create Copilot actions that execute based on a schedule. A user might for instance, use a Copilot action to make it so that Copilot sends them an email message every day containing a summary of what they need to know for the day ahead.
Microsoft describes Copilot Actions as a tool for automating repetitive tasks, similar to what you might do using Power Automate or even a PowerShell script. If a user has to compile a report every Friday for instance, then that might be something that a Copilot Action could help with.
I find the notion of Copilot Actions to be intriguing. At the same time though, I have three big questions about Copilot Actions. Unfortunately, these questions can only be answered after organizations begin using Copilot Actions.
My first question is whether Copilot Actions will be limited to working within the Microsoft 365 eco system, or if there will be a way to interact with third party software. I would be especially keen to find out if there is a way to automate tasks involving applications produced by smaller software vendors who are unlikely to build Copilot plugins. I would absolutely love for example, to build an automated workflow that, when I finish writing a blog post, automatically emails it to the editor, generates a corresponding invoice, and removes the assignment from my calendar.
My second question about Copilot Actions is whether it will ultimately end up putting people out of work. If a user can have questions answered by a virtual HR staff member, then it stands to reason that an organization might not end up needing quite as many actual HR employees.
Finally, my third question, is can Copilot Actions be trusted? We have all seen examples of AI going completely off the rails and doing something really bizarre. It will be interesting to see whether Copilot Actions and Copilot Agents prove themselves to be reliable enough for day to day use, or if they end up causing more problems than they solve.
About the Author
Brien Posey is a 22-time Microsoft MVP with decades of IT experience. As a freelance writer, Posey has written thousands of articles and contributed to several dozen books on a wide variety of IT topics. Prior to going freelance, Posey was a CIO for a national chain of hospitals and health care facilities. He has also served as a network administrator for some of the country's largest insurance companies and for the Department of Defense at Fort Knox. In addition to his continued work in IT, Posey has spent the last several years actively training as a commercial scientist-astronaut candidate in preparation to fly on a mission to study polar mesospheric clouds from space. You can follow his spaceflight training on his Web site.