Demystifying Microsoft Copilot: Real-world Use Cases & Experience

Tom Arbuthnot: 0:05

This week on Teams Insider podcast, we have Kevin McDonnell, a longtime MVP and friend who's at Avanade in their modern work division. And we get into Microsoft Copilot, but not your typical Copilot show. We get into real world use cases. We talk about some of the licensing changes. Kevin is a real expert in this area, and it's a really good conversation. Many thanks to Kevin for taking the time to do the show and also be sure to check out Kevin and Zoe's podcast Copilot Connection if you want to get more into Copilot. Hope you enjoy the show. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the pod. Taking it in a little bit of a different direction this time. You may or may not have heard Copilot is a big deal at the moment. And it's just got opened up to pretty much everybody license wise. So I brought in my friend Kevin MVP and long term friend in the UK who has the longest title I've ever heard of in every related to Copilot. Kevin, you just want to introduce yourself and a little bit about your background and your role.

Kevin McDonnell: 1:00

Thanks, Tom. Yeah, so Kevin McDonnell, Microsoft MVP, I've been a Viva Explorer for a couple of years and doing the community stuff. As a day job, I'm the, and you can see me looking over to make sure I get this right, the Copilot Strategy and Modern Workplace AI Lead at Avanade. For Avanade's a global Microsoft partner, partly owned by Accenture, partly owned by Microsoft. So we sit very closely with both sides of that. And this new role means I'm there. So there's a lot out there to try and drive the Copilots, I should say, because we talk about Copilot, but the reality is there's many out there. Especially from a modern workplace perspective, which includes Teams. So there's that nice tenuous link to that one about driving that out to people, helping people understand it and seeing where they can get the value from it as well.

Tom Arbuthnot: 1:46

Awesome. I understand it's key. So we're going to go low marketing on this pod and try and stick to the reality, which is, I think you probably agree and listening to your pod actually on Copilot connections, which is really good. You do this on there as well, where you're trying to demarketing it a little bit. So can we start with Microsoft using this Word Copilot for both A single product for a family of products and for basically, as far as I can tell, anything related to AI. Is that fair? Is that kind of what they're doing?

Kevin McDonnell: 2:16

There. So there is what is Microsoft Copilot. You need to put that little bit of the beginning, which is the kind of personal side to it as well. So you'll go into Bing. You've probably seen it there in the chat. That's your entry point to generative AI. And it's fantastic for that, There's a slight extension to that. What was Bing chat enterprise? You can get that for the enterprise as well, which means they're not using what you're putting into that data to train future models. So you can be confident they're protecting your data within that. If Samsung's listening, highly recommend you listen to that because I know there was a little story about them leaking some information to chat GPT from there. So making sure that you're protecting what you're putting into

Tom Arbuthnot: 2:58

So functionally the same. So this is Copilot in the browser. Ask questions. It can grab content from the web. But when you add that data protection layer, which I think is included in the. me three and me five by default, you get that. Like we won't use your data. Guarantee.

Kevin McDonnell: 3:14

That's right, and I think the Frontline worker, I can't remember, CF1 and CF3, I think it is both, that you get it included in there as well, which I think is a great one, because we mustn't forget our lovely Frontline

Tom Arbuthnot: 3:26

Yeah. It's very top of mind for Microsoft at the moment. I think there's some AI opportunities there where they can have real value to them as well.

Kevin McDonnell: 3:32

Yeah, absolutely. So that's your nice entry point and if you want to get people started, that is the fantastic one. You can turn it on very easily. It just appears there for people and that will also appear in the Edge. So if people are using Edge, you've got the sidebar there. You can start practicing prompts. You can start with your adoption story. I know we'll come

Tom Arbuthnot: 3:53

Feels like it's going to be pushed into windows pretty aggressively as well, like enterprise controls over whether you turn it on or off, but having that sidebar on windows where you can get to Copilot as well.

Kevin McDonnell: 4:03

Yeah, they've announced the surface devices will have a Copilot button. You've got that I was about to say Windows Copilot. You'll hear me trying to correct myself and educate people on the right way to explain this thing. So it's Copilot in Windows, which is effectively that same Copilot, but embedded in Windows. Plus you've got some extra capabilities, certainly coming down the line. I know Zoe and I talked about this a couple of episodes back right now, you can turn on dark mode for windows using Copilot, which isn't the most exciting thing, but it's starting to bring a lot of those accessibility controls within there. So you can turn on different colored icons. You can bring something great. Read of capabilities so it can read the content on there. You've got a lot more coming with that, which I think will be really powerful way to bring that ease of accessibility to people.

Tom Arbuthnot: 4:54

I think as technologists, we might tend to laugh a little bit of those early features because we're like, obviously, you go into settings and you click this and you click this and you click this. For normal human beings. I had a stat from somebody who did an accessibility session from Microsoft. They were saying like, their accessibility features like hardly get any discovery because nobody knows they're there. So so that ability to ask a text prompt to do it to help use is actually quite interesting.

Kevin McDonnell: 5:20

Yeah, absolutely. And I think we see that across the Copilots. We've talked a lot about levelling the playing field with the Copilots, because it's those things you might have heard of, or you suspect there's something there. As you say, you can't remember which settings do I go into? Where is this hidden? And sometimes search will find these things, but with that generative AI, it's got that additional power of helping you find things and being able to do that as well. So it's not ask how to do it as you would in Bing, or I'm sure some of you might use Google as well. You can actually get it to do it for you as well. And we see that in the Copilot for Microsoft 365. For me, the Excel within that, you talked about the challenge. Excel's a bit rubbish when it comes to Copilot. There's a lot of limitations to what you can do. But what it's great as is explaining how to do things or taking some of those features, conditional formatting's my favorite example. I can never remember how to do that properly. Bit of natural language text into the Copilot. Boom, it's identified which column you're talking about, applies it straight away there, which is really powerful for everyone. Yeah.

Tom Arbuthnot: 6:28

Yeah, I think that's a really it's a really important use case for Copilot in the office suite actually is unlocking the features we all know are there, but like nobody wants to say Google or bring like how do I do conditional formatting and I want This line for this variable range to be green, this line for this variable range I know we're early on the exacts of that happening, but the ability to go into a text prompt in app and say, this is what I want to happen and have it make happen is it's really exciting.

Kevin McDonnell: 6:55

absolutely.

Tom Arbuthnot: 6:56

Okay, so we've done the kind of free slash Copilot. We've done Microsoft Copilot with the data protection is the Microsoft 365 or is it Copilot for Microsoft 365 or Microsoft 365 Copilot these

Kevin McDonnell: 7:08

Officially it's Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365, which is just one of the worst titles. So we officially you're meant to have that Microsoft first, but Copilot for either Microsoft 365 or M365 is generally what we

Tom Arbuthnot: 7:22

Great. And this is where we're into the this 30 per user per month on top of the, now you can add this to the either the E licenses or the ME licenses, which was a big unlock for a lot of people. And you can order

Kevin McDonnell: 7:36

And the business

Tom Arbuthnot: 7:37

Oh, yeah. Sorry. Yeah. Very important. Yeah. So yeah, Empowering Cloud. As an example, we're only six people. I had it through MVP. I had it friends at the access customers, but we couldn't buy it because we weren't, we were mostly business premium. And now we've added it on, which is great. So yeah, it's pretty much accessible. And it's either here or coming to Frontline and Edu as well, isn't it? So most licenses now can add it on.

Kevin McDonnell: 8:00

It's there

Tom Arbuthnot: 8:00

for

Kevin McDonnell: 8:01

Edu, I'm not sure about Frontline. I don't think there's been announcements. I know there is the Microsoft Copilot for frontline, Who's going to pay 30 per user per month for Frontline work and maybe a different story, but I'm hoping we'll hear some more around something that will fit the Frontline side a little bit better

Tom Arbuthnot: 8:18

Yeah. And that brings the experience both into office, but also into your data, your SharePoint documents, your Word documents, your Teams chat your transcriptions. So that's a massive step up in capability.

Kevin McDonnell: 8:32

That's right. And it understands who you are. It's using that power of the Microsoft Graph to connect those other items, bring that information that's related to you and surface that content. The downside is it also knows who you are and surfaces all the content that you have access to. And as MVPs, especially for me on the modern work side of things, we've been talking for years about governance, compliance, thinking about how you share your content. And we've had organizations who've Buried themselves slightly and just turned off Delve. We're going to be hearing that same conversation coming back again. Because Copilot will help you surface that information more easily, you're going to need to make sure you're comfortable with what's there as well. So I think that is across the Copilots. You could say the same for Dynamics. I'm not going to go through a big tech list of all the different Copilots. That's 157 last time I

Tom Arbuthnot: 9:26

I want to put you on the spot now, Kevin, and see if you can list them all off, but we won't do that.

Kevin McDonnell: 9:32

No, and there's different Copilots because behind the scenes, there's different Copilots for like Word on mobile versus Word on desktop and Word in the browser. So there's a slight fudginess between that 157, but that's the back end behind there. And no, I definitely can't list all of those.

Tom Arbuthnot: 9:49

We joke, but that is one of the challenges of the moment, and it's all moving so fast. I give Microsoft a lot of credit for moving fast and getting things to market. But it's is this Power BI Copilot? And is that part of our BI Pro or not? There's service Copilot sales Copilot. There's various Viva Copilots. Yeah. So it is. Yeah. No, that's where I guess you need to probably at the moment talk to an expert, right? Because it is a fast moving landscape.

Kevin McDonnell: 10:15

Yeah, and I've started categorizing the Copilots into different areas. So there's ones that are available for everyone for use for everyone, like the ones we've touched on their Microsoft Copilot and Windows Copilot Microsoft 365. It doesn't really matter who you are within the organization. Assuming you have that license turned on, there's something useful there for you. You then go down to the more specific ones. So if we look at things like Copilot in Power Platform, Copilot in the various Dynamics 365s, that are generally tailored to more specific roles within there. So you've got your finance teams, your marketing teams you've got GitHub Copilot for your developers. They're not 100%, not saying only those people can use them, but they're tailored towards those specific activities. And then you've got more scenario based, which are less likely to be the ones off the shelf, but they're helping with a particular area. And that's where you evolve into that extending Copilot and probably custom Copilots within there and building your own ones. So I think you touched on earlier, it's Microsoft looking to this to be everything. And they're trying to wrap together. If you're creating something using ai, it is a Copilot. There's a certain touch of that. That's a land grab. It's, yeah, everything's here. Copilot. Let's have a nice, lovely brand that markets that. For me, why I do like it is that it's that flow of work for people that you shouldn't have these different, you. You can have digital assistant bots. You can have Copilots, GPTs all over the place, all in different technologies, different websites. How do you know where to go to? By wrapping it up and calling them Copilots, you're starting to edge people to think about this coming from one place. And for me we're slightly biased on this podcast, but to try and bring things through Teams, to have that one interface that starts to bring it, the common area that you go to, and you could have different Copilots for different Teams you're working in, different channels, different areas. They could be attached more to the SharePoint side. They can be apps that are pinned to the left, but your starting to simplify that access for the end user and to come back to the fact there's so many different Copilots, you shouldn't be looking at the technology. You should be looking at what are the problems, what are the opportunities that you've got there? And then looking at what AI can do for those as well, because that will help you steer towards, is there a Copilot that's there for me? Can I extend a Copilot to give me what I want? Can I build a particular Copilot to meet my needs from there and looking at that. So let's not get hung up with all these different Copilots and different platforms. Let's get hung up on the problems that need to be solved and opportunities that

Tom Arbuthnot: 13:02

yeah, I love the way you've categorized that. That makes a lot of sense. Like here's the most people, generic scenarios. Here's the business role unit scenarios. And then here's the kind of more custom bespoke scenarios. And as you say, entirely the right approach to take is what's the person trying to achieve here or the business trying to achieve? How do we apply one of technology out of any three of these buckets to the use case?

Kevin McDonnell: 13:26

Yeah, absolutely.

Tom Arbuthnot: 13:27

are you seeing, Kevin? I feel like our audience can go off and listen to, 100 YouTube videos on the kind of more boxed Copilots. I'd love to get into you. I know you've been doing work on more the custom Copilot, the line of business use cases. What have you been seeing there?

Kevin McDonnell: 13:43

Yeah, it's, there's certain things I can talk about, certain things I can't within that as well, but I, for me, this is the interesting area that a lot of people are focused on. Being fairly new to Copilot as that license has changed for Copilot and Microsoft 365. It's getting people understanding that area from it. But that's going to fade much like any new technology people start to adopt it. We see that in Teams. Yes, there's going to be a long trail of people wanting to come on board of that. So it's not going to go away completely. But where the really interesting is where can we take it further? Where can we go beyond? These large language models are incredible. We're already seeing some really inspirational things that people can do with that. How can we bring that into the Copilot world within there? I loved when I think it was built in 2023 and Satya was really talking about the Copilots. It was top of mind. It was the big item there and Kevin Scott, the CTO at Microsoft. He that was when they first started talking about custom Copilots and he talked about his one there of his podcast custom Copilot. So he would record his podcast. He would load that file up. It would get transcribed automatically. It would identify the guests. It would then go back and bring details of that guest. Summarize that. Podcast, upload that summary, use that summary to generate an image automatically and publish it there. So it's using that generative AI to help make his life more effective within there. And that's something that I've picked up from there. I wanted from Ignite. I was hearing so much talk about Copilots that was like, I feel I need to build something with this. So I. I built a similar thing. I got all the Ignite videos because you can get those. There is actually an API for Ignite to get all those sessions, downloaded those, transcribed them, loaded them up with Azure AI search and built a custom Copilot. I've played around with a couple. One was using Copilot Studio that could then query all the content with there. And I've also built one using Teams AI so you can build it as a Teams app as the more pro code solution. So I can go and say what was talked about is Ignite. What was there about SharePoint Premium? What's the latest on Teams? Who has been speaking there as well? Because with that AI search you can use the cognitive skills to identify individuals and key topics. And you can really interrogate that and where search. Search on its own. You could find that bit of content by wrapping it up with the generative AI. You can get answers and have a usable bit of content from that as well. So in theory, that was very nice.

Tom Arbuthnot: 16:20

That's a really interesting use case. Tom Morgan has done something similar with the Empowering Cloud video. So we have about 150 briefings now, and he fed all the transcripts through it was the Azure open AI with the API's. And we hooked it up to our Teams, but we haven't launched this or anything yet. We've been playing around with it. And it was cool because like you say, it's not just search is summarized. It's here's three bullets, but also it references back to Here's the video that's most relevant for you, which just changes the way. You might not even need to watch the video because you've got the key bullets, but you know where to go. And, it's referenced from a known quantity as well.

Kevin McDonnell: 16:53

Yeah, absolutely. And so I think we'll see more and more things come through like that. And the one, one slight caveat to people on that. I know when I ran it and I think About 400 videos I managed to download. That was nice and easy enough. Put it up as Azure storage, a few pennies to store those. That was great. Transcription on the other hand, you pay per minutes transcribed. And if you didn't keep an eye on your credits you can burn through your credits very quickly. Especially when the Then turn on the AI search as well. So planning ahead a little bit, thinking about this and what your content's actually going to be is definitely worthwhile. Don't just write a big loop that, and leave that running overnight and wake up in the morning to find it's all gone. Cause you'd be really stupid

Tom Arbuthnot: 17:40

y Yeah.

Kevin McDonnell: 17:41

you did that.

Tom Arbuthnot: 17:42

Yeah. Yeah. Not something we'd ever do, Kevin,

Kevin McDonnell: 17:44

No, absolutely not.

Tom Arbuthnot: 17:45

For the niche of the audience who are interested as well. The the Microsoft Startup Program gives you a stack of credits. So if you're a small business and you're going down that road they're being really supportive around ai. That's something we've leveraged at Empowering Cloud, is you get lots of credit to test these things out, which is great. So it's a

Kevin McDonnell: 18:04

are other options, there's free bits to it as well that you can try some of these things out to a certain degree as well.

Tom Arbuthnot: 18:10

really good use case you can talk about to get the idea is and lots of businesses will have this data in text already, right? There'll be different silos of data. It's about bringing that data to life in a useful way for the people that need it.

Kevin McDonnell: 18:25

Yeah, and I think going on to other use cases, and ones I can talk about, I think where a lot of this will get interesting, especially with extending the Copilots. I love that the Copilot for Microsoft 365 extension model will be the wider extension model for the other Copilots that Microsoft's trying to be very aligned on that, which is surprising and nice at the same time within there. So I really like that model from there. And this is right now. You can easily bring your content in. So you can use graph connectors to not just index your Microsoft 365 content. You can go out to other systems. So whether that's your on premises file shares. A classic one is ServiceNow we, a lot of organizations have moved their knowledge bases into there and you've got your help and support material. You can index that and bring that into your Copilot and that can go for any APIs where you can go out and pull that information where I think we'll see the next big evolution is not just consuming data, reading that the summaries we talked about there summarizing videos. It's going to be taking actions as well. I think we've seen a lot of the Copilots haven't necessarily jumped down that too much. Cause you, you want to control that there might be a certain element of the terminator fear to this of hang on. If this, if my AI can go do all these things, how do I control it? So I think I don't think talking about it, taking over the world, but it's that fear of it doing things you don't expect. So they're doing this very carefully, but I think that will. There is definitely a lot of movement there. That will be the next big evolution across these Copilots. We're seeing it with Copilots for sales. You've now got that ability to log opportunities from the Copilots itself and talk about that without having to go in and fill out a form. You're making it easier. You're leveling that playing field. It should be about doing what you need to do more easily and efficiently.

Tom Arbuthnot: 20:18

things like booking travel comes to mind as a great potential opportunity, right? You build a plugin for Copilot and you say I'm going to be saying in this place at this date, which hotels meet our budget requirements. And if you could just be then like, okay, My preference is hotel to make it happen. We're not quite there yet, but you can see how that's technically quite easy to happen, providing the booking systems have APIs and the Copilot knows what you're saying. It's that that human interaction element that's been unlocked here.

Kevin McDonnell: 20:47

Yeah, absolutely. And that kind of brings me on to one of the final ones of things to prepare for and get ready for this. So the reason I say that is because one of the things people need to think about this extensibility and custom Copilot is how do you govern all those things happening? Travel booking is a great example that you may have within an organization two or three different travel booking systems, especially for different countries might treat it differently or different occasions. How do you know to route to the same one? Taking it up a level, I want to raise a ticket. That's very nice. Which system would you like to raise a ticket? Is it HR? IT? Operations? The building itself. So building that understanding and helping as you're bringing those extensions in, starting to think about how is this going to scale up to different people? Do you need to permission different plugins to different people? Do you need to plan to what that messaging is? And I think that will be again, another big evolution we'll see over the next year to two years is how people plan and think about that. Yeah.

Tom Arbuthnot: 21:50

Yeah, very true. So Kevin, if people want to find out more about their appetite, I want you to talk about your and Zoe show because I think that's great. But also, what's the best way to reach out to you?

Kevin McDonnell: 22:00

Yeah, so check out Copilot Connection, we're at Copilotconnection.com we release episodes out on a podcast and also onto YouTube. So would you like watching Which would be more the Zoe side, or if you like listening, that's more the me side, so you don't have to look at me, both options are available to people from there, and as I say, we talk a lot about the latest news, pick up key topics, and try and bring a few guests in there. We've been a bit busy and not quite as good as we'd hoped on bringing more guests, but we'll certainly see more coming along over the next few

Tom Arbuthnot: 22:33

You need a Copilot for booking guests, Kevin, clearly.

Kevin McDonnell: 22:35

We do. I have been toying with that idea, but that involves me being more structured in what I do. And that's part of the problem as well in terms of socials, Kev McDonk, KEV, MCDONK on most of those, or just look up Kevin McDonnell, Microsoft tends to find me to the right thing. No, I don't work for Microsoft, but that routes me to the right place more often than not.

Tom Arbuthnot: 22:59

Awesome Kevin. Thanks for taking the time again. Shout out for that podcast is one I listen to regularly. It's been really useful. Maybe we'll leave it a few months and get you on again. And we can talk about some of the advances in Copilot because with your new role, I feel like you're going to be fully immersed.

Kevin McDonnell: 23:12

Absolutely. I think we could even talk about licensing that time, but

Tom Arbuthnot: 23:15

Oh there's a promise. I might hold you to

Kevin McDonnell: 23:18

Yeah.

Tom Arbuthnot: 23:19

cool. Thanks Kevin.

Kevin McDonnell: 23:20

Thank you.