Has anyone executed any valuable use cases using MS CoPilot they'd be willing to share? Welcome thoughts here or links to previous posts where this might be a topic.
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We are still pretty early in our adoption of MS Co-Pilot and the use cases I could share are likely quite basic or trivial at best. I’ve personally used it to help me summarize Teams chats that are quite busy throughout the day, create initial PowerPoint drafts from a document and even used it to help draft SMART goals for team member development plans. I don’t believe this rises to the level of the request however.
Which part of Copilot? MS has an interesting marketing naming scheme where everything is names Copilot something. For example we use Copilot Chat - that is the "chatGPT like" genAI product included with our E5 licenses .
Not yet. I am just now exploring and testing with it now.
Precious few. There is a major problem. Copilot is still running on a Microsoft instance of GPT 3.5 Turbo. But if you are currently on o3-mini-high from OpenAI or the close behind Gemini or Claude, there is no comparison. It's like finding use cases for an old 1990s Motorola Brick Phone (Digital Personal Communicator - google it) while the current state of the art is an iPhone 4. Co-pilot is so far behind that it is frustrating to use, makes frequent mistakes and doesn't really have the omniscient integration across the Azure, Office 365, Sharepoint Teams space that it should to be effective at good use cases.
On the other hand. It's really great for preparing meetings minutes and for skipping meetings because of the lovely summaries. But that makes it a one trick pony. And by the way, why have meetings if they get skipped? And why so complex that you need minutes of meeting prepared by (no longer) leading edge AI? Don't we live in an Agile world?
My corollary, therefore, is that Yes, co-pilot provides on average a 10% "efficiency gain" which is about 45-50 minutes of a person's day. Nothing to laugh at, except....<br><br>In a LEAN and Agile organisation we shouldn't have been doing that work anyway!
Agreed, Paul. I would upvote this twice just for the brick phone analogy!
We have ~100 CoPilot users so I asked them to share their top three Use Cases with me. The (CoPilot generated) summary of results is below
Top 10 Copilot Use Cases / Benefits (Priority Order)
Priority Use Case / Benefit Description and Key Examples
1 Time Saving and Increased Efficiency Time saving is cited as the single most common benefit, often stated explicitly or as the direct result of nearly every application. Specific examples include saving hours monthly on searching documents or turning multi-hour manual tasks into minutes.
2 Information Retrieval, Search, and Contextual Finding Users rely heavily on Copilot for quickly locating specific source information and documents within large archives, Sharepoint folders, OneDrive, Outlook, and Teams. It is often described as superior to built-in Microsoft search functions.
3 Meeting Management (Summaries, Minutes, and Action Items) This is a highly valued, time-saving function. Copilot automates the creation of meeting summaries, minutes, and action lists from Teams calls and recorded sessions. It allows users to focus on participating rather than note-taking or to catch up efficiently on missed meetings (sometimes skipping the need to listen to the recording entirely).
4 Generating Greater Insights and Conducting Technical Research/Comparison Users leverage Copilot for in-depth research, finding technical references, competitive market analysis, and learning new industry concepts or jargon. It also enables complex tasks like comparing different engineering codes or standards quickly or cross-examining learning to identify knowledge gaps.
5 Email Assistance (Drafting, Refinement, and Summarizing Chains) Copilot is used extensively for drafting emails, refining rough replies, and adjusting tone to be friendlier or more professional. It is also valuable for screening and summarizing long email conversations to quickly understand the gist.
6 Content Drafting and Proposal/Report Generation Copilot serves as an effective starting point for generating substantial documents. This includes creating introductions and executive summaries for RFP responses, generating slide decks and presentation outlines, and quickly producing first drafts of reports or technical documentation.
7 Text Quality Improvement and Narrative Construction Copilot enhances the quality, clarity, and professionalism of text. Specific applications include converting bullet-point logic into polished narrative text for client communication, rewording 'clunky' phrasing in technical writing, and ensuring the tone and grammar are correct in sensitive communications.
8 Coding, Scripting, and Formula Assistance Users apply Copilot to technical automation and troubleshooting, particularly within Microsoft apps. This includes writing code in Python and VBA, generating formulas in Excel, refactoring scripts, and creating custom tools.
9 General Document and Content Summarization Beyond meeting minutes, Copilot is routinely used to synthesize large documents, technical reports, and lengthy external materials, providing a quick overview to focus reading efforts. This speeds up document review significantly.
10 Data Analysis and Excel Specific Manipulation Copilot assists with handling spreadsheet data, such as suggesting complex formulas, performing data cleansing and analysis, creating comment response sheets from PDFs, and generating charts and visualizations.