Ignore the Hype Surrounding the Copilot Announcement

Extract Value from Copilot for Microsoft 365 Deployments

Microsoft’s January 15 announcement removing the limitations on Copilot for Microsoft 365 purchases sparked an avalanche of commentary. Regretfully, many of the words published merely recycled text and added nothing to the debate, perhaps because the authors really don’t know too much about how Copilot for Microsoft 365 works and what it does. A knowledge vacuum often appears following the debut of new technology with a high ratio of noise to signal sprouting across many blogs and articles. I think we’re in that kind of environment now. Hopefully, the Copilot hype will calm down as knowledge takes root. We’ll see.

Lower Cost Copilot for Microsoft 365 Deployments

As a recap, the announcement boils down to two points:

• The previous requirement to purchase 300 Copilot for Microsoft 365 licenses is gone. You can buy any quantity from one up at $30/user/month. Following its usual pattern, Microsoft insists on a year-long commitment, so you sign up to pay $360/user.
• Office 365 E3 and Office 365 E5 are now eligible platforms to host Copilot for Microsoft 365. As I pointed out last August, making Microsoft 365 E3 and E5 the only eligible platforms for enterprise customers was a somewhat cynical exercise in product packaging.

Taken together, the result of the announcement makes it much easier for organizations to run Copilot for Microsoft 365 in their own environment to measure if generative AI makes sense for them. Instead of a minimum $108,000 spend in the first year plus the potential costs of upgrading base licenses to Microsoft 365 E3 or E5, an Office 365 E3 tenant can spend $3,600 for a ten-user test. That level of expenditure is much more palatable and makes it more likely that tenants will sign up to kick the Copilot tires. Currently, trial licenses are unavailable for Copilot for Microsoft 365.

Aspects to Consider About Copilot for Microsoft 365 Deployments

Until now, the organizations contemplating Copilot deployments have largely been at the high end of the enterprise sector. Usually, those organizations have large staffs available to research and plan steps in a comprehensive deployment plan. Smaller tenants might not have the same resources. If your tenant is considering signing up for Copilot for Microsoft 365, here are a few points to consider when thinking about a Copilot for Microsoft 365 deployment:

• Office 365 E3 is enough to support Copilot for Microsoft 365. E3 includes Purview solutions like sensitivity labels, retention policies, eDiscovery, and auditing, all of which are supported by Copilot operations. E5 introduces more automatic processing like auto-label policies and better eDiscovery. You do not need to upgrade to a higher-cost Office 365 or Microsoft 365 license unless you find a good reason and value to do so. Likewise, you don’t need add-on products like Viva Pulse to be successful with Copilot for Microsoft 365.
• App upgrades might be necessary. Copilot for Outlook only supports the Outlook Monarch and OWA clients. Microsoft could have implemented Copilot in such a way to support the Win32 client, but they haven’t. Copilot for Teams supports the new Teams client. Given that Microsoft will retire the old Teams client and automatically upgrade users to the new client on March 31, 2024, this shouldn’t be an issue.
• The concepts of “data in use” and “data available for use” are important. Data in use is information Copilot processes when working with an open file, including local files, files stored on a network share, or files from a third-party repository. Data available for use describes the information stored in Microsoft 365 repositories like SharePoint Online sites and OneDrive for Business accounts. Storing as much data as possible in Microsoft 365 creates an abundance of information for Copilot to interrogate when it responds to user prompts. Only items accessible to the user through search can be used by Copilot. This includes information loaded into a tenant through a third-party connector. Figuring out what data is available to Copilot, where the data is stored, and the accuracy of the data is a big part of any deployment. Cleaning up an existing SharePoint Online/OneDrive for Business environment will probably take longer than you think.
• Copilot depends on the semantic index. Think of the semantic index as a tweaked version of Microsoft Search that’s optimized for interrogation by generative AI tools like Copilot. When users create or import new information and store it in a Microsoft 365 repository, the content ends up in the semantic index.
• Good prompting is a skill for users to acquire. Prompts instruct Copilot what to do. When you ask Copilot to do something, its input to the Large Language Model includes the user prompt and implicit or explicit references to ground (add context to) the prompt. Implicit references are documents and files found by Copilot through Graph searches. Explicit references are documents specified by users when they create a prompt. In my experience, explicit references help ground Copilot better because they create a more precise set of information for the AI to work with. Implicit references can find incorrect or invalid information that finds its way into Copilot responses. Everything good flows from well-crafted prompts, so make sure that users are prepared to interact with Copilot.
• If your tenant uses sensitivity labels to protect confidential information, review the usage rights assigned in labels to ensure that Copilot can’t access documents stamped with highly sensitive labels. It’s been common practice to add rights to labels to allow anyone in an organization to have read access to documents (Figure 1). The content of protected documents are accessible by Copilot if the rights assigned to the signed-in account include View (see the content) and Extract (use the content). Now is a good time to review the rights assigned in labels and decide if the rights should be more specific (assigned to accounts and groups rather than everyone) and limited. This article explains how to generate a report of sensitivity label settings with PowerShell.

No Silver Bullet

In the deployment of any technology, it’s critical to have a clear idea of why the technology is needed, how it will be used, the expected benefits, how to measure success, and the expected user group. Microsoft’s removal of limitations surrounding Copilot for Microsoft 365 are very welcome, especially because of the reduced cost. But widening Copilot availability does not make it a silver bullet. Like any other technology, Copilot brings its own strengths and challenges. I look forward to learning more about them during 2024.