Blog posts

Microsoft 365 Copilot (M365 Copilot or Copilot) is a new feature that helps you work smarter and faster with the power of artificial intelligence (AI).

In today's fast-paced business landscape, efficiency and productivity are paramount. Organizations are constantly seeking ways to streamline their workflows and optimize time. Enter Microsoft Copilot, a ground-breaking AI-powered tool designed to revolutionize the way we all work.

In this comprehensive blog (updated 18 July 2023 with pricing), we will delve into the key features, availability, pricing, benefits and much more, helping you make an informed decision about integrating this game-changing solution into your business. Once you have read this, you might want to read about how to Get your People and Content Ready for Microsoft 365 Copilot.

As mentioned in my previous article, we have integrated ChatGPT in our Atlas product. This was both challenging and fun. The OpenAI API is well documented, so is the Azure OpenAI service. However, one of the things that is not completely documented, is the Stream option. This allows you to call the API and get the response as a stream of data, so you are getting data from the very first second, and you don´t have to wait for the entire response. Note that depending on your request, ChatGPT can take some seconds until you get the response, so from a UX point of view, it is potentially a better experience if you start showing data while the response is fully completed.

Rubbish in. Rubbish out.

Anyone involved in building or delivering search solutions, or enterprise content management more widely, will subscribe to this mantra. Which, if said in more diplomatic terms, means that if you don't have good content, how can you expect to have good outcomes? Such as high quality search results.

Unless you are in a desert island with no internet connection, you have heard about ChatGPT. In its own words (and I really mean it, as I have asked ChatGPT for a short summary about it):

When considering Artificial Intelligence (AI), I think we can all agree that it fosters a wide range of discussions - from the deeply philosophical, through science-fiction to highly technical. It is a somewhat divisive topic, with a huge fanbase and an equally large number of concerned parties. Most do though meet in the middle and agree on a pragmatic stance that - if we are to have AI, we probably cannot avoid it even if we wanted to - then we need to wrap some governance or protective measures and controls around it. 

Aside from all that however, one aspect that has generally been overlooked is the rise of that I would call "Shadow AI" in organisations.

Microsoft 365 Copilot (Copilot) is developed by Microsoft and integrated into your Microsoft 365 tenant (subject to licensing and so forth), and was announced to the wider world on March 16, 2023.

When you use Copilot, you will experience it in two predominant ways.

• First, Copilot is embedded within Microsoft 365 apps such as Outlook, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Teams and more.
• Second, it is surfaced through a new app called "Business Chat".

A common question that comes up when discussing ChatGPT in the context of knowledge, document and information management, is something along the lines of: "When or how will ChatGPT be able to discover our enterprise content, such as SharePoint Pages or Documents stored in Teams and SharePoint?"

In late 2020, Microsoft released SharePoint Syntex. A Microsoft 365 content service, SharePoint Syntex adds Artificial Intelligence content service capabilities to SharePoint document libraries, creating content understanding models that automatically classify the many and various documents in those libraries. Essentially SharePoint Syntex enables businesses to efficiently use the information stored in its documents.

Right now, anything that optimizes your organization’s ability to make the most of its hard-earned collective intelligence and to improve productivity, is going to be attracting greater attention.

(Ha. Who would have thought that SharePoint document libraries would become a sexy tech topic – again?)

In this blog:

The amazing thing about Microsoft Viva Topics is how well the AI engine is able to discover and group together lots of content from across your SharePoint Online estate. It is really quite phenomenal to see Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing in action like this and we're getting the same positive and excited reaction from our clients who are using Viva Topics.

Watch a short video of Microsoft Viva Topics as it appears just after the initial set-up process in ClearPeople's own Microsoft 365 tenant.