Microsoft Copilot launch date revealed: Get ready for AI on 1st November

Microsoft Copilot launch date revealed: get ready for AI on 1st November.

The moment AI enthusiasts and Microsoft 365 users have been waiting for has arrived, with the launch date announcement for Copilot General Availability.

At an event in New York today (21st September), Microsoft revealed that Enterprise users will be able to access it’s game-changing generative AI tools from the 26th of September, starting with Microsoft Copilot in Windows.

Microsoft 365 Copilot drops on the 1st of November 2023 for Enterprise customers (E3 or E5 licenses).

With today’s annoucement Copilot from Microsoft is coming in three seperate flavours; Microsoft Copilot, Bing Chat for Enterprise, and Microsoft 365 Copilot. Here’s a breakdown:

So what do we know about Copilot and its potential to turbocharge your business’s productivity and augment workforce? Here’s a recap and also some of the most frequency asked questions from our customers…

What is Microsoft 365 Copilot?

Copilot introduces a fully integrated AI experience into the M365 apps you use every day.

It combines the power of Large Language Models (LLMs) with your data and content, working alongside users to generate relevant answers and assistance in your business context.

Here are some use cases to explain:

• In Teams, Copilot can summarise your meetings, capture the main points and actions discussed, and even link to other M365 apps like Planner to create project plans on the fly.
• In Word, Copilot can create draft content for you – whether it’s an article, some research or a product description – based on some basic ‘prompts’. Because it’s integrated with your company data, it can draw through key relevant detail, like meeting notes and previous presentations – even producing job descriptions and contracts that reflect your usual written approach.
• In Outlook, Copilot will ‘separate the signal from the noise’. It can prioritise the most important messages, summarise long email threads, and even draft replies, drawing through relevant data sources and adapting to your writing style.

Read more about the functionality in our blog The Microsoft 365 apps that will have their potential augmented by Copilot

What are the potential benefits of Microsoft Copilot for your business?

In short, Copilot will be a game changer for your productivity. By taking on menial tasks, summarising meetings, creating draft content, it will free your employees from the drudgery of repetitive work and attending unnecessary meetings, and focus them on more valuable activities.

It has the potential to elevate the skills of your entire workforce, bringing the productivity of all of your employees up to the level of your higher performers, freeing up capacity and potentially reducing the need to recruit.

And it could also lead to a happier and more satisfied workforce as employees spend more time on interesting projects, while learning valuable new AI skills.

Read more about how AI will can benefit your business in our our blog Understanding AI: where can it take your business?

How does Microsoft Copilot differ from other AI tools?

Because Copilot integrates the M365 application portfolio with Microsoft Graph and AI LLMs, it provides a productivity hub specifically for your business, tapping into your business data (including your calendar, emails, chats, documents and meetings) to provide responses that draw on your content and context.

It inherits all of your company’s security, compliance and privacy policies – and because it’s embedded into the apps your teams use every day, the user experience is intuitive and streamlined. There’s no need to visit other (less secure) generative AI platforms.

How much will Microsoft Copilot cost? What is the pricing model?

Copilot will be available at $30 per user, per month – a fee that will be recouped many times over in terms of the productivity savings it introduces to your business.

It’s important to note that not all of your M365 users will need Copilot (certainly not from day one.) Get started with a handful of licenses, understand its potential, and over time you can roll it out to your wider workforce.

How secure is Microsoft Copilot?

Microsoft has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in developing Copilot, to bring the power of AI to businesses in a secure format.

Copilot is ‘Secure by design and secure by default’, meaning any data you introduce to Copilot will remain within your platforms, and will not be used to train AI models without your permission.

However it’s vitally important that you review your cyber security and data security across your estate before giving your employees access to Copilot. It will draw on any data it can, within each user’s permissions so it’s critical that you lock down these permissions in advance of deployment (get in touch with our team to help with this – we can run a Sharepoint audit and other security checks to ensure everything is in place.)

Is there a demo of Microsoft Copilot available?

Microsoft has released a number of videos that walk through the benefits of Copilot across its M365 apps.

If you’d like a chat about how it could work for your business, get in touch.

Are you prepared for Copilot?

If you need help preparing for Copilot, BCN can help. From Data to Security it’s important you put the foundations in place to maximise the impact and return for your organisation.