How to get OpenAI’s GPT-4 and DALL-E for free

You will probably be aware that Chat-GPT offers both a free tier (Chat GPT3) and a paid “plus” tier which costs $20 and upwards and includes more features and the new GPT-4 engine.

  • The free tier is limited, is based on the “older” ChatGPT-3.5 model and doesn’t include any image creation tools.
  • The Plus tier costs $20 and gives you ChatGPT-4 (the newest fasted and accurate model) and the ability to create AI images using DALL-E and ability to web search!
OpenAI ChatGPT Pricing Models. Free version and Plus version, which is $20 per user per month.

However, you can get access and use (legally) all the plus features (and more) including GPT-4 and DALL-E for free – by using Microsoft Copilot in Edge (you may know this as Bing Chat).

How to get all the features of ChatGPT-4 and DALL-E for free.

Microsoft Copilot is the brand Microsoft have given to their AI technology which is all built on the very same ChatGPT technology built by OpenAI. In face Microsoft own a significant portion of OpenAI and have been developing together for years.

Here’s why you really want to take a look.

  • Microsoft Copilot is 100% Free.
  • It uses the latest Chat GPT-4 models and you also get access to Image Designer which is built on DALL-E version 3.
  • It is available as a dedicated app on iOS and Android,
  • It is built in to Windows 11 (and soon Windows 10)
  • It is also built into Microsoft’s Edge browser (this is built on Chromium technology – so is essentially Chrome but better!).

Corporate users also get the same free version but with Enterprise data protection, meaning chat data and content is not used to train their consumer models.

Introduction to Microsoft Copilot

Copilot is Microsoft’s AI powered Generative AI tools built on the latest Open AI versions of Chat GPT large language model (LLM) and the DALL-E image creation technology. By using Copilot, users get access to this for free without having to pay the $20 per month subscription fee for ChatGPT Plus.

To get Copilot, you just need to head over the Apple Store or Google Play Store and search for Microsoft Copilot.

You don’t need to sign up, but if you do sign in with your Microsoft account (you can create one for free if you don’t have one) , you get access to more features and can have more detailed and longer conversations with the chatbot. This is definitely worth doing if you plan to use Chat GPT / Copilot more than a couple times a day…

This offers amazing value. Copilot is a free and amazing tool that uses the state-of-the-art AI models from OpenAI, including GPT-4 and DALL-E 3. Copilot gives you access to the same innovation and functionality that Microsoft is embedding into its premium products and services for both individual and business customers. DALL-E 3 is an impressive AI model that can produce stunning photos, artwork, stickers, backgrounds, and other images from your instruction / prompt.

Getting Started With Copilot – What can it do?

Welcome to Copilot. This is the ultimate chat tool for creating and exploring amazing content. If you have used Chat GPT before, you already know how powerful and fun it is. But Copilot takes it to the next level. With Copilot, you can not only use chat to search, but also use it to access and manipulate data from the internet (how cool is that?), and even generate stunning images with your words. And if you use Copilot from the Edge browser, you can also analyse and work on content from any web-page – that’s awesome, right? Don’t believe me? Just see for yourself.

Getting started is super simple – whether you are using the browser, Windows 11, or a mobile app. You can simply use the ‘Ask me anything’ prompt to type your question or instruction (this is called a prompt), upload an image, or paste some text in, or tap the microphone icon to speak to Copilot. Copilot has the ability to reply with audio as well as displaying results on screen which is nice.

The following images show the different starting screen on different devices.

Some things Copilot can help you with.

Copilot (as the prompts suggest) can be used to perform a powerful range of text and image based tasks, research and more. For example, you could use it to help you…

This table, show the outputs of these steps based on the prompts I used. Why not follow along and adapt the prompts to suit your need. You may need to tweak them to get the desired result.

Desired OutcomeSample Prompt (instruction)
A story about a car that can fly.Write me a story about a family that take their new car out for a drive only to find it has the ability to fly. Make the story funny and limit it to 3 paragraphs“.
Drafting an email about a specific topic.I need to write an email to my team explaining that we are planning to restructure the team to align to our new coprate vision. Draft me an email that will be both empatetic but also direct about the change that is happening.”
Summarise a documentOpen a PDF document in the browser. “Summarise the key points of this document into 3 sections including a summary, key points and a conclusion“.
Compare different things (such as products) and present the information in a preferred (e.g., a table) format.I want to go on holiday with my 2 young children over xmas next year where the weather will be warm and sunny and near a beach. Create a table with some different places we could go that are good for children, expected costs per person and the location. Ensure flight times are under 5 hours.
Rewrite a body of text (document, email body, report).Instruction: Open a document you are working in word or powerpoint in the browser. Highlight a body of text and select “write” from the context menu.
Text based awesome things Copilot can help with or perform for you.


This table, show the outputs of these steps based on the prompts I used. Why not follow along and adapt the prompts to suit your need. You may need to tweak them to get the desired result. You can create these prompts directly in Copilot or for more control and fun. Just go to. https://designer.microsoft.com .

Desired OutcomeSample Prompt (instruction)
Create social media content about a [brand launch] or something else.“Create me an image for social media to promote my new webinar I am launching in March on AI technolog in the retail industry.”
Create an image such as an illustration for the story we just created above.“I have written a story about a family that take their new car out for a drive only to find it has the ability to fly. Create me some illustrations of a flying car taking off for the story using in coloured pencil sketches for a childrens book.”
Create an image for a blog site or report. I need to write a financial report for the return on investment of AI technology in the enegery sector. Create me a modern, line art image I can use on the front cover. Make it look professional with minimum colours”.
Explain an image by asking questions about a local image or doc on the webUse the upload image box to upload an image from your phone or computer and then ask Copilot to “describe the image or create you some alt-text”.
Recreate an image using AI. Upload an image and then ask Copilot to create a new image based on this. For example: “Create a new image that uses the same background but adds some farm animals ouitside the building
Image based awesome things Copilot can help you with or perform.

Here’s a bonus cool prompt you can try.. I have endless fun with this..

Vibrant red eyes, dark green baby dinosaur in a forest with leaves hiding some people his cute but fierce face. BLACK background with faint outlines of forests and mountains in the background. studio photography, close up

Great Designer Image Creator Prompt.
Created with Microsoft Image Designer

Conclusion

Microsoft’s Copilot app is now available for iOS and Android users. It ships with a ton of features, including the capability to generate answers to queries, draft emails, and summarize text. You can also generate images using the tool by leveraging its DALL-E 3 technology. It also ships with OpenAI’s latest LLM, GPT-4, and you can access all these for free.

Wait.. There’s more.

OK, so there is more.. You can also opt to purchase Copilot Pro…. For £19 pupm for individual for Microsoft Family subscriptions you get aceess to event better GPT4-Turbo, faster speeds and much more more.

Read about Copilot Pro here..

Five things to know about Microsoft 365 Copilot

I have run well over a dozen Business Briefing sessions with customers over the past month and whilst still not available to (most of) us yet, one thing is for certain – Microsoft 365 Copilot will be an absolute game-changer for any business that uses Microsoft 365 as their primary productivity and collaboration toolset.

If you are already leveraging Teams, OneDrive, SharePoint, Office, and even apps like Forms, Loop and Viva, the way you work with these apps, with your teams and customers is about to be turbo charged – bringing huge benefits to every employee who has a Copilot license.

This blog covers the 5 key things I’ve been talking to business’ about in the run up to release of Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Recap – what is Microsoft 365 Copilot

Microsoft 365 Copilot will be as deep rooted into Office 365 as Windows is on moder desktop and will be as revolutionary and disruptive as the hype. Whilst we may have “heard this before”, my early experience of Microsoft 365 Copilot tells me that this goes beyond any form of productivity gains we’ve been promised or seen before.

Microsoft 365 Copilot will be an absolute game-changer for any business that uses Microsoft 365 as their primary productivity and collaboration toolset.

Copilot won’t just be for IT and the techies either – in fact, IT may benefit the least!

Copilot will help increase the speed to get work done, improve the quality and help people get more from your tools and data. It should help increase profit by automating tasks, enhancing productivity, and improving skills.

Copilot will be accessible to users through natural language and starts with a prompt from you in the associated Office 365 App through an approach called “grounding”. Microsoft 365 Copilot will help with anything and everything. It can help you with tasks such as analysing data in Excel, summarising documents, creating presentations from scratch or content elsewhere in PowerPoint, automatically minuting meeting and assigning follow-up tasks and providing detailed responses to any clarifying questions.

There is so much excitement for Microsoft 365 Copilot but also many things’ organisations need to do to prepare to ensure they get the best return on their investment – yes, it’s an investment, at circa $30 per user per month.

Here’s my five key things to be excited about and to make sure you prepare for….

Whether you are a business leader, manager, or a member of team, you need to understand how Copilot works and how it can benefit your role and your organisation. Otherwise, you will find your competition are using it to their advantage.

#1 It’s still a waiting game….

Whilst Microsoft announced Microsoft 365 Copilot back in March 2023 and made it available to an extremely limited (twenty-six) US organisations, the sizzle videos Microsoft released, which dominated social media has sparked huge interest, questions, and speculation about what is coming.

Then, in June 2023, Microsoft expanded the availability of the product to an “invited” list of around six hundred customers. Microsoft said they also expect to release Microsoft 365 Copilot in the “coming months” but realistically I think that this is still nine to twelve months away, though I expect the private preview will be available to more organisations around the time of Microsoft Ignite at the back end of 2023.

Whilst we hate to wait – there is a lot of preparation that most organisations will need to do to plan, prepare (and pay) for Microsoft 365 Copilot to get the best value from it.

We also now know that Microsoft 365 Copilot will set you back around $30 pupm based on the pricing Microsoft announced back in June 2023.

#2 – Quality of your data will be critical to success of Copilot

Microsoft 365 Copilot is powered by a large language model (LLM) that can access and analyse information from the Internet (it’s built on ChatGPT-4) but most importantly (and the main differentiation of this and ChatGPT), your organisational data.

Microsoft 365 Copilot will be deep rooting into your Office 365 environment, giving it the ability to leverage your Outlook messages, Teams chat, calls and meetings, OneDrive and SharePoint documents, Loop components, CRM data (Dynamics 365), Azure Files, and other internal and external data (via plug-ins) that it is permitted to access – and act on this data (at your command) to provide you create new content (from multiple sources), analyse data, compare content or re-write work directly from within your Office applications and services.

The other thing that stands Microsoft 365 Copilot aside from other AI tools like ChatGPT is a new indexing tool coming to Microsoft 365 called Semantic Index for Copilot, which is a sophisticated map of all your user and company data. For example, when you ask Copilot about the “March Sales Report,” it doesn’t simply look for documents with those words in the file name or body, it instead understands that “sales reports are produced by Kelly on the finance team and created in Excel.” And it uses that conceptual understanding to determine your intent and help you find what you need.

Sounds incredible right? Yes, but Microsoft 365 Copilot’s performance will depend primarily on what you ask it to do (more on that later), and the quality and completeness of your data. If your data is inaccurate, has multiple conflicting versions, or the permissions/access control are not correct, it may not give you the best results or even be able access the information. There is also the danger that it will have access to things you think it shouldn’t if your data governance and protection need work!

Therefore, if you do nothing else while you wait patiently for it, you need to ensure that your data is clean, updated, and consistent. The quality and security of your data has never been so important.

This is something that will need addressing and it is something that Microsoft strongly recommend doing now (while you are waiting for Copilot to be available).

Teh success of Microsoft 365 Copilot within your organisation will not be Copilot itself - it will be your organisational data that Copilot relies upon to do its job. 


#3 The impact of Copilot will be huge for everyone.

We’ve all (most likely) used ChatGPT or Bing Chat Enterprise to help us write or summarise text, but with Microsoft 365 Copilot, employees will be able to get a jump start into whatever task they are starting or finishing.

This is because, with Copilot, Microsoft have not just added a tool that can access Generative Chat services (think Bing Chat Enterprise – which is powered by ChatGPT4).

Once you have your hands on Microsoft 365 Copilot, employees will be able to focus on the part of work that needs real human and skilled input, using the power of AI to get started quicker, improve quality of our work, and spend less time on mundane tasks. Microsoft 365 Copilot should be able to assist people in creating high-quality content in a a much shorter amount of time.

Using AI to improve how we work – Image (c) Microsoft.

You will have seen from the demos that every Office app will have a Copilot button, which once clicked will call your Copilot assistant’s chat box right from within your application.

For example….

  • In Excel – Copilot can help analyse data and generate charts, creating formulas from free text input, visualise information better or look for trends across different cells, sheets, or workbooks. It will also be able to help with data management by suggesting content and formatting options for your spreadsheets
  • In Word it will help you write documents, curate executive summaries, create proposals or summarise from emails, presentations, or meeting notes. It will be able to write, edit, summarise, and creates right alongside you with only a brief prompt. Copilot will help you create a first draft of document, bringing in information from across your organisation and the internet as needed. Copilot can add content to existing documents, summarize text, and rewrite sections or the entire document to make it more concise.
  • In PowerPoint – Copilot can help you turn your ideas into stunning presentations. Copilot will be able to transform existing written documents into decks complete with speaker notes and sources or start a new presentation from a simple prompt. It will be able to condense lengthy presentations at the click of a button and let you use natural language commands to adjust layouts, reformat text, and perfectly time animations. Microsoft call it your “storytelling partner”
  • In Outlook – According to a report by McKinsey, the average employees spend 28% of their time reading and responding to emails. Copilot will help you triage your inbox, summarise long email threads, and generate replies for you. Copilot will also help you with tasks such as scheduling meetings, creating tasks, and setting reminders and can also help with email management by suggesting content and formatting options for your messages.
  • In Teams – Copilot will help you summarise and prepare for meetings by combing through all your documents, emails, meetings, files, and resources to get you information you need that is highly relevant. It can streamline tasks such as scheduling meetings, creating agendas, and taking notes during meetings. It can also help you with tasks such as creating tasks, setting reminders, and managing your to-do list. Copilot can also help you with team collaboration by suggesting content and formatting options for your messages.
Copilot won't be limited to Microsoft 365 either. Copilot is coming to Dynamics 365, Teams, Viva and of course Power Platform. Copilot is also coming to Windows 11, Bing and of course their developer tools GitHub. There's even a Security Copilot for your Microsoft 365 Admins and SOC.

#4 Copilot “should” pay for itself.

Watch the sizzle video again – Microsoft 365 Copilot will be able to do all the things shown here just by chatting to the Copilot chat bot. it and will also suggest things proactively.

At $30 per user per month, this can add a lot of cost to your cloud subscriptions, but rest assured, Copilot will save vast amounts of wasted time, which will increase productivity (letting people work on other things). Copilot is there to aid every person do almost any task in any app.

For example

While you may not be able to test this until you have your hand on a pilot yourselves, most of the organisations I have spoken to know that eventually investment in AI has the potential to more than pay for itself. With Microsoft 365 Copilot, this $30 (£25) pupm, should improve output and productivity, save time (which saves money) and enabled people to get more done quickly (which saves money) depending on how you look at it to more than £25 pupm in investment.

So, £25 a month is around 75p per day. If you have someone earning £50,000 a year, and they work ~250 working days then this is about £200 a day or £25 an hour.

Now, say they host/run TWO meetings a month and spend 30 mins writing up minutes and action plans after the meeting – then that’s about one hour @ £25 cost.

If, instead of doing this themselves, Microsoft 365 Copilot could write up the minutes and take actions just for that one meeting then we have technically saved that £25 for an investment of £25 (per month) – so we have already broken even after one Copilot run meeting!

Once you’ve run a pilot and tested this out, I am pretty certain almost every person or role would benefit from Copilot and even if not everyone, you’ll want to look at a time and motion study (or mini assessment anyway) and look at the ways Copilot can squeeze an additional 30 mins a day in time back or revenue generating tasks.

#5 – It won’t be perfect so make sure you “check it’s work”

Like all transformative technologies, there are tasks that AI is not well suited for, so it’s important to be aware of the potential drawbacks.

AI-produced content and outputs may contain inaccuracies, biases, or sensitive materials because they were trained on information from the internet, as well as other sources. AI may not know about recent events yet, and struggles to understand and interpret sarcasm, irony, or humor. Please remember that it’s not a person.

Microsoft advise that “It’s important that you review any content the AI generates for you to make sure it has accurately produced what you wanted.” – this means you are responsible for the content and checking its sources!!

Remember again, that Copilot’s ability to do the best job will be reliant on what you ask and where the data comes from that it uses, so remember – rubbish in, rubbish out. Your pilot and testing of Copilot are critical in making sure users get the best experience.

Microsoft 365 Copilot pricing finally been announced.

Back in March, Microsoft announced the upcoming availability of Microsoft 365 Copilot, an AI powered service that would bring generative AI features into Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, and the rest of the Microsoft Cloud which has the potential to fundamentally change the way we work with apps, data and services and ever…

CoPilot will work alongside your Microsoft 365 apps and services and leverages the same built in security and privacy in mind so that data is always safe. It respects existing Microsoft 365 security and privacy settings as well as respects individual and group permission policies. This means that you can use it to generate reports, summaries, or other documents without worrying about data leaks or unauthorised access.

How much will Microsoft 365 Copilot cost?

Until now, there has been no indication as to pricing or available (Microsoft 365 Copilot is currently in a closed private preview), but this week, Microsoft used their global partner conference to announced pricing.

Microsoft 365 Copilot for commercial customers will cost an extra $30 per user per month on top of what organisations pay for their Microsoft 365 licenses. There is also minimum base license requirement (for the add on) of Microsoft 365 E3, E5, or Business Standard or Professional, though I expect that large enterprise organisations will be able to get a cheaper rate on Enterprise Agreements.

Microsoft 365 Copilot will cost
$30 per user per month for commercial customers.

What about other Sectors?

Pricing for Public Sector, Healthcare/NHS, Edu and Not for Profit has not yet been announced.

Cheaper than “expectations“?

Rumours of what organisations in the Early Access Program (EAP) had been paying led to speculations that costs could be closer to $40 per use per month so this price is actually lower that what some thought, though other rumours suggested Microsoft “might” bundle it in Microsoft 365 E5.

What do you think – how much were you expecting Microsoft 365 Copilot to cost?

When will Microsoft 365 Copilot be available?

No dates have yet been annouced for wider preview, public preview or General Availability (which is the cycle Microsoft usually follows for new products and services.

Microsoft 365 Copilot is still currently early access preview testing (EAP) with 600 paying enterprise customers.

Bing Chat Enterprise

Microsoft also yesterday announced Bing Chat Enterprise, a new version of the ChatGPT-4 powered Bing Chat service that is now built into their Edge browser and Windows 11 (currently in preview). Bing Chat Enterprise’s main difference will be its privacy model which will ensure user and business data are protected and will not leak outside the boundaries of the organisation.

Bing Chat Enterprise

“Bing Chat Enterprise gives your organization AI-powered chat for work with commercial data protection,”

Yusaf Mehdi and Jared Spataro |Microsoft

Microsoft said that unlike it’s AI rivals “Chat data is not saved, and Microsoft has no eyes-on access, which means no one can view your data. And your data is not used to train the models.”

Bing Chat Enterprise will be “free”

Unlike Copilot, Bing Chat Enterprise will be available to existing Microsoft 365 customers at no additional cost, and Microsoft also said that they also plan to offer a standalone version for $5 per user per month.

Data privacy has been a major concern for many companies, who are putting in contols to stop employees using generative AI chat tools. Global organisations including Samsung, Verizon, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, and Goldman Sachs are all among the companies that restricted or banned the use of public verisons of Bing Chat, ChatGPT, Google Bard etc. Bing Chat Enterprise’s privacy guard is designed to enable organisation to leverage these AI tools with peace of mind.

When will Bing Chat Enterprise be available?

Bing Chat Enterprise is currently available in preview and is accessible from within Microsoft Edge or bing.com/chat.

When Windows Copilot (not to be confused with Microsoft 365 Copilot) is released to the public in a Windows update later this year, Bing Chat Enterprise will also be available from within Windows 11. You can test out Windows Copilot today as a Windows Insider.

What is Semantic Index for Copilot?

Semantic Index for Copilot promises to help organisations get ready for AI within their workplace. What is it? How does it work? and Why will we need it?

Last week as part of Microsoft’ annoucement about the next stage of the early previews of Copilot, they also annouced Semantic Index for Copilot, which will allow organisations to better prepare their data and users for Copilot by creating a “sophisticated map” of user and corporate data.

Image (c) Microsoft

This map is formed by encoding and indexing the keyword searches by uses into a vector that combines the phrsses, meanings, relationships and context of the data. This map is used to help Microsoft 365 Copilot to essentially learn more about your organisation (privacy and data protection being preserved of course), allowing it to better respond to user queries or “prompts.”

Available soon (for no additional cost) for Microsoft 365 Enterprise [E3 and E5] customers as well as Microsoft 365 Business Standard and Premium, it will work with the Copilot subsystem and the Microsoft Graph to create a sophisticated map of all the users, data and content in your organisation. It’s purpose will be to identify relationships between people and data, helping it to create important connections between them. Organisations will be able to use this to test the responses, answers and deductions formed by Copilot to help clean up, secure and better govern data eliminating the “garbage in, garbage out”, ensuring it will be able to deliver relevant, actionable responses to prompts based on data held within the company. This little video from Microsoft helps bring the process to life:

Microsoft video on Semantic Index for Copilot

Copilot’s new Semantic Index feature should help the chatbot locate and fetch the correct data requested by a user rather than spitting out every result based on a keyword search.

As the technology community eagerly anticipates the wider release of Copilot, Microsoft’s ongoing efforts to enhance its functionality and expand its accessibility represent a significant step forward in harnessing the power of AI to empower users and streamline work processes. Last week the early preview was extended to 600 (invite only) organisations across the US.

Microsoft also shared new upcoming improvements to their existing products which will become AI infused. These annoucements include the integration of Copilot into Whiteboard, Outlook, OneNote, Loop, and Viva Learning. They also said that new image generation features powered by DALL-E are coming to PowerPoint.

Finally, a reminder from Microsoft that they are committed to ensure tbeir AI solutions adhere to their strict Responsible AI Standard while providing meaningful benefits to their customers.

Microsoft’s Work Trend Index reenfoced our ‘need’ for AI

In order to further remind us, why we lift like Copilot is needed in today’s work environments, Microsoft also revealed the results of their 2023 Annual Work Trend Index.

This report is based on surveys of 31,000 individuals spread across 31 countries. Microsoft’s findings this year indicated that there has been a drastic increae in the volume of assigned work and the pace required from employees. The report claims that leaders, managers and workers are more looking towards AI solutions to reduce their respective workloads, rather than being scared about jobs it may replace.

The work trend index also highlights the following key points..

  • 62% of employees spend unnecessary time searching for information, as well as communicating and coordinating across teams, leaving little focus time
  • Nearly two-thirds of the respondents noted that they did not find enough time to do their actual job
  • 70% of respondents would prefer delegating some of their workload to AI copilots
  • With the rise in AI-powered solutions, 49% are concerned about job security
  • Managers are 2x more likely to empower their employees with AI rather than replace them with it
  • 82% of enterprise leaders believe that their employees will require new skills in this age of AI, including prompt engineering and enhancing their workflows by integrating AI
  • There has been a 79% year-over-year increase in LinkedIn job postings which have used words like “GPT” and “GAI” (generative artificial intelligence)

More reading..

Preparing for Microsoft Copilot

Everyone got very excited when Microsoft introduced the world to Microsoft Copilot back in March this year and just yesterday they reached a new milestone, after annoucing a private preview with just 600 global customers.

But… One of the questions I get asked a lot (between colleagues, partners and customers) is “…are there things we need to do to be ready for Copilot when it becomes available”.

The simple answer is yes – if you want it to work as expected

The longer answer is “it depends” on if you plan to use it, how well your current data is structured, organised and governed, and what processes you have in place around user education, training and change management.

Based on the work I have been doing with Microsoft, this list is aimed to provide the key things, suggestions and considerations for IT, managers and leadership on things you’ll want to get ship-shape while we wait for Copilot to be more generally available, which my sources tell me will be late 2023 to Q1 2024.

1. Get your data in shape.

The reason Microsoft 365 is the productivity suite of choice for so many (arguably most) organisations is because it brings together applications, data, groups, users and services into a common and integrated suite, as well as providing thousands of connectors to allow organisations to connect third-party apps and data into mix.

Powered by the Microsoft Graph, Microsoft 365 already has the power to connect people, teams, and organisations across all their apps and services in an intelligent and context aware, with AI powered services scattered across the Microsoft 365 apps and services you use every day….

With Microsoft Copilot….this will move to a whole new level.

Copilot will put conversational AI at the front and centre of every app and service you know and use. Leveraging personal context, re-generative learning and of course the Microsoft Graph, Copilot will make its’ own deductions on what you ask, what you mean, and how you work. Whilst it will learn and evolve, it will of course, still be dependent on your organisational data, and how its structured, governed and secured.

This means if you have say 50 different documents spread out in 15 different locations that talk about your company strategy or business objectives, and only one of them is the up-to-date version. How will Copilot know which version is correct when it needs to surface information based on a request? In the same way, if the management and reporting structure, job titles and other information is incorrect in Azure AD, Copilots’ decisions and advice around people will also likely be incorrect.

To help, organisations get AI-ready, Microsoft have announced that they will soon start to roll out a service known as Semantic Index for Copilot. This is a new service coming to Microsoft 365 which will create a sophisticated map of your data to help you test how Copilot will ingest and act on your data. Image for example a sales manager asking for “FY23 Sales Report,”. Copilot will be data and context aware, meaning that it will not simply look for documents that contain keywords in the filename or text body. Instead, Copilot will try to “understand” and “learn” about who within the organisation produces such reports, when they are shared, and where they are shared to.

Microsoft say that Semantic Index for Copilot will be a vital tool to help organisations ensure that employees will get predicable, relevant, accurate, and actionable responses to their asks of Copilot and will help your organisation to “tweak” their data lifecycle and governance to ensure that the data Copilot acts on is correct and accessible (or not) by the right people.

What should you do?
1. Check and refine your SharePoint and Teams lifecycle, governance and compliance policies
2. Speak to your Microsoft partner about a funded data governance workshop
3. Review and update Active Directory (or connect to HR to ensure these are up-to-date)
4. Look out for the release of Semantic Index for Copilot to "test your data"

2. Get your security in order

In a similar fashion to making sure our data is correct from a version and validty perspective, if we dont get our security and access control polcies in shape, we risk Copilot duiscovering data that a employee or team may not “meant to have access to”.

In the much the same way that the Office 365 apps “discover” the data around you – presenting files that your collegaues and teams are working on together, Copilot will do the same but on a whole new level, as what is searches for, indexes and uses, will be instructed by the user rather than simply surfaced.

Just like the rest of Microsoft 365, Copilot will adhere to the security, privacy, data governance and data sensitivity policies that has been set-up within your organisation, and will not provide information that the user doesn’t have access to. It may suggest for, example, “you dont have access to that, you may need to request this from Pam in accounts”.

The potential problem of course is that many (ok most) organisations have a sprawl of Teams sites, poor or inconsistent data governance, and inadequate user training, meaning that put simply, you may not realise the sheer amount of information and documents that is being shared within your organisation, and more importantly who actually has access to what data and how many copies may exist and where!

We all worry about Security – do we have MFA? Do we have conditional access configured? Are account protected? Is sensitive information protected? etc. We know the slogan “hackers dont hack in, they login” – just imagine if you have Copilot, and a users’ identity gets compromised. They log in, and with Copilot at their fingertips, they don’t need to worry about where stuff is stored as Copilot will do all the discovery for them!

So what can you do?
1. Review and refine your document management, security and privacy policies - perhaps introduce or enforce DLP and Data Classifcation - aka Microsoft Purview
2. Review your security posture, MFA enforcement, risk based conditional access etc
3. Create straightforward instructions and train people where to store documents and how to protect and secure them
4. Run a pilot and look at adoption data loss prevention and information classification to protect sensitive data.
5. Speak to your Microsoft partner about a funded workshop for 1, 2 and 3.

3. Explore, Plan, Experiment – but treat it as organisational change!

The release of Microsoft Copilot is still a little way away (it is a closed Private Preview today with around 600 global organisations) and there are currently no dates on the roadmap for a public preview mainstream release. There is also no pricing yet about pricing.

What we do know is – it is coming and it will fundamentally impact and change how your people and teams will work. Yes, there is still an element of hype, lots of desire to test it out, loads and loads of questions and lots of unknowns.

Communication and training is going to be a key part of sucess. How do you interface with AI? Yes its’ intelligent, but it’s not a human, therefore people need to be taught how to best work with Copilot. Bear in mind most people use around ten percent of the functionality of say Teams (with most just using basic functions like chat and calling), but to get the most from it, users need to know what to expect, how to use it and how the organisation wants (or not) employees to use it…

Create a pilot group and mini success team. Use this team to keep up-to-date with the news and blogs and above all make sure leadership, management and IT are “in the know”.

Start communicating your plans for Copilot and AI in general. Employees will and should have questions. Are there roles that might change or not be needed? Will you stop hiring? Will you wait and see? It will be important to talk to, and listen to employees, and ideally form a “success with AI” unit, bringing people together from different parts of the business, to discover the challenges they face in their everyday work and how they think and hope AI will help them.

Above all – think of this like a project (one of continual change). Depending on your business, AI will have an impact, and the whole organisation will need to understand and embrace this change (once we have it all working of course). Consider an AI abmassador and follow your usual approach to change management with a roadmap, PoCs, pilots and feedback groups so you hit it head on, with ideas, and a solid vision but with room for hiccups, course changes and surprises on the way.

That sounds like a lot - what can we do?
1. Build a success unit (could be a Team site of Viva Community)
2. Get onto early adoptor programmes when availble, go to the AI conferences and start to leverage demos etc when available.
3. Talk to your peers, partners, and Microsoft Team and look out for funded workshops which will likely be available from summer.
4. Read Microsoft's Worklab report on working with next generation AI (it's a good read).

4. Keep Calm – it is coming but there is time to prepare

Microsoft has just announced the launch of their Microsoft 365 Copilot Early Access Program. It’s an invitation-only, paid preview program that’s set to roll out to only 600 clients across the globe at first in the coming weeks.

They say that they have received overwhelming feedback from their initial early preview clients, they have been “testing the concepts” with. They say those clients have indicated huge benefits to business and the ways in which it can transform and reshape work. In recent months, Microsoft have also released further information around how Copilot will will impact other applications such as Viva, Dynamics 365, Teams and more with new capabilities being announced almost weekly.

This new generation of AI will remove the drudgery of work and unleash creativity…There’s an enormous opportunity for AI-powered tools to help alleviate digital debt, build AI aptitude, and empower employees

Satya Nadella |Chairman and CEO |Microsoft

We will know more as we move forward – there are lots of moving parts – previews, public previews, (potentially) governments getting in the way, data soverignty issues (today data is only processed in the US and not local in local geo), licensing prices and of course availabilty….

In fact – this is probably already out of date as its a rapid moving landscape, and this is just the tip of the iceberg and just Microsoft.

What should you do?
1. Keep checking with your Microsoft team,. your partner and the Microsoft 365 Roadmap
2. Start thinking roles that will be positively affected by AI in the workplace. Speak to users, buid your success team.
3. Think about new skills your teams will need to work along side AI.
4. Read Microsoft's Worklab report on working with next generational AI (it's a good read).

What is next in CoPilot?

A good question….

When Microsoft annouced Copilot in March, where they showed the value concepts in apps like teams, Powerpoint and Excel, they said that this was “just the beginning”. Over the last couple of months, Microsoft have continued to tease new Copilot capabilities to bring AI to every part of Microsoft apps and services. The key annoucements (since the actual annoucement include):

  • Copilot in Whiteboard – which will make Microsoft Teams meetings and brainstorms more creative and effective. Using natural language, you will be able to ask Copilot to generate ideas, organize ideas into themes, create designs that bring ideas to life and summarise whiteboard content.
  • Copilot in Outlook will offer coaching tips and suggestions on clarity, sentiment and tone to help users write more effective emails and communicate more confidently.
  • Copilot in OneNote will use prompts to draft plans, generate ideas, create lists and organize information to help customers find what they need easily.
  • Copilot in Loop will helps your team stay in sync by quickly summarising all the content on your Loop page to keep everyone aligned and able to collaborate effectively.
  • Copilot in Viva Learning will use a natural language chat interface to help users create a personalized learning journey including designing upskilling paths, discovering relevant learning resources and scheduling time for assigned trainings.

Q&A – This will evolve

QuestionWhat we knowSource
Where will the data be processed by Copilot?Microsoft have said that currently all processing will take place is the US. It will eventually be regionalised based on customer tennant. No time scales yetMay 2023: Microsoft 365 Conference
Will Copilot respect data seciuroty and soverienty?Yes -Microsoft have made it clear that Copilots’ sphere of access will be limited to the user context in which it runs, goverened by your organisation’s policies. May 2023: Microsoft 365 Conference.
When will Copilot enter public preview?No dates annouced yet. Be sure to keep an eye on the Microsoft 365 Roadmap.
Will there be charge for Copilot.No offical news but the expectation is yes.
Q&A Table.

What do you think?

Like you, I am still working out what this means for our business, my teams and my people. I welcome your feedback, thoughts and ideas.