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Copilot has made a large impact on small and medium-sized businesses over the past year, and we are excited to share how wave two of Microsoft 365 Copilot innovations announced today can help you achieve even more for your business, no matter the size.
In a recent survey of companies with up to 300 employees, business leaders responded they are experiencing on average a 12% faster time to market for new products and services.1
Our customers tell us they are experiencing the impact of Copilot in many aspects of how they do business. ICG, a startup construction firm, is using Copilot to write customer proposals six times faster, which lets their sales team pursue more opportunities and revenue. PKSHA, a software development firm, tells us that Copilot helped their customer success team by reducing time spent on data analysis by 75%, allowing the team to provide insightful recommendations to customers more quickly.
"As a small to mid-sized defense contractor and one of the first U.S. companies to roll out Microsoft 365 Copilot company-wide, IDT is committed to accelerating the delivery of solutions to the Department of Defense. We believe AI-driven technologies like Copilot hold tremendous potential for enhancing our capabilities. The initial results of Copilot's integration across various functions, including program management, software development, and deployment, have been highly encouraging. We are excited to continue expanding our use of Copilot in partnership with Microsoft, driving innovation and increasing the speed at which we deliver disruptive innovation to our customers."
- Rob Hornbuckle, Chief Information and Operations Officer, Innovative Defense Technologies
Let’s explore how our latest AI innovations can help you serve your customers as you scale and grow, and help you make your business stand out among the competition.
Microsoft is innovating on behalf of your business
We’re making the free Microsoft Copilot more accessible to users with a Microsoft Entra ID account. It can be easily accessed at Microsoft.com/copilot and the Microsoft 365 app. Soon you will be able to pin it directly into Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Outlook so it is more available during your day-to-day work. You can use it to ask questions relevant to your business, like summarizing industry trends, all with enterprise data protection so your data is encrypted and private.
You can also enter prompts like “compare a competitor’s product to my product” and ask it to reference your internal product spec sheet by manually adding the file. Copilot will be able to reason over your file and grab the latest publicly available information from the internet to provide a response.
An image of the Copilot for work chat experiences.
While Microsoft Copilot is available to users with an Entra ID account, Business Chat (BizChat) requires a Microsoft 365 Copilot subscription, which can be accessed at Microsoft365.com/copilot.
BizChat combines the power of web-based insights with the Microsoft Graph to bring together data from across your documents, presentations, email, calendar, notes, and contacts—and contextualizes this data with information from the web. Like an assistant, it has a deep understanding of you, your job, your priorities, and your organization. It can find whatever you need in your files (even the files you forgot existed), connect the dots across all your content and context swiftly, and even integrate with the apps you use to run your business.
We have enhanced your BizChat experience with Copilot Pages, a persistent canvas for collaboration. Just click on “Edit in Pages” at the bottom of a Copilot response. This will create a page and open it alongside the chat that includes Copilot’s response. Pages takes the AI-generated content and makes it durable, so you can edit it, add to it and share it with your team, just like you would a Microsoft Word document. You and your team can work together in real time—asking Copilot more questions and adding more content. Copilot Pages will be generally available later this month and will also be accessible in the free Microsoft Copilot.
An image of the Copilot Page experience and how to share a page link with your team.
Microsoft Excel is widely used by small businesses for inventory management, dashboards, project workbacks and data analysis as well as other work tasks. Analyzing data can be challenging, but with Copilot, all you have to do is ask to get insights.
Copilot in Excel is now generally available. Just ask Copilot to analyze the data written within your spreadsheets or textual content written in documents and provide actionable insights. Then ask Copilot to visualize the insights in a chart, scatter plot or PivotTable. Copilot can even recommend the right visualization for you to better understand complex data and make more informed decisions with your team.
Furthermore, Copilot in Excel with Python adds the capabilities of Python to let you leverage these advanced analytic capabilities in natural language with no coding required. Just ask your questions using everyday language to enable predictive modeling and text analytics. Iterate with Copilot right in Excel to generate heatmaps and word clouds. These capabilities are rolling out to Microsoft 365 Insiders and will continue rolling out to all our customers over the next few months. Find out more about Copilot in Excel updates.
Copilot can help you spend less effort on time-consuming, day-to-day work so you can focus your energy on growing your business.
While meeting transcripts contain important information, there is often rich discussion that also happens in meeting chats. Now available, this new feature in Copilot in Teams can answer questions using information from both the transcript and meeting chat to give you a complete picture of what was discussed, helping you stay on top of your meeting details.
Copilot in Outlook will soon be able to help you better manage your inbox with Prioritize my inbox. Copilot will combine the context of your role in your organization and previous work emails to surface the messages most important to you so you can spend less time triaging your inbox and focus on what’s most important. This feature will be in public preview starting late 2024.
Copilot in PowerPoint works alongside you to turn your ideas into professional presentations. With the new Narrative builder in PowerPoint, you can ask Copilot to build an outline of your presentation and once you’ve adjusted the outline, you can then ask Copilot to build the slides. It can use your company’s template, or even create custom images generated just for you. You will never have to start from a blank slide again.
Often, small business infrastructure is a combination of disparate tools and software to meet specific process and customer requirements. Copilot can help coordinate all these business functions and workflows using agents, so you can orchestrate your business from a single place.
Copilot agents are generally available in BizChat so you don’t have to spend time switching between different tools or trying to contextualize information from different sources. These agents will allow you and your team to streamline your processes and focus more on the task at hand.
You can build your own custom agent to reason over specific SharePoint sites using agent builder, a lightweight Microsoft Copilot Studio experience integrated into Microsoft 365 Copilot. Click on “Build a Copilot agent” in BizChat and then make the agent available to your team.
In Copilot Studio, you can also create agents for your third-party systems or edit existing agents. You can @ mention the agent as you would any other teammate to ask it questions specifically about that site. Agents are accessible from any device that has BizChat, including mobile devices. Copilot agents and Copilot Studio agent builder will be rolling out to general availability over the coming weeks.
To use Copilot right away, just access Microsoft Copilot in the Microsoft 365 app and at Microsoft.com/copilot. You will need to sign in with your Entra ID account.
To use Copilot across all your Microsoft 365 apps and work data, you can purchase Microsoft 365 Copilot as an add-on to your Microsoft 365 Business Basic, Microsoft 365 Standard or Microsoft 365 Business Premium subscriptions. If you do not already have these core productivity offerings you can purchase them now.
Find out more about Microsoft 365 Copilot or reach out to a Cloud Solution Partner to learn more.
You can start taking steps to prepare, understand licensing and technical requirements, familiarize yourself with new capabilities, and explore the new small and medium-sized business Copilot Success Kit.
______________________________________
1 “New Technology: The Projected Total Economic Impact™: Of Copilot for Microsoft 365 for SMB,” a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Microsoft. Results are based on a composite organization.
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In a recent survey of companies with up to 300 employees, business leaders responded they are experiencing on average a 12% faster time to market for new products and services.1
Our customers tell us they are experiencing the impact of Copilot in many aspects of how they do business. ICG, a startup construction firm, is using Copilot to write customer proposals six times faster, which lets their sales team pursue more opportunities and revenue. PKSHA, a software development firm, tells us that Copilot helped their customer success team by reducing time spent on data analysis by 75%, allowing the team to provide insightful recommendations to customers more quickly.
"As a small to mid-sized defense contractor and one of the first U.S. companies to roll out Microsoft 365 Copilot company-wide, IDT is committed to accelerating the delivery of solutions to the Department of Defense. We believe AI-driven technologies like Copilot hold tremendous potential for enhancing our capabilities. The initial results of Copilot's integration across various functions, including program management, software development, and deployment, have been highly encouraging. We are excited to continue expanding our use of Copilot in partnership with Microsoft, driving innovation and increasing the speed at which we deliver disruptive innovation to our customers."
- Rob Hornbuckle, Chief Information and Operations Officer, Innovative Defense Technologies
Let’s explore how our latest AI innovations can help you serve your customers as you scale and grow, and help you make your business stand out among the competition.
Microsoft is innovating on behalf of your business
Your AI assistant for work
We’re making the free Microsoft Copilot more accessible to users with a Microsoft Entra ID account. It can be easily accessed at Microsoft.com/copilot and the Microsoft 365 app. Soon you will be able to pin it directly into Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Outlook so it is more available during your day-to-day work. You can use it to ask questions relevant to your business, like summarizing industry trends, all with enterprise data protection so your data is encrypted and private.
You can also enter prompts like “compare a competitor’s product to my product” and ask it to reference your internal product spec sheet by manually adding the file. Copilot will be able to reason over your file and grab the latest publicly available information from the internet to provide a response.
An image of the Copilot for work chat experiences.While Microsoft Copilot is available to users with an Entra ID account, Business Chat (BizChat) requires a Microsoft 365 Copilot subscription, which can be accessed at Microsoft365.com/copilot.
BizChat combines the power of web-based insights with the Microsoft Graph to bring together data from across your documents, presentations, email, calendar, notes, and contacts—and contextualizes this data with information from the web. Like an assistant, it has a deep understanding of you, your job, your priorities, and your organization. It can find whatever you need in your files (even the files you forgot existed), connect the dots across all your content and context swiftly, and even integrate with the apps you use to run your business.
We have enhanced your BizChat experience with Copilot Pages, a persistent canvas for collaboration. Just click on “Edit in Pages” at the bottom of a Copilot response. This will create a page and open it alongside the chat that includes Copilot’s response. Pages takes the AI-generated content and makes it durable, so you can edit it, add to it and share it with your team, just like you would a Microsoft Word document. You and your team can work together in real time—asking Copilot more questions and adding more content. Copilot Pages will be generally available later this month and will also be accessible in the free Microsoft Copilot.
An image of the Copilot Page experience and how to share a page link with your team.Analyze your business data
Microsoft Excel is widely used by small businesses for inventory management, dashboards, project workbacks and data analysis as well as other work tasks. Analyzing data can be challenging, but with Copilot, all you have to do is ask to get insights.
Copilot in Excel is now generally available. Just ask Copilot to analyze the data written within your spreadsheets or textual content written in documents and provide actionable insights. Then ask Copilot to visualize the insights in a chart, scatter plot or PivotTable. Copilot can even recommend the right visualization for you to better understand complex data and make more informed decisions with your team.
Furthermore, Copilot in Excel with Python adds the capabilities of Python to let you leverage these advanced analytic capabilities in natural language with no coding required. Just ask your questions using everyday language to enable predictive modeling and text analytics. Iterate with Copilot right in Excel to generate heatmaps and word clouds. These capabilities are rolling out to Microsoft 365 Insiders and will continue rolling out to all our customers over the next few months. Find out more about Copilot in Excel updates.
Get Through the Busy Work, to the Work-Work
Copilot can help you spend less effort on time-consuming, day-to-day work so you can focus your energy on growing your business.
While meeting transcripts contain important information, there is often rich discussion that also happens in meeting chats. Now available, this new feature in Copilot in Teams can answer questions using information from both the transcript and meeting chat to give you a complete picture of what was discussed, helping you stay on top of your meeting details.
Copilot in Outlook will soon be able to help you better manage your inbox with Prioritize my inbox. Copilot will combine the context of your role in your organization and previous work emails to surface the messages most important to you so you can spend less time triaging your inbox and focus on what’s most important. This feature will be in public preview starting late 2024.
Make your business stand out
Copilot in PowerPoint works alongside you to turn your ideas into professional presentations. With the new Narrative builder in PowerPoint, you can ask Copilot to build an outline of your presentation and once you’ve adjusted the outline, you can then ask Copilot to build the slides. It can use your company’s template, or even create custom images generated just for you. You will never have to start from a blank slide again.
Use Copilot agents across all your business apps
Often, small business infrastructure is a combination of disparate tools and software to meet specific process and customer requirements. Copilot can help coordinate all these business functions and workflows using agents, so you can orchestrate your business from a single place.
Copilot agents are generally available in BizChat so you don’t have to spend time switching between different tools or trying to contextualize information from different sources. These agents will allow you and your team to streamline your processes and focus more on the task at hand.
You can build your own custom agent to reason over specific SharePoint sites using agent builder, a lightweight Microsoft Copilot Studio experience integrated into Microsoft 365 Copilot. Click on “Build a Copilot agent” in BizChat and then make the agent available to your team.
In Copilot Studio, you can also create agents for your third-party systems or edit existing agents. You can @ mention the agent as you would any other teammate to ask it questions specifically about that site. Agents are accessible from any device that has BizChat, including mobile devices. Copilot agents and Copilot Studio agent builder will be rolling out to general availability over the coming weeks.
Get Started
To use Copilot right away, just access Microsoft Copilot in the Microsoft 365 app and at Microsoft.com/copilot. You will need to sign in with your Entra ID account.
To use Copilot across all your Microsoft 365 apps and work data, you can purchase Microsoft 365 Copilot as an add-on to your Microsoft 365 Business Basic, Microsoft 365 Standard or Microsoft 365 Business Premium subscriptions. If you do not already have these core productivity offerings you can purchase them now.
Find out more about Microsoft 365 Copilot or reach out to a Cloud Solution Partner to learn more.
You can start taking steps to prepare, understand licensing and technical requirements, familiarize yourself with new capabilities, and explore the new small and medium-sized business Copilot Success Kit.
______________________________________
1 “New Technology: The Projected Total Economic Impact™: Of Copilot for Microsoft 365 for SMB,” a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Microsoft. Results are based on a composite organization.
Continue reading...