Want to compose an email in an instant or recap a meeting you missed? As of November 1, the AI-powered digital assistant Microsoft 365 Copilot is widely available to businesses. It is integrated into popular tools such as Word, PowerPoint and Excel. Myriam Broeders, CTO of Microsoft Belux, explains what Copilot can do.
What exactly is Copilot? And how can it make our work easier in 2024? We asked Myriam Broeders, CTO of Microsoft Belux. She is also director of the Microsoft Technology Center (MTC) in Brussels, a reservist in the Belgian Army Cyber Command, was chosen as one of fifty female role models for technology by Inspiring Fifty in 2022 and was nominated as Leading Lady of the Year ICT by DataNews.
What can employees do with the digital assistant?
MYRIAM BROTHERS. “Over the last year, with ChatGPT, we saw an opportunity to ask technology questions as if it were a human and get answers in human language. We create this option to ask questions about Microsoft 365 solutions used in modern work, Outlook, Excel, PowerPoint, Word and Teams. In those applications you will find Copilot as your digital assistant. For example, you can ask Copilot to create a summary of a document in Word. Or ask in Bing Copilot: “Give me a colleague’s latest email.” Or you have a meeting with your boss in ten minutes and you ask him to give you some topics for that meeting. Copilot will then review your calendar and the emails you exchanged and provide a response.
‘Copilot is also integrated into other Microsoft applications, such as GitHub as a developer platform, Dynamics 365, our CRM and ERP system (for customer relations and business processes respectively, nvdr) and the Bing search engine. There you will receive an answer to your question instead of links to websites. With Bing you can also see where those answers come from, because you will see references to the sources of the answer. We see Copilot as a digital assistant that makes your life easier. You have faster access to information and can process and edit it more efficiently.
During your presentation to the seventy business leaders who participated in technology federation Agoria’s The Future of Digital trade mission in Atlanta, US, you showed how employees with no prior technology knowledge can build their own chatbots in minutes.
BROTHERS. “YES. In addition to integrating AI capabilities like Copilot into our solutions, we also provide organizations with the tools to create these types of Copilots with Copilot Studio. Use the power of generative AI to improve workflows, sharpen analytics and simplify data management. This allows businesses and governments to create a Copilot customized for their organization and needs. I’ve shown how to create a chatbot on a public website in minutes that works out of the box. This is just the tip of the iceberg, many other things are possible. Let’s take a company that has both businesses and consumers as customers. For example, you can create a co-pilot who can answer questions about the stock situation.
What do you mainly use Copilot for?
BROTHERS. “I have a lot of meetings. I often ask Copilot to summarize a Teams meeting I didn’t attend. Or I ask what a particular participant in that meeting said about a topic that is relevant to me. Being able to find and process information quickly definitely contributes to my well-being. I can get extremely frustrated when I have to search for information in an email, a Teams chat, or somewhere else. My calendar also regularly became overcrowded, forcing me to listen to recorded meetings or read the transcript. It takes a lot of time. Now I can request an AI-generated meeting summary and quickly see what actions are taking place. Furthermore, Copilot takes into account not only what was said during the meeting, but also the PowerPoint slides shown. I’ve only had access to Microsoft 365 Copilot for a few weeks, but I can already feel the enormous comfort it brings me.”
Which application surprises?
BROTHERS. “Copilot can automatically provide data-driven suggestions and insights, where Copilot notices things you might not have seen yourself, such as anomalies or trends in the data. This year I became a reservist in the Belgian army. An interesting application of Security Copilot that we are looking forward to is the availability of incident information within hours or minutes. In the past, sometimes you had to wait days or weeks for this.”
You will soon be moving to Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, near Seattle. Will you now become the highest Belgian in the Microsoft hierarchy?
BROTHERS. “I am the director of the Microsoft Technology Center (MTC) in Brussels, where we discuss with customers their complex challenges and how technology can play a role in them. There are approximately forty such centers around the world. In March I will be moving to the MTC Corp team in Redmond, which sets the strategy for those centers. Am I the tallest Belgian? It depends on how you look at it. If we look at who reports to whom, we can be very proud of Stijn Nauwelaerts. He is the corporate vice president of human resources and reports to Kathleen Hogan, Chief People Officer, who in turn reports to our CEO Satya Nadella.
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2023-12-28 17:25:00
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