QUICK LINKS:

 
00:00 — Microsoft 365 Copilot Small Business Guide 
00:53 — Save time 
02:14 — Privacy & safety 
05:03 — How Microsoft 365 Copilot can assist you 
06:24 — Work smarter, improve skill sets 
08:13 — Create custom experiences 
08:48 — Enable Copilot and onboard users 
10:28 — How to apply Copilot to specific areas in your company 
12:18 — Guidance & resources 
14:07 — Wrap up 

Link References

Watch our whole series at https://aka.ms/CopilotSMBMechanics

Check out our show on preparing for Copilot at https://aka.ms/SMBOversharingMechanics

See how to create custom experiences at https://aka.ms/Wave2Mechanics

Use role-based scenario guidance at https://aka.ms/AIforAll

Get a Success Kit at https://aka.ms/CopilotSMBSuccesskit

Sign up for or watch Quickstart Training at https://aka.ms/QuickStartCopilot

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Video Transcript:

– Generative AI is leveling the playing field, removing previous productivity barriers, which is really good news, especially if you run or work for a smaller company. And today, we’re going to look at how wave two of Microsoft 365 Copilot can specifically help your small or medium-sized business by enabling a secure application of generative AI with your work data to rapidly author presentations and content, reducing digital debt to focus on and follow up on what’s important to you as you engage with your customers and making it easier than ever to automate everyday tasks and processes. In fact, for IT, we’re also going to show you how simple it is to light up Microsoft 365 Copilot in your tenant and share tips and resources for onboarding your organization. I’m joined, once again, by engineer Mary Pasch from the Copilot Platform team. Welcome back.

– Yeah, thank you for having me back.

– So last time you were on, we actually introduced wave two of Microsoft 365 Copilot. So how has the Microsoft 365 Copilot experience been crafted with small businesses in mind?

– So top of the list here, and this is a universal theme, is how we can help you save time, whether you’re running the business or an employee. We know that many of you often wear many hats and there’s more work than time. And Microsoft 365 Copilot is there to assist you as you work. It’s part of your favorite apps, such as Microsoft Teams, as well as Outlook, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and more. And it’s integrated in the browser and across apps with Business Chat. It works directly with your work data and can help you to focus on what’s important, boosting how much you can get done. The experience supports your core business functions, whether that’s attracting customers and assisting with marketing efforts, or retaining them through more timely communications while you’re on the go by suggesting responses and generating a solid draft that you can iterate on further. And we’ve also made it easier than ever to customize the data you use with Copilot and quickly automate tasks using Copilot Studio, where, with zero code, you can connect Microsoft 365 Copilot to data, for example, sitting in your support systems. And this can be almost any system that you might be using. Or you can automate repetitive tasks. For example, documenting day-to-day customer interactions.

– Right, and because Microsoft 365 Copilot uniquely works with your data, the experience is, by default, tailored to your specific needs.

– It is, and because it’s your work data, it remains private and safe with enterprise-grade security, along with other capabilities like identifying and blocking harmful content.

– And we should really unpack this a bit because, I know one of the core concerns of small businesses is really who gets to use generative AI inside of their organization, whether that’s linked to perceived costs or maybe the fear of leaking company data.

– And it’s totally normal for you to start with just a small group of select managers in your company, which is important to get them on board, except the majority of the rest of your company is probably using AI tools right now, even if they don’t have access to premium AI services like Microsoft 365 Copilot. And the risk is they may end up using less safe, free alternatives and potentially pasting private work data into unprotected prompts just to be able to use GenAI as they work.

– Of course, all this can lead to data loss and those free services, they might even train their models based on your data.

– Right, which is why I say if you’re evaluating Microsoft 365 Copilot today and you’re starting with just a few users, it’s a good idea to at least have the rest of your company sign in with their work account to use the free Microsoft Copilot experience, which doesn’t integrate automatically with your work content. But even if you cut and paste work data into a prompt to generate content and responses, your prompts, with your data and the response, are all private. They remain separate to our models and are not used for training. And all the interactions are auditable in Microsoft Purview, which, if you haven’t used it before, is available with Business, Standard, and Premium. Then, as you make Microsoft 365 Copilot available to more people, it connects to your work data, but importantly, it only has access to the data that you have access to. As users reference files with data sensitivity labels, the security controls you have in place are respected and your experience is personalized based on your level of access to information. And with these permissions, you can, for example, reference Word documents to build your own personalized PowerPoint presentation, complete with complementing imagery, using Microsoft 365 Copilot, in just a few seconds. And it even authors the notes with references so that you can check the source.

– And what’s really important here is ensuring that you have the right permission set up for things like information access, especially for data that’s stored in SharePoint for different people, different team functions or different groups because when you do, Microsoft 365 Copilot will, as we mentioned, respect those controls that you have in place. In fact, I checked out the recent show that we did on preparing for Copilot at aka.ms/SMBOversharingMechanics. And this is something that you’ll want to do to govern information discovery in your organization regardless of whether you deploy Copilot or not.

– And that peace of mind really opens up the breadth of what Microsoft 365 Copilot can offer. And there are lots of ways it can assist you. This is a first look of how Copilot can help you triage your inbox in minutes, helping you prioritize what’s there. It analyzes all of your emails using both the content of your messages and the context of your job, like who your manager is and who’s on your team, to highlight what’s most important. You can then sort by priority based on Copilot’s analysis. So if we look at this email from a new customer, Tailwind Traders, when selected, Copilot shares why it thinks it’s significant and highlights what action you need to take. This is a key customer for the next few months, so you teach Copilot that all emails mentioning them are a top priority. And beyond email, Copilot and Teams helps you to quickly generate meeting summaries, can suggest action items, summarize your various chat conversations, and even provide answers to specific questions. BizChat can then go across communication modalities so that you can prioritize your time and stay connected. For example, as you work with customers and stakeholders, it makes it easy to find the right file or information in less time by letting Microsoft 365 Copilot search across all your related files and recent communication across apps.

– And what I like here is that from a business perspective, it’s like you’re giving everyone their own personal assistant to augment how much they can do, which is a net positive, then, for the top line.

– And this isn’t about replacing people in the workforce, which, some people might fear. This is all about removing burden and helping you work smarter and also learn and improve your skillset. For example, if you’ve never done a request for a proposal, or RFP, before, you can ask Microsoft 365 Copilot and point it to relevant information sources like I’m doing here using the forward slash in Word to reference files. And because our models are trained on the most common proposal types and document formats, Copilot will generate relevant outputs based on the work information you pointed to to create a tailored RFP. So now you aren’t stuck with a blank page, you get a great starting point. And because source material is referenced, it’s easier to check for accuracy. I’ll give you another example. Maybe you’ve been asked to summarize the biggest sales opportunities based on recent lead generation efforts, but you aren’t that well-versed in Excel. Well, using natural language. You can ask Copilot to summarize what those opportunities are, and you can see it surfaces up the top insights from the data and you can then go further by asking it to visualize the opportunity by customer type and it presents it in a chart. And as it’s doing all this, it also provides an explanation of how it’s going about the task so that you can reproduce the same steps yourself if you ever want to do this again in the future. And one more thing I’ll show you, beyond text, you can also quickly create visual content, which is good if you’re someone with great ideas but not necessarily a creative talent, or maybe you just don’t have the time. Microsoft 365 Copilot in work mode creates custom-generated images, which means you can quickly generate, for example, suitable images for your social media campaigns or website.

– And these examples here provide a really good taste in terms of what you can do to use Microsoft 365 Copilot personally for business functions like maybe sales, or business analysis, and also marketing,

– Right, and for the different teams across your company, this is where we make it easier to create custom experiences that can help with everyday, repeatable tasks. For example, for your technical support staff on calls with customers, you can create a Copilot agent that’s able to quickly find answers to customer questions on the fly from your company’s knowledge base. This is as easy as using Copilot and SharePoint and pointing it to the files you want Copilot to reference in responses.

– And on our last show, by the way, you know, we saw how you can actually create these, which, you can check out at aka.ms/Wave2Mechanics. Why don’t we switch gears though and really look at enabling Copilot for your company because it’s not that complicated. It’s as simple as assigning Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses to your managed users in the Microsoft 365 Admin Center. And you’ll see here on the left navigation pane, you’ll just need to select Users, then the Active users, and you’ll just choose the ones that you want to assign license to from that list. Now, you’ll click on, again, Manage product licenses in the User details pane, then Assign more. And under Licenses, check the box next to Microsoft 365 Copilot to assign the license and hit Save changes. And that’s it. Then Microsoft 365 Copilot capabilities are just going to light up across their Microsoft 365 desktop and web experiences, and they’ll get access to powerful business chat experiences as well for Microsoft 365 Copilot. Then, to extend Copilot experiences to mobile devices, you can also use your preferred device management tools like, for example, Microsoft Intune, as you can see here, to install the Microsoft 365 app with integrated Copilot capabilities and others on managed phones. That said, as with any new technology, there’s always some onboarding necessary for things like Copilot.

– And this is where, as a best practice, it’s a good idea to look across the different disciplines in your company, whether that’s your finance and marketing teams, your sales people, customer service staff, or recruitment with human resources. It’s a good idea to look at those business functions where introducing Microsoft 365 Copilot can provide the most help during your initial rollout. This way, there’s also more peer-to-peer learning and shared best practices, which can help before you scale Copilot out to the rest of your company.

– And by the way, if you’re looking for ways and ideas to apply Microsoft 365 Copilot to specific areas in your company, a really great tool to use is role-based scenario guidance to start that conversation with users in these different areas about their pain points, their opportunities, and also ideas, which you can get to at aka.ms/AIforAll. You can see all the different company disciplines here, everything from Customer Service, Finance, Human Resources, and others. I’m going to scroll back up here and choose Using Copilot in IT because that’s how I roll. But here, I can see all the different functional area KPIs, everything from IT budget variance to Average support ticket resolution. And when I click into the top one, it tells me more about that KPI and where Copilot can help, like drafting and analyzing surveys to find out what people like or could live without maybe to save costs, and other practical applications. Now, what I really like, though, are the functional scenarios here on the left, and I use Generate IT prompts a lot. And Copilot is great for researching technical topics, creating how-to documentation, and even authoring scripts to automate tasks. In fact, I’m going to scroll up here. I’m going to copy this sample prompt to research a topic, in this case, Power Automate. Now I’m going to head over to Copilot and I’ll paste it in. Now I’ll just replace this tool, service text variable here with the words Power Automate. There we go. And hit Enter. And Copilot drafts this nice comprehensive response with a high level description of Power Automate, its options, steps to plan my implementation, recommendations for creating flows, which is what you do with Power Automate, starting with templates. And below that, there’s some high-level best practices for long-term viability. At the very bottom, I can see that everything was grounded using Microsoft Learn articles for Power Automate, so I know that I can trust the output. That said, though, there’s also more general knowledge that you’ll want to share with everyone in your company when you onboard them as well.

– Yes, and this is an area where we have a lot of best practice guidance. We’ve created an end-to-end guide with resources you need to deploy Microsoft 365 Copilot with a Success Kit, which you can find at aka.ms/CopilotSMBSuccesskit. This is a downloadable ZIP file with a lot of helpful files and templates to get you started. Here you can see that it has a complete checklist, highlighting all the steps for implementing Copilot. There’s a detailed implementation guide in PowerPoint with all the steps we covered today, even a How it Works explainer video from Microsoft Mechanics. And to save you time, the user enablement toolkit has pre-written an email across all of the roles we saw earlier. In fact, I’ll open the Sales folder and you’ll see seven email templates for an introduction and others for what you can do in each app. If I open the first one, you’ll see that you only need to add your company logo header to personalize it, along with the recipient, team name, and the signature. And that’s it. Additionally, you can give users training on prompt authoring because the more descriptive you are, the better the responses will be. So make sure that you provide the intended outcome, additional context, and reference specific information sources where needed, like when we built the request for proposal earlier. The role-based email templates for each app also highlight a few repeatable prompts to try, including where to reference people, topics and files for the best responses. And if you have Microsoft 365 Copilot running, there’s even an interactive online Quickstart Training available in multiple languages that you and users can sign up for, watch on demand at aka.ms/QuickStartCopilot.

– And these are all resources that are available right now for free.

– Yes, they are. And we keep updating them, thanks to your feedback.

– Thanks so much for joining us today, Mary. These were just a few highlights for how Microsoft 365 Copilot can help. But of course, the best way to know for sure is to try it out for yourself. And you can see our complete Microsoft 365 Copilot series for small and medium-sized businesses at aka.ms/CopilotSMBMechanics. Be sure to subscribe to Mechanics for more of the latest tech updates and explanations, and thanks so much for watching.