Why you need to deploy Microsoft Copilot Now

A perspective of how time is critical in your orgnaizations success

They were tonnes of announcements at Microsoft Ignite 2024, but the one thing that was core was Copilot and agents. But why does this matter and why would this be so important? The most basic way of looking at Copilot is by comparing it with ChatGPT. I have ChatGPT open in a browser on the side and ask it any questions I want. But that is just the tip of the iceberg and it is what is lurking underneth that is amazing.

The question you need to ask is what problem is Microsoft trying to solve. The list below are factors that reduce operational effiency, employee satisfaction and consume time. These are the things that are part of the promise AI has to increse productivity:

1. Increasing employee productivity
2. Helping employess with necessary but repetitive and mundane tasks
3. Increasing employee wellbeing
4. Eliminating employee time-spend on low-value activities
5. Augmenting enhancing human capabilities
6. Accelerating employess pace of work
7. Enabling employees to acess and recall institutional knowledge
8. Helping users understand if work is aligned to company goals
9. Removing the coordination challenges of hybrid work
10. Incresing inclusivity
11. Reducing headcount - just remember AI will not take your job :)

Most employees feel they don’t currently have the right capabilities to get their work done. AI will open new paths for learning, and success depends on leaders equipping employees for an AI-powered future. But there will be new skills required to make the most of AI. You will need to help yourt employees embrace a new way of working, starting with building AI aptitude — from practicing prompt engineering to fact-checking and verifying AI-generated content. Some of the skills that will be needed to optimize on the technology are:

1. Flexibility - Rapidly adjust to AI's integration in the workflow
2. Emotional Intelligence - Determine when to leverage a human capability instead of an AI capability
3. Analytical Judgement - Determine when to leverage an AI capability instead of a human capability
4. Creative Evaluation - Evaluate content produced by AI
5. Intellectual Curiosity - Ask AI the right questions
6. Bias detection and handling - Evaluate AI fairness in decision-making
7. AI delegation - Direct AI with the right prompts

As people get more comforatble with Copilot, they will want to start pushing the boundaries, creating automated agents using natural langugue. They already are familiar with prompting in a chat interface and thus this is a natural progress to put into a list of tasks and automate. They no longer need to go to IT to be put on the back of the super long waiting list of projects. When you have the organziation deploying multiple agents, for thousands of tasks, collectively there will be major benefits realized.

You can’t sit back and wait till your competitors are doing double or many multiples of what they were with the same staff. If at that time you decide to finally bite the bullet and turn Copilot on, you will be starting where they were a year ago. Unfortunatley there is no way to rush adoption, education, iteration and culture. Get started with your Copilot journey now to set up your ogranization for success.