Demystifying Copilot, agents, and AI

Demystifying Copilot, Agents, and AI: Boost Productivity with Microsoft’s AI Tools

Irene Direnko-Smith: Good morning everyone. We’ll give a couple more minutes for everyone to join and then we’ll kick off.

Okay.

Oh, good morning. And a very warm welcome. My name is Irene Durka Smith and I’m head of Fujifilm Process Automation. Together with Code Blue, we are part of the wider fil family, and our join focus is on helping Kiwi businesses work smarter. Thank you for joining us for the first webinar in this innovation series, and today we’ll be focusing on Microsoft Technology stack for personal and organizational productivity.

You will hear from Matt and Amelia about different aspects of applying AI at your workplace, and we will start with Matt Bourne, solution Architect and Modern Workplace Practice Lead at Code Blue With over 20 years of experience in the technology sector, Matt spent the last 10 years working with the Microsoft 3 6 5 technology stack.

Matt is an early adopter of copilot and is passionate about responsible use of ai. With the focus on data governance and security, Matt will share his perspective on how to get the most out of your Microsoft copilot for personal productivity. Then Amelia Rain will follow Matt’s presentation with a perspective on how organizations can benefit using AI beyond personal productivity, scaling operations, improving customer services, and taking your entire company’s performance to the next level.

Amelia has over 20 years of experience with Microsoft Dynamics working for Microsoft Partners, distributors, and Microsoft in New Zealand. She’s an expert in utilizing Microsoft technology to drive transformation and ensure customer success. Please post your questions anytime during the presentation using a q and a function located at the top of the panel.

We’ll answer your questions at the q and a part of the of the webinar at nine 40 and we’ll wrap up at 10:00 AM sharp. And then with this let me invite Matt to start the first part of our webinar.

Matt Bourne: We go. Yep. Morning. Sweet. Everybody can hear me, hopefully. Morning, so today I, we’ve split this webinar into two sections. I’m gonna be talking about personal productivity with using ai, and then when the media follows, she’s gonna be talking about organizational productivity using ai. My main focus will be on Microsoft 3 6 5 copilot.

And you can see on the screen I’m gonna cover over a couple of things and relevant steps of it. One of the main things you’ll see in there is that I’m actually gonna do some demos of some of the cool things that copilot can actually do.

First up, I get this question a lot because a lot of the time we hear things like, oh, why would I use copilot as opposed to chat GBT. It’s quite a common question. One of the big things is that I. When you look at copilot copilot is to keep you in the flow of work. If you use chat GBT, you actually take that information and you’re putting it elsewhere.

So some examples of things that copilot can do.

It can be assistant because it has direct access into your information and it lives inside your environment. And this has access to your emails, your teams messages. Anything that you have access to inside your Microsoft environment. So it can be an assistant, it can summarize emails, communications, it can be a tutor.

And I actually demo this in a wee bit. One of the big things that a lot of people tend to have issues with is that when they write an email if they’re writing it to, this level of people, then they would write it in a particular way. But if then they need to send that same email or a similar email to an executive team, you may need to reword that email.

And sometimes that can be really tricky. So this can help along those lines. And probably the other one there is it can be a creator. It’s incredibly helpful when you are doing draft documents or just even taking you’ve done this big beautiful document and someone says, Hey, I really need that in a blog post.

Now no one wants to have to go and rewrite an entire document and summarize it into a blog post. But being able to do that in, quite quickly is really helpful. And I do demo this as well. I’m gonna moving through these rails really quickly because I have a short amount of time and I wanna spend a bit of time on the demos.

So one of the big things around copilot is that people always there, there’s a lot of different copilots currently there’s last check, it was about 142 copilots with Microsoft which is quite a large number. Now when they talk about that, what they’re actually talking about is all the different connection points to copilot effectively.

So one of the main ones here is we’ve got a unified copilot. And what that has is the unified copilot actually has access to all of your information across all the different applications and all the different copilots that are around. So if you go into the copilot app, if you use it inside teams or if you use it in the each browser, when you put things in there, you can, I could reference something along the lines of, Hey, what’s the latest information, or What was our last communication I had with this person?

And it’ll go through and summarize that. It’ll pull information from teams, it’ll pull up from Outlook. Things from SharePoint, and then it can move across all the areas.

Then we have the application specific ones. Now these ones here, why they’re so unique. And again, when the, when I do the demos, you’ll actually see these is that they understand the information they’re looking at. So if you are inside Excel for example, and you say, Hey, I need to take this information here and I need to, run this command over, or this formula over it, and I want the output to come out over here, what it will actually do is it will actually look at your information and understand it because it lives inside that application.

And it’s that entire of that co-pilot is to understand Excel and what you are doing inside it.

And then the last one so you’ve got on your phone currently it’s on the Microsoft 3 6 5 app, which is a unified one, and then it’s also an outlook. You, it is slowly rolling out to the word and Excel and PowerPoint on your Android and iOS devices. But it’s not quite there yet, but it is coming,

right? I’m gonna ask, before I show this, I’m gonna ask this question. How many people here have a smartphone that they only use for phone calls and nothing else? Now, I’m gonna pretty confidently say that nobody has a 3000 smartphone. They only use for phone calls. That is what it’s like if you try and use a.

Copilot as a Google search replacement, like you are using the most basic feature of AI and saying, yep, that’s all I’m gonna use it for. And yes, I do know people that use AI basically as a Google search. Now you, yes, it works, it can do that job, but you’re not getting any of the massive benefits out of it or the productivity gains that you get from having it.

The other big one is not an autopilot. This is something that comes up quite a lot early on. Now I will say that as part of the organizational side, and Amelia touches on this in in her section, that there is some parts that do have some automated parts in there. But as far as Microsoft 3, 6, 5 copilot, it is not an autopilot.

It’s not there to replace you. It’s actually there to help you and help you do your job and work alongside you, thus being called a copilot. So that’s quite an important factor. That’s really worth keeping an eye. It’s not there to replace your job. It’s there to en enhance you and make you able to do your job more efficiently.

Takes away that mundane. Before I go into the demos I just wanted to talk about prompt construction. So one of the big things around co-pilot is that because the whole thing works in natural language, meaning you don’t have to understand if you want to write a if you wanna write a formula in Excel, sorry.

If you’d like to write a formula in Excel. You do not need to know all the syntaxes of that formula. You can say, I would like to have it so that cell B three is gonna equal the average of cells D to D three to D seven. And then I want it, I want a number calculated off the side of that, and you can write it in natural language and it will do that.

Now, to do that though, you need to give it a bunch of information. The more information you give it, the better, but it will still work with minimal information. And when I’m doing the demos, and I’ll show you some of the differences and there, there’s actually some understanding how the prompt is put together makes a really big difference.

It is worth playing with this and just seeing what sort of things you can actually achieve. But yeah, effectively you want to have a goal. You wanna have what sort of context? If you’ve got any sources, so whether it’s an internal source or a website. And then also what you’d like to come out of it.

So do you want it to be, this is for an external facing presentation or is this for an internal only? Communication, for example. So then it will actually give you, what you’re looking for.

So now we’re gonna go into the fun part. So we are going into some demos. Now, I do apologize ’cause I meant to flick between a few apps here, but I think we should be all good, right? This one here.

Alright. Everyone can see that screen Zoom. Sorry. Yep. Sweet. Okay. So I want that

and I want this. Okay. I made it nice and easy so I don’t have to type everything out.

Amelia Reinecke: We got See,

Matt Bourne: They can, yeah. Okay. So one of the things you would’ve noticed here is I typed out a copied and pasted a really nice simple email here. And as part of that email I’m looking at that and I, it was very painful to write that, but this is the type of emails that I see coming across quite a lot.

Now in this particular scenario, we might want to go, Hey, actually we wanna change how this is, how this email’s gonna be perceived, or who are we sending it to? So we can actually click on the little copilot button here and we can, we’ve got a few things. We can do an auto rewrite. So where we’ll actually take some recomme, it’ll make some recommendations.

Or we can actually go get coaching. We can make it shorter. We can make it longer or we can just change the tone. So we might say we wanna change it to a more formal tone or make it a bit more direct. So in this scenario, we’re gonna get some coaching. So we click get coaching. And so what it’s doing now is analyze the information because looking at the context of it, and then what it does is it actually goes through and it gives you a bunch of effectively reasons as why it’s recommending replacing these different parts.

So you’ve got, as you go through, it looks at the tone of the email and then looks at this, what the reader is gonna get out of it. Instead of saying, Hey, this is super helpful, you can say things like, I’m confident this is gonna and then you also got the clarity as well be more specific as opposed to saying, Hey, this is gonna be super cool.

You can say things like, you’re gonna get the benefits out of this based on these factors. So in this scenario, we can then apply all suggestions if we want to. And what it’ll do is it actually goes through and it’s, it makes up the email and it tells you what it’s recommending that it’s gonna write in there.

And then we can either insert below or we can replace it. So we’ve got two choices here. So we hit replaced. What we’ll actually do is it actually replaces that entire email for us. Then obviously we can edit it further from there. If we’re not happy with that. We can also do a, we can do a recheck and it will have another go at it.

Over time, this actually learns your writing habits as well, and so it’ll give you more insight as to when you write things, it’ll start making natural suggestions. I’ve been using copilot now for about 18 months, and when I write emails, it’ll actually pop up and say, Hey, did did you mean to write this like this?

Or would you recommend, maybe we’d recommend doing it like this instead based on your audience. So this is really helpful. Another factor that you can do really quickly. As you can summarize, emails I’m not gonna go into this, anyone who’s got a 3 6 5 copi license will know when you click on an email.

You basically can summarize that straight off the bat. It’ll take a really long email and it’ll give you a bunch of little lines as a nice summary. But the tutoring is, it is a really good tool set inside outlook and it’s something that I don’t think gets utilized enough. I use it quite regularly especially depending on the audience I’m writing to.

So next up we are going to move over to Word

and

I don’t have word open.

Amelia Reinecke: So while Matt’s

getting organized yesterday, I took a Visio diagram and I uploaded into copilot M three six copilot. And said, Hey mate, can you please give this to me in simple to understand English. And it was within seconds, it broke down a quite complex video visual diagram with about seven different swim lanes and it just go poof.

And it’s just 0.4, 0.4 point broken down into the sections by each of the functions. It was very impressive. So I was quite pleased. Makes my job easier.

Matt Bourne: Yeah, so I’ve got word up. Apologies for that. Okay. So what we’re gonna do here is we’re gonna ask this to write us a guideline document. And it’s gonna populate that document for us.

So again, I’ve done my so I don’t have to type these out. I’ve done my prompt. So at the moment, this one here, it says, create me a guideline on how to build a deck in New Zealand and Auckland New Zealand specifically include the steps on who can carry out the task. I’ve said, reference the building New Zealand Building code, and also the Auckland City Council bylaws.

And then I’ve set the documents for a business that requires a new deck. I put the measurements of the deck and how high off ground level it is. So when I click next, what it actually will do is this will go away and it’ll actually draft this entire document for us based on all those factors. And it will then also go through, it’ll pull information from the New Zealand building code.

It’ll also pull information from the Auckland city Council bylaws to see if there’s any concerns around that. And obviously the more in depth you go. So if you’ve got particular concerns, if you’re in a certain area if you’ve got I know ground that is high water table, you can add all those, inform all that information in it.

It will actually add all those aspects or points in. You could also ask it to add a focus into it. So as you’ll see, it’s actually gone through and it’s pulled together a pretty quick guideline for us, which in this particular scenario is quite helpful. It’s given us a step by step process, do the initial planning, it pertain the necessary approvals saying you need resource consent and you’ll also apply for a building consent because the deck exceeds 1.5 meters.

So it’s automatically pulled all that information and given us that. Now, in this particular scenario, we might look at this and go actually that’s really helpful. We actually wanna post about that. So then what we can do from there is we can then. Do this. So if we come down to the bottom here, we can go.

Yep. We’ll keep that. Let’s just go to insert the page, right? And if we come back in here and open up copilot. And if we go, so I can say, I wanted to write a blog post from this document. Make it three 50 words long. Focus on the requirements.

And so then what it’s done is it’s just simplified that entire document, it just wrote for us down into a three 50 word blog post, which we could then put up. And will also ask things like, if we open this up, it’ll actually go in and it will ask, do you wanna put a conclusion at the end, which is already automatically done for us.

This just allows us to get the information quickly. Now, one thing I’ll note here. Drafting with copilot is amazing, but I would never say this is a final document. You still need to understand what you’re looking at. You need to know, where that information’s coming from and you just need to understand it, but the days of starting from a blank page are gone.

Amelia Reinecke: But Matt, I think that’s where it says it’s a co-pilot, so you’re co-driving.

Matt Bourne: Yeah.

Amelia Reinecke: It’s like driving a Tesla, but not quite just driving a ute, right? Yeah. So you can’t just go and say, Hey, this is the, this is the final version. ’cause you’ve gotta burn your fingers for sure.

Matt Bourne: Yeah, a hundred percent.

And so you do still need to verify this information. You need to go through it. But instead of having to rewrite every single thing, you actually have some quite simple ways to get that, to get a bulk of that information done. And that makes a big difference. I’m now going to jump over quickly into PowerPoint.

Where we stop sharing that and go into PowerPoint. So what I’m actually gonna do is I saved that document or a copy of it last night. And so what I’m actually gonna do is based on that guideline we just made, I’m now gonna ask it to make me a PowerPoint presentation. So I haven’t put any other aspects here.

And we could say, Hey, I want to focus on the area, the things that the deck’s gonna be built in. We could put focuses in there, but for this particular one, we are just gonna ask it to create us a general presentation based on that. So if we watch this,

okay, that’s not very helpful. Create a presentation from that. Go.

We go.

So what I’ll actually do, and again, this is not a final copy, but I am not a power. I’m not a PowerPoint expert by any means. And so for someone like me, this is really helpful. Gives me a whole bunch of information, comes up, builds an agenda. But the other thing you’ll notice is it’s actually gone through and it’s put all your talking notes in there as well.

So it’s actually given you a really good start based on that one guideline document that now you can actually talk about. It’s added images in for you. And if you’re not happy with that, you can say, you can go in and you can modify one of those pages. You can ask it to do have another go at it and say, Hey, I actually wanna change the focus.

I’d like to change the focus on this around the foundational points. And so it’ll spend a bit more time focusing on the foundational points.

Amelia Reinecke: You can also actually go and put in a theme or your logo Yep. Or anything like that. So it’s really just making you a little bit more faster. Yep. And productive.

Matt Bourne: Cool. And then the last one I’m gonna do

is Excel. Now this is one of the ones that Excel is always fun. I’m quite capable of writing full macros in Excel, but eh takes a lot of time and a lot of effort. So what we’re gonna do here is I just want, in this particular scenario, I’m gonna keep it really simple ’cause I’m loaded on time. This one here, just a number of users, number of number that have copilot M 3 6 5, and number of users that actively use M 3 6 5 copilot.

And what I want is, I want a percentage of the active users. So I’m basically gonna say over here I need a percentage of D four out of D three. Real simple language. That’s what I would like. And so what it’s doing now is it’s gonna go off and it’s gonna analyze my data and see it’s analyzing the data there.

And then what it’s actually recommending is it’s saying, Hey, I see what you wanna do. Do you want us to insert the whole column? So it’s actually worked out, not just for the cell I was in, but it’s actually going, Hey, I can see what you’re doing here. Actually, let’s just do that whole column for you. And so then if I insert column,

why did that not work?

I know why when you clicked on that, it didn’t insert, but. So we hover over it, you can see it’s showing that the percentages are correct there. So this is what it’ll do. It’ll go through and analyze that information and this is where it’s really powerful of being able to analyze it inside the application without taking it out of the context and putting it somewhere else to get an answer.

You can get that answer right in here because it sees the context that you’re asking that question in.

Cool. Because I’m running run out of time, I’m going to jump back to the slide deck

and go to that one and Right. Okay. So before I hand over Amelia, I’ve got about five slides to go through quickly. One of the ones here, and this is both relevant for the bits that I was just showing you, but also some of the things Amelia’s gonna talk through. Data governance is a really important factor and it’s something that’s quite often overlooked.

One of the big things around data governance is it’s all about having standards in your environment as to how you manage and control data. It’s probably too big a topic to go over in this scenario, and I think we cover it in the next webinar we go much deeper into this, but I just really want to, just to mention it in here, that it does have quite a lot of relevance.

When you create those documents from drafts, if you’ve got information that’s tagged as internal lonely, and you’ve said in there that this is for an external customer, it will automatically ignore anything that’s been tagged as internal lonely. So that’s just an example of where data governance becomes really important with ai.

Again, this is another one of those really big topics, but it’s something that I just wanted to mention. And Cass is going to throw a link for more information around this into the chat. But one of the things that is worth noting is that all co-pilots, they all abide by enterprise data protection or also more commonly known as commercial data protection.

And effectively what it means is that the information you put into copilot is not used to train the model. It doesn’t leave your environment. It’s all processed within in the confines of your environment. You take that information that you’ve would’ve necessarily put into copilot and you put it into chat, GPT, it’s leaving your environment.

You have no control over that information anymore, free for all, and it is free for all. So this is really a really important factor for businesses especially.

Do we need to train our staff? The simple answer is yes. The great example is our senior leadership team. When we first rolled it out to them a lot of them really struggled with it. So we actually did a bit of training for them and it made a huge difference. They went from, Hey, we’ve done a few searches and it’s not really working to, wow, this is amazing.

We’re actually getting a lot of benefit out of this. So just that little bit of training makes a huge difference. It’s the same as any new product.

I’ll just put in a few steps here. And just thinking about if you’re thinking about rolling out co-pilot obviously come and have a talk to us, but there’s a few steps in this that are worth considering. We will be sharing this entire slide deck so other people will be able to see it and you’ll be able to have a look at this afterwards.

So just a wee bit of a summary here. Copilot Midland search engine, it’s there to help you not replace you. Con, constructing your prompt is really important. And then obviously play with it. See what it can do. Consider data governance, training is important and having a plan, I have one more slide before I pass over to, hopefully it’s gonna get some laughs, but anyone who knows the Simpson you first, you don’t succeed.

Give up. Please don’t be like Homer. If you don’t succeed the first time. Try again. Yeah. Like it’s, you just gotta give it a few tries. It’s lots of fun.

Amelia Reinecke: Cool.

Matt Bourne: Thanks Matt. Okay. Do you want Yeah, please.

Yeah. Thank you.

Amelia Reinecke: Okay. So what Matt has. Showed us is that copilot is a thing that helps you to be personally more productive. As a personal assistant. It helps you to come into the flow of work. So if you work in emails or you work in teams, most of the time you can use your copilot wherever you are.

And I think one thing that we pro probably need to start normalizing is that copilot is the queue interface, the UI for ai.

Matt Bourne: Yep.

Amelia Reinecke: We don’t have to think about that big thing that’s ai. We can just talk to this to this chat bot. And that will help us get information. Now that’s really beautiful from a personal productivity point of view.

What I wanna talk to you about is actually how we can take the next step. And the next step is really taking talking about agents. Now, agents is an extension of co-pilot and you can have an agent working on itself, or you can have a co-pilot triggering an agent or any way that you can think of. But so an agent is actually a thing that we create to.

Fix or to help automate a specific business function. So if you are in in a team that works with sales or leads, you can say, okay, lead me. Look at all the leads that came in from our website and trigger a couple of things. So that is what an agent does. So it’s an AI powered system with actions that triggers that can also autonomously do things.

We’ll get to the different types of agents in a minute. It works on half of, on behalf of the employee or the team, or the function as I said. And it can be connected autonomously. So that’s, that’s just a little bit about the difference between a copilot and an agent. Now it’s interesting and I hope that most of you on the call have heard about the power platform.

It is Microsoft’s low code, no code environment. And basically at the moment, most of the business applications like Dynamics 3 6 5 sales. Business, central customer service, finance and automation. Finance and operations all live in this low code power platform environment that has things like Power BI and Power Automate and so on.

The new thing, it’s not so new actually is copilot studio. And that is where you build all your co-pilot. So you can build a co-pilot to do, to make you fast at your lead generation or your lead qualifying your leads. Or you can take a brand new co-pilot or a new agent and build it in co-pilot studio.

So just a little bit about where it sits in the greater scheme of the ecosystem. And then a little bit, a bit more about what is an agent. So an agent can actually go and do couple of things. Now, the most important thing is that an agent can actually, be in your Microsoft environment, in your tenant, and never have to go outside of it.

So you can build it so that it stays in your environment. It uses your applications like maybe Zendesk and if you use, let’s say Salesforce or any of those dynamics. Dynamics is good. Salesforce news sorry, it’s just my my personal opinion, but let’s say you have business applications that are not Microsoft applications.

You can still get your agents and your copilots to work with third party applications. You can have Microsoft N 365, which is what Matt showed us. And you can work with that within your agent or your co-pilot. So at the moment, Microsoft has created a time matt alluded to the connectors earlier.

There’s also standard templates Microsoft has created for co-pilots for, let’s say, for co-pilot, for sales, co-pilot, for customer service, and a co-pilot for finance. And these things can be put down as a base. Out of the box, and you can then go and configure it to make it fit your business purposes more.

Then we’ve got the power platform, as we said, power apps, power automate power pages, so you can actually link it to your website and it’s still within your organization and you keep that, that governance around that. It’s not going into a chat GPT and bringing in other bad actors into your environment.

Then obviously my favorite, it works with Dynamics 3 6 5, so sales, finance, business, central customer service, marketing, the whole lot. So it’s pretty, pretty nifty. Now the LA last week at Microsoft Bold, there was a couple of things announced. It’s actually getting quite nuts at the moment because there’s daily new releases of things, but I think the main thing at the moment is we’ve got the co-pilot.

So if you think about that’s a personal co-pilot. And that helps you with your personal productivity. Then we have copilot studio, and you go and look at the stuff that’s in copilot and you extend it, you build out, you do a bunch of agents. Now there’s a new term called Agent Boss, which Microsoft has.

Point, and it’s basically meaning that we as people will be the bosses of many agents. They will go do functions, they will go and match things. You as a human will go and look at it and say, yes, I’m happy. Push the button. It just makes it a lot faster for you to go and type things or go and open another application or whatever the case might be.

So all of this sits on copilot control system. So when we said copilot studio, it is all with the governance, with the security, with all that, with that basis that you come to love with Microsoft security is in there. So different types of agents. So we’ve had, and we’ve talked about this one quite a lot today, the retrieval.

So retrieval of information. The example that I like to use here is that you are sitting inside of your Microsoft environment and you go in a new type. Oh, by the way how much paternity leave do I have? A year and it’ll come back. It will go into all your SharePoint lists and all your knowledge basis and all of those things.

And it’ll come back and it’ll say, Hey, you have 10 days a year, whatever it is. But it will also bring back the documentation links to those documentations. Then we jump into the next one. It can actually then go and say, do you wanna go ahead and book paternity leave? Then it becomes a task. So you retrieve data, you get the information that you’re looking for, and then you create the actions, the tasks that needs to be had, that needs to happen.

Tasks in here, things like time sheets. I don’t know how many people on the call have to do the proverbial time sheet every week or every day. Pain in the backside. Expense claims. So tasks, all of these, the middle bit is probably the pink and the blue is probably where we view, sorry, pink and purple, or where we’ve used things like retrieving information and thinking about charge GBT, but with, in your environment tasks, bringing things to you and then actioning them.

The new one, which is the one that’s, to me personally the most scariest is is the AU autonomous. Agent, and this still is in preview. You can see that. But it’s basically allowing the agent to go and do things and just go and dust stuff. I’m a little bit where we have to test that still.

So we can go through, in between where you’ve got the task, you can say, Hey, this is what we see, and then you go and push it and let it go further.

Matt Bourne: Look, Skynet was a safe system.

Amelia Reinecke: Oh yeah. Very safe. Yeah exactly my point. Now this slide I’ve put in because, hey Microsoft loves stats and this is.

Unfortunately, because it’s Microsoft, it’s always American states. So it says that 68% of early copilot users have improved their quality of work. Now, Matt said earlier he’s been working with Colo copilot for 18,

Matt Bourne: 18 months. So probably the biggest thing I would say is that for me, it creates time and it allows me to a task that would’ve taken four hours in the past, I can now do in an hour.

And so it creates time for me, which allows me to do more things in a day be more functional of my job. So yeah, really helpful.

Amelia Reinecke: Okay, so not just American Stats, good old New Zealand stats. There you go.

Now we are gonna go quickly. I’ve got six minutes left. We’ll talk about a little bit of the different kinds of copilots that’s out there at the moment. We’ve got the copilot sales agent. You can also in your dynamics, it doesn’t have to be Dynamics 3 6 5 sales. It could be Salesforce, it could be anything like that where you can close more deals with AI assistant.

You, I don’t know if but for a very long time you could have put your LinkedIn into your dynamics application and grab information from LinkedIn to build out your lead or your opportunity with information from the companies and whatever that’s on LinkedIn, co-pilot for service agents.

So making your service agents, more effective. They can bring information from various applications into a teams call that they have with the customer and say, oh, I can see that you’ve locked seven cases in the last month, whatever the case might be, et cetera, et cetera. And then the co-pilot for finance that is still in preview and that’s just streamlining your financial processes with the AI assistant.

And as I said before, this might get tied today, but it’s all built on the Microsoft copilot studio and where you can customize, extend, build out your own copilots and agents. So a little bit, as I said before, these are just examples of, the first one is the copilot sales agent, and it’s got out of the box integration with Salesforce.

So you can see you are in Outlook. I think that’s Outlook.

Matt Bourne: Yeah, that’s,

Amelia Reinecke: And you can bring in your co-pilot from Salesforce into your flow of work. The next one is working with Zendesk so you can connect it and as Matt said, hundreds of connectors already completed by Microsoft, so you don’t have to do all that integration work.

So again, ServiceNow Zen Deck, unfortunately Salesforce, sorry, I’m not a big fan of Salesforce, but in, anyway and then you can look at it from a finance point of view integration with SAP and because it’s Microsoft, there will be integration with finance, Microsoft Finance and Operations and Business Central and all those things.

But it brings it into the flow of work. I think that’s the point I’m trying to leave with you. I. Then if we look at just a little bit more about the sales agent, you can see here you can actually be on a team score with maybe your co maybe or a sales team that’s selling a massive deal. You can view the opportunity summary, can bring it into your team’s conversation.

You can analyze the sales conversation, you can draft a proposal. You can create revenue, data and charts. You can create t tasks in your CRM, doesn’t matter which CRM it is. You can update the opportunity and show conversational rates the rate of conversation and create a pitch presentation, which Matt showed us earlier.

I’m gonna jump. To the next one, which is basically what I’ve said here, but in a little bit more detail. You’ll get the slide deck afterwards and you can go through that. I’m running out of time. Then copilot services agent. So embed copilot directly into your agent desktop. Again, exactly what I told, what we talked about with the sales agent.

This is the customer services agent and it just brings all the information to the team that’s working with it. And I think what is coming, and it’s it’s probably already happening, is Microsoft are taking, with the agents and the copilots, they are taking the lines between our business applications and they’re erasing them so that you work with an agent and you, if the UI becomes just so much easier.

And then if the UI gives you three things, but it’s three things from three different systems, it goes and populates that information and then trigger what needs to be triggered, et cetera, et cetera. So that’s the long and short of that. Then this is also just again, how the copilot service agent will work.

You can go through that on your own time a little bit. Just more examples. I think we’ve had these examples before. Now as I said, you can extend and customize with co-pilot studio, so can use the co-pilots and the agents that are already created and modified like you could do with Dynamics 3 6 5 sales or finance or power apps or any of that stuff.

And then you can also just build your own, I think two things that I would leave, want to leave with you. Before we go into this slide, sorry. Just go back one step, couple of things I wanna leave with you. So firstly, this works within your environment. So in your Microsoft environment, you can go and say, keep that as the holy grail.

And we don’t want any information outside of our organization. You can say we want information from our website, but you don’t have to go and say, Hey, I wanna bring in a chat GPT type thing or take my information into a chat GPT thing. So it’s all internally. So please be cognizant of that. So it’s, if you think about it, it is like you had a chat on your website for customers to go and find things.

It’s like that, but with inside your Microsoft tenant. And I think those are the. Key messages, I would like to leave with you. Cool. Okay, next slide. We are almost done, guys. 15 minutes. Yeah. Cool.

Matt Bourne: Okay. So I’m gonna apologize here quickly, is that both Amelia and I, as you can see, we’re both quite passionate about this and we could probably both talk for a few more hours each about our respective sections and a lot of crossover.

So we have covered a lot today. I’m aware of that. So we will share the slide deck so you get all the information. But one of the things we wanted to point out is that how can we help? So at Code Blue we’ve got modern Workplace consultants. They can come in, they can help do reviews on your business, see how copilot could benefit you working on strategies and plans around it.

Helping with audits of your existing environment to see if you’ve got any potential security issues, which AI will find a way through. So it’s just understanding what those are and what your risks are. Help with data governance and protection, and also training plans.

Amelia Reinecke: And then from a few g process automation.

Matt Bourne: Are you on each

Amelia Reinecke: click? Yes. I don’t know why I did that. Yes. So it is daunting and I understand that. But what we do at fil Business Process automation is we are, as Max said, very passionate about this. We have a team of people that can help you get started evaluating your functional areas that require automation, that require a thinking of, Hey, how can we make this easier for our staff so that they can do the things that they enjoy more and not sit and just capture data.

One of the cool things that came out, I’ll just jump in there, is you can now actually drag a form and drop it in your. Sorry, dynamics application and it will actually populate that data for you. It is a beautiful thing if you think of people sitting and recreating and many and updating information line by line.

That’s no more, the no longer the case. Start with already created templates and then we will help you with the application integrations. We can look at agents for time sheets, expenses, whatever it is that you feel your business are spending too much time on, please come talk to us. We can help.

Matt Bourne: Thanks. So what we’re gonna do is, I’m just gonna look through some of these questions. So I can see there’s a list of them in there. So we’ll start at the bottom. So we’ve got one from Graham. So just reading through email. So your message based on that. So Graham’s saying that his his asked copilot summarize information from his email.

And it’s saying it doesn’t have access. The most likely reason for this will be is that you are currently using copilot chat, which is included in your license. Only copilot M 365 has access to your information inside the applications and stuff. So if you’re using the chat one, which is the one that’s included with your Office 3, 6 5 license, it doesn’t have any of that access.

So if you’d like to talk further about that, then reach out to your account manager or one of our team. We can look to help you get that sorted. Jason, I have a work smartphone that does MFA, does that count?

Amelia Reinecke: Oh, it doesn’t care about MFA. No, MFA is fine. I think this was in relation to the question about the expensive phone that used for talking.

Oh, okay. Oh, gotcha.

Matt Bourne: That makes

Amelia Reinecke: sense

Matt Bourne: now. Yeah. Obviously using it for m FFA and, we’re still the bare minimum there. I think. Book copilot provide references defining where it got the info from. Oh, definitely. It does, and you can also ask it to tell you where it gets information from.

And sometimes if I can’t find the information and it makes it up and you say, Hey, where did you find this? It’ll literally come back to you and say, oh I couldn’t find that information anywhere on the internet. So I I use my best guess and this is what I’ve come up with. It’ll actually tell you that it’s quite honest, which is amusing.

Amelia Reinecke: And I actually think in some cases I’ve seen it puts a footnote. In where the data comes from. Most definitely. Yep.

Matt Bourne: So we got another one here. How do we download copilot? So copilot is automatically should automatically be on your system. At least it’s been disabled by your administrator.

Administrators do have the rights to block, copilot or disable it. I wouldn’t recommend it, but some do. One of the ways so there’s remembering, there’s two different sides to copilot. If you do wanna try it out though I think it’s copilot.microsoft.com. Off the top of my head or if you go into your office 3, 6, 5 portal in the browser, you can click on copilot and it’ll be there.

But remembering that is only the chat version. If you have the full paid version, it’s in the same application. It’s at the top. You’ve got a choice of we, or work is the full paid one. We is the chat version. So when asking copilots to create a document, how can you have assurance that information is correct? How do you know where the information has come from and the sources are reliable? Okay as I mentioned before, that create, using it to create drafts is great. I would never fully trust what comes out of it.

I always review it and check it. But you can ask where it got that information from and you can ask it for a reference point and it will actually give you a link. You can then click on that, see how I’ve pulled that information to see that it is correct. Effectively what it’s doing is it’ll go off, it’ll click with information for you.

You still need to understand what you’re looking at. So for example, if you are a salesperson and you went and, said, Hey, I need this full technical design drawn up by copilot, and then just blindly sent it out without understanding what’s in it. There’s a lot of risk in that. Whereas if you are a an engineer that does that, that spins that up, then you can look at it and go, okay, I can see where that’s all correct.

That’s an issue there. I want to find out some more reference points from that. So it’s, that’s why I say it’s really good for drafting. I wouldn’t trust it a hundred percent right now. It is really good. But there it’s not perfect.

Amelia Reinecke: Again, it’s a copilot, it’s not an autopilot. So it’s helping you creating things a lot faster, but you are still the main person and it’s your job to check that stuff before you send it out to a customer.

That’s if you like your job. Otherwise, things can happen.

Matt Bourne: So when you add a document in PowerPoint for it to create a presentation, it seems to be challenging to find a document. If I save it to desktop, sometimes I can see it, but I don’t seem to be able to search for a document I’ve saved easily.

How do you find documents? Easily? Okay, so four. For PowerPoint or anything to do with copilot, the document must live in your either in your OneDrive or in your company, SharePoint or in Teams. So if it’s on your desktop and your desktop is not backed up to your OneDrive, it won’t actually be able to find that document.

The other thing you can do is you can go into the document and you can get the URL to it. So if you look for it in the web you can get that link to the document and you can put that in as a reference, this document, and it will find it. Normally if you’ve opened a document recently it will, it’ll find it.

Or if you just start typing the document name providing it’s in your environment, it will find it for you. It works really well, but that document does have to be in your Microsoft 3 6 5 tenant on your local machine. It can’t find it. When will I see copilot in my Excel? So you’ll only see copilot in Excel a if you’ve got, if copilot hasn’t been blocked by your administrator, but b, if you’ve got copilot for M 3 6 5 as opposed to copilot chat.

So copilot chat again is the one that you get included with your license. Your office 3 6 5 license PIL of M 365 is a separate purchase. And yeah, that’s what gives you all the integration into your applications, but the benefits far outweigh any cost for it. Yeah. The next question here is apologies is really obvious, but how do we get the co-pilot icon and the ribbons for word Excel and PowerPoint?

So again, that’s to do with the not having the co-pilot M 365 license. So that, that’s what gives you, and in all the applications that’s what allows you to have all those have the link in all of them. The M 365 copilots the requirement for all of that. Tell me the PowerPoint copilot prompt. Oh, okay. So when you are inside copilot on the right hand side is actually a prompt there, which is just says create a presentation from X document. So that’s in the prompt list. Or you can just type in, Hey, I’d like to create a external facing presentation.

Based on this particular document, and it will, because it understands natural language, it will automatically understand what you’d like and it will go and create that for you.

What version of M 365 includes copilot at application level? So no M 365 includes copilot copilot four M 365, which yes, I’m aware is very confusing. That is that is actually a separate purchase. I think off the top of my head, I think it’s $582 a year per license, per user for that.

Or there is a month monthly bill, but still annual subscription. But again, if you’ve got any questions about that, please reach out to us or your account manager and we can help you with with any of that as well. I have any more questions. Alright. One more question. How does the agent access online software applications that are password protected?

Okay, so pay iPay x zero and things like that. So the agent will work over a API in the backend. So it’ll actually have direct backend access, but it will still have to link through to know who you are, so it knows what permissions you have inside the application. So it doesn’t actually go through the front door effectively.

It basically goes through a back door into the application and copilot will then filter things as to what you have access to from there. So that’s what the API will do. And that links directly into the agent, which will link into copilot.

Amelia Reinecke: There is what’s called a service account, and that’s the account that you use to, to pick up those points between applications.

Matt Bourne: Cool. And oh, there’s just to where would you suggest we can go for a good course to upskill on these and learn some more on these agents in depth? How about we, and we’ll come back to the we’ll put some suggested courses in the the correspondence email, which comes out with this slide deck.

Yeah.

Amelia Reinecke: But Ms. Learn is a really good place to go for most training things.

Matt Bourne: Yeah. And also Rob’s raised about agents the cost of them. So what we’ll do is when we send this out we’ll put a bit of an overview of the costing model of agents when the email comes out with the the slide decks.

Amelia Reinecke: Yeah.

Matt Bourne: Just, it’s a bit, it’s a bit hard to explain it, but if we draw it out for you a wee bit, it’ll make it a bit easier.

Amelia Reinecke: Microsoft licensing, it’s a doc art.

Matt Bourne: I think we’ll hand over to Irene to just finish this up.

Amelia Reinecke: And I’ll just add to the last question around the licensing for the agents.

What our team does is generally help you work out the current manual cost and then figure out what is the ROI, so we can help you with that. So yes, some of the licensing can be expensive but we can help you understand if there is return on that investment or not. And if there’s not, obviously that’s not the right choice.

But in many occasions, even the higher licensing costs can still be justified because you’re spending a lot of time manually reentering or doing certain functions. So I think just to wrap up, we’ve got a couple of minutes. Thank you very much for joining us today. Thank you, Matt and Amelia for your insightful presentation and really enjoyed, I think, answering your questions.

Thank you for yeah for putting your questions in the q and a. We have $300 Prezi cards. You can win if you fill in the feedback form. We really would appreciate your feedback so we can understand how we can run these sessions better. You have until the end of tomorrow to submit your feedback.

And then the winners will be notified via email in the next couple of days. We will be rerunning this webinar next week on the 4th of June, on Wednesday from nine till 10 again. So if you’ve got someone who has missed this particular webinar but still would like to hear the content, please suggest that they join the rerun next week.

And then in June and July we will be running. The next sessions for our series one will be on data governance and insights. We’ll talk about things like Dataverse and Power bi. So very interesting topic. We do get a lot of questions from our customers about this topic. Please register and we will be sending out invites to this workshop as well.

And then the next topic after that, we’ll be using Microsoft Dynamics for non-for-profit organizations specifically. So again, that is later in July and we will be updating you with the sessions coming after July as well. So once again, thank you very much for joining us and enjoy your day.

Matt Bourne: Thanks you much, team.

Thank you. Thank you.