Microsoft 365 Copilot: Top Announcements from Ignite!

all right some exciting things to talk to you about today here are the headline announcements for Microsoft 365 co-pilot that have come out of Microsoft ignite I'm framing this in the structure of a top 10 but you know you're going to get more than 10 things in here I'm going to come back at the end and point out sort of the three really key things that I think you need to take away from this but I'm going to give you a lot more than that we're going to go through this in the following order first

of all the most important thing you need to know about what's happening with this license and it's a very good thing huge new benefit then we'll take a look at some new experiences in the business chat the biz chat experience that sits on the web or teams lots of stuff coming into the Microsoft 365 applications teams Outlook PowerPoint Excel word not necessarily in that order and then finally some things that are going to help with adoption and then my sort of top three things I want you to co take away so number one here SharePoint

advanced management is now included in your Microsoft 365 co-pilot license this is a really big deal and a really really big benefit this means you don't have to necessarily start by paying for perview and other services to get that data security sorted out so SharePoint advanced management is something that can help you with these things content sprawl oversharing managing the access and control and those first two things are the the most common things that are blocking organizations from going ahead they're concerned that they've shared a whole SharePoint site and everyone's got access to things so

there are a lot of other tools coming through I'm seeing a lot of things from Microsoft around making it easier to overcome that that Blocker of the concern about the security of your documents incidentally co-pilot is not the cause of this if you've got a problem with the security and control of your underlying documents you've got that problem whether you have co-pilot or not it's just that co-pilot makes it easier to see that you've got a problem so wherever you're at in this journey it's a good idea to take advantage of those things but now

with your Microsoft 365 co-pilot license you're getting this incredible tool that is going to make all of that stuff a whole lot easier for you to get started I'm always happy when I get to talk about a licensing change that means hey you're now getting more for your money so it's a good one next up here agents in co-pilot and this is in the Microsoft 365 experiences so there are five that are being announced here we've seen some of these before actually agents in SharePoint was announced back in September this is where you can go

into a SharePoint site and just click in and say basically create an agent to reason over those documents and answer questions from those documents so that's becoming generally available some of these other ones we saw an early concept of these at build but they've come further and there's there's more of them now so let's take a look at a couple of these just to give you a sense so these are pre-built code co-pilots four sort of common situations one of them here is called a facilitator and this is basically one that's going to start taking

realtime notes and help you out inside your meeting so you're inside a meeting here and you can see the AI generated notes so if you've used Microsoft 365 co-pilot before probably most of you have if you're watching this video but welcome along if you're new to this the idea so far is that you can get this meeting recap and you can ask questions that's a thing that we can do already but this pre-built agent now is like a live notetaker sitting inside the meeting and you can collaborate with it so this is very much like

this experience of having an assistant taking notes live watch as we go along here there's quite a lot of these experiences that are lifting out of not just chat not just I chat to a co-pilot and it chats back with me but these collaborative experiences between people and co-pilots and this is the first example but we're going to see more of these so the idea here is that the co-pilot is working in this collaborative little piece and people in the meeting can go in and make those Corrections and additions and you're basically generating those notes

as you go along we've also got something here where it can generate an upto-date summary of the important information in a team's chat have you ever been in a group chat where you've been doing something else all day and you come back and there's a lot of stuff in there so this is something where again the co-pilot is like another member of the team sitting in the chat and can help you with that sort of generated summary down the side there but this is existing inside the group chat not just the meeting so this is

a bit of a new way of thinking about it so that's that facilitator agent which we're going to see soon the other one here is the Employee Self-Service now this is something we've been able to build with the tools available in copilot studio for a while but this is one of the most common scenarios that people want it sort of sits inside every organization so what we're seeing here is Microsoft building out ready to use and ready to extend something that you don't have to build this from scratch because this is an incredibly common use

case I think this is really good I think one of the biggest blockers with this technology is for organizations to understand what you can use it for so having something like this that's pre-built and ready to go and ready to connect up with your line of Business Systems is a really good way for people to start getting their heads around it and then start to think about your other use cases so our Employee Self-Service pre-built agent here sits inside this Biz chat experience you can say how many vacation days do I have left here now

in this demo this is the Microsoft demo that they're using to explain it to us obviously this would be connected up to your real systems and you'd need to do a bit of Plumbing in the background to do that so it's giving you the answer and it's showing you where that's coming from so this is drawing from The Relic Cloud which is the fictional organiz ation that we're using here to actually get the users the logged in users leave balance but also linking to the time away guide in SharePoint which is a policy that's explaining

what's going on so you'll see here that this is connecting to both that system of record and tracking of the leave balances as well as the policy that goes with it let's ask it another question here what's our parental leave policy so this is more of a policy type question and this is where we can reason over the knowledge that the organization's got any agent use case I'm you're going to be hearing this a lot from me where you are connecting it to your organizational knowledge other high value use cases make that knowledge more available

to your employees and to your business processes and this is where AI for business really really comes into its own and this is a really nice straightforward example of that so you'll see here now it's drawing from a few different things we've got the Relic Cloud HR web again which is that system of record as well as in fact a power Point slide deck and a Word document so it's able to reason over lots of different types of documents not just not just Word documents or PDFs and then it can take action so this is

the other thing is you can say yes I'd like to put that request in and this is a little component that sits in here where we've got it already knows the name of cat lson who's the person who's logged in here she can fill in the start date and end date and submit and that will go through so that is one of the the pre-built agents there's about five of them watch this space lots more to come here plus we've also seen the capability that you can build your own agents and I'm hoping that this

one gives us inspiration for other things that we can do on the platform next up we have co-pilot actions now we're going to take a bit of time here cuz this is a really interesting one in trying to figure out the overlap between Ai and Automation and in particular here a co-pilot action and a power automate flow if you're familiar with that so this sits again inside this Biz chat experience and it starts off with some common actions and suggestions that you can go into so there's a whole range of different choices that you've got

available we're going to go with this one on the top left here which is to collect synthesize and share information so this brings up a prompt as a starting point where you go in and kind of fill the the gaps in the template if you like so when we've chosen that template and you can build these from blank but the example that we're seeing here is one where you're choosing a common scenario I do love a template as a way for people to learn and get started so this is like a pre-built prompt with fill

in the spaces for what you want so message who and you can go in and choose multiple people from within your organization to do what to collect and you can put in information or whatever it is you want and then do what with it and by when so you've got the structure of that prompt and in this example here we end up with this prompt at the top so the person has filled in the details to say I want to message Lydia Liz and the launch Team so it doesn't even have to be just individuals

to collect status updates on this particular project and then send a summary over email this is this is interesting right because I look at this at at the at the start here and this looks very much just like a flow that you could build in power automate let's send messages to these people send a reminder send a summary at first glance it looks like wooden is this just flow it's not I'm going to try and explain it to to you and please subscribe to my channel I'm going to be doing a heap more content on

this like agents versus automations and how it changes things so if you're getting value out of this this is a big area that I want to spend some time with you on so what we've got here looks like a flow but it's doing more than that and there's one screenshot here that helps us understand this more so what it actually does is when the agent is triggered you'll see it's coming through so this is being triggered um and and coming in saying it's via co-pilot so it's not impersonating the person but it's acting on behalf

of the person with this message hi there I'm gathering status updates on Project sha to say share with our leadership team could you send me your updates now if you were doing something in flow you might be able to send that message to everyone and then what would they do they would respond maybe you'd set up a loop component like you you'd sort of still ended up end up with a a basically a reminder type system this is doing something more clever this is bringing it into where these people work it's sending them this little

editable sort of card in here where you can see that this person is filling in the details and then it takes all of that and compiles it back to the person who initiated this with all of the different contributions so this is using a loop component if you're not across micro Loop don't worry Loop is a loop is a collaborative tool and again not the last time you're going to hear about loop loop is a collaborative tool it's like a little component where everyone can be live in their editing at the same time and a

lot of these underlying experiences coming through in co-pilot and agents are actually giving you these Loop components without you necessarily even knowing that so they're really leveraging this ability to sort of create in real time in a collaborative way this now has gathered all the information from those people and is putting it back together you can see we've hovered over where this particular piece of feedback has come from that came from Liz and we can see the original thing but now it's collating and summarizing which we know is a very a thing that copilot is

very good at and bringing all that together and now I can turn that into an email as an update so we're going to as I said we're going to spend some more time on the channel on this I want to talk to you a lot about this stuff because I think the overlap of the world world of Automation and co-pilots and agents just got amazing and confusing and and exciting so let me know if you've got questions about this I'm going to try and answer them and make more content but I think this is a

really interesting example here and definitely a space to watch you will then be able to monitor what's going on so we've got a section here called actions where you can see the different actions you can choose to run them uh you can see what's going on and I want to play with this page to understand more about what it does so more to come on this one next up also within this bis chat experience we have some enhancements to the concept of co-pilot pages so just to level set if you haven't come across co-pilot Pages

because this was only announced at all in September so this is new and now it's being enhanced the idea here is that you've got this side by side experience between co-pilot on the one side the chat on the one side and this Page's experience on the other side which is again using Loop this collaborative experience so what happens is if you're chatting with copala and you say hey find me the report on this and summarize that and pull out a CH chart on this you've got all of that sitting in the chat but chances are

you want to do something with it this is an experience of using co-pilot at work I might want to take that and then share it with my colleagues and have them collaborate with me on it so that's what this allows you to do the co-pilot pages is to take that experience from your chat and say edit in a page and then as the chat continues you can start building out your content on the page which allows you to take it somewhere else so what we've seen at ignite is the announcement of this going even further

again I'll come back and do a let me know if you'd like a demo of copilot Pages it's on my list of of videos to make especially once these new parts come in but what we've got here is the co-pilot on the left and the page on the right but you'll see we've got a pretty chart in there so the idea of being able to kind of create a chart use Co pilot to create a chart from this Excel document and then put it in here and have something where people can actually chat about that

and collaborate on it it's also going to be able to do these mermaid diagrams so again we're sort of getting a preview of something in co-pilot here of it generating something and then saying yes put it in there so we're moving beyond just straightforward text and links here and code if you are sewing inclined that you can do that and collaborate one more thing here that we've got going on is that you will be able to work with multiple pages so that rather than the experience at the moment which is very much just like one

co-pilot chat with one page you'll be able to say oh actually I'm having another chat completely you know the next day and I've come across something and I want to add that into my page so you'll be able to choose that there so that whole world of co-pilot pages and and taking the experience out of the chat and into something collaborative powered by Loop is getting a big uplift let's take a look at what is happening with the co-pilot in the Microsoft 365 applications we're going to run through oh I should have written my order

down teams then Outlook then word then PowerPoint then Excel I think anyway you could correct me if I'm wrong teams is definitely first so we've got a few different features in each of these so I'm going to take you through each of them in turn first up co-pilot in teams we have got the ability for the co-pilot to reason over and understand information shared on the screen so the first iteration of this was that the co-pilot could recap the meeting based on the transcript answer questions provide insights based on your transcript more recently we saw

an announcement that it could also reason over the chat because there's a lot of content in a meeting in a chat and so now in addition to those things we've also got it reasoning over what's on the screen so if someone is sharing a presentation it understands what's going on with that shared content and the shared slide and that also becomes part of what you can chat about in the meeting similar kind of experience that we can get a summary of a file in a chat so if someone shares a deck with you and you

can just kind of go down the side and say can you please summarize this that'll be another thing that you'll be able to do moving on now to co-piloting Outlook co-piloting Outlook has been it's getting a it's getting a bit of an uplift this hasn't been the strongest part of it but there are a couple of things coming in here that I think are good still still more to come here so so the first one here this one was actually announced back in the September Wave 2 release um and you know recapped again obviously at

at ignite is this prioritize my inbox I think this is a really interesting one I haven't got this yet so I'm I'm waiting to see uh how it works for me but this is where the co-pilot understands the context of your role who your managers are who your manager is who your some of us probably have two managers who's who's your manager who are your direct reports who's in your team and it can help you prioritize basically sort your inbox by what it thinks is the highest priority and then when you go in and open

an email it can tell you you know this is why I think this email is high priority and you can teach it by saying this message is high priority or not and here's why in this example this is from a customer Tailwind Traders fictional customer uh where this is an important customer for the person who's using this email so you can actually tell co-pilot any emails from this customer are important so that's the PRI prioritize my inbox feature couple of things that have just been announced at ignite then well it's really sort of one thing

with two parts to it is handling scheduling meetings and I know this is something that everyone wants this is the start of it this won't go as far as you want what this will do is enable you to schedule a one-on-one or Focus time for yourself now the dream scenario and I I don't know when we get to it but the dream scenario is you want it to be able to go schedule me a meeting with all these people who are external we're not we're not there yet but this one at least allows you to

say hey find a time when I can meet with my manager and then it comes up with a suggested time notably it's not doing the scheduling for you you are in control as you are with all of these co-pilot experiences it's a very core principle of the design of the thing so you can choose to edit or send and off it goes the extension of this kind of another feature but similar sort of thing is that you can use co-pilot to draft the meeting agenda so this example here is saying I'd like to schedule a

meeting to provide an update on this project and discuss the approval and it kind of figures out an agenda for you obviously this is a fairly straightforward example I look at this one and think you probably could have just typed that but this is very similar to any of those other experiences where you say I'd like to draft an email about X Y or Zed depending on the use case it's either rudimentary or actually very useful so this will be one to to play around with if you've got more complexity in there then I think

that's going to be very useful let's take a look now at co-pilot in word did I get my order right I think I'm doing okay so far there's quite a lot going on in word I'm I'm actually really excited about the the copilot in word as an experience it's a highly highly valuable one we've been able to use copilot in word to draft a document based on other content already you could go in and say up to three documents create create my word document based on this this and this this one now is actually doing

something a little bit better let me just play this this again because it didn't got youo fast create a strategy but it actually suggests the sources that you can use so you'll see there it's bringing up things that are including not just other word documents but including PDFs emails meetings so there's quite a lot this is this benefit of co-pilot being like in your Microsoft graph and having access to all of those things so now word will kind of suggest do you want to use all of these things to draft it this one is actually

I think going to be you imagine anything we have to pull together a whole lot of information and the time it takes I think this is going to really help with that second one here is being able to have co-pilots citing the sources when drafting so it drafts a document and you want it to be able to tell you where that content came from again let's just click back on this one um and you'll see that it's actually coming through with a citation to say this is is where it came from so that content that's

being pulled together this is something I've actually had customers ask for so I'm very happy to see this one in the mixed next up we've got coaching so if you've written something and you want to improve it you can say get coaching on it this is a little bit like the coaching inside of Outlook where it can give you suggestions on how you might improve your writing so depending on where you are this is something that might be useful for you we have copilot in PowerPoint some cool things here this one's come a very long

way since earlier in the year if you tried copilot and PowerPoint back in like March or April when it was relatively new please clear your mind and come back to it there's a lot more going on in here so one of the things that was announced in September in the Wave 2 released was this thing called a narrative Builder that allows you to get more structure we are now going to be able to create a presentation using the narrative Builder using an existing document and you'll see here rather than just the the chat on the

side where you say create a presentation from a document and just goes here it is this is one where it actually gives you the structure of the presentation you can see you can iterate on that bring another document in and kind of get the whole thing working and bring in those other data sources first and then go ahead and generate the slides generating a PowerPoint from existing documents is I think the strongest feature of this really happy to see that it's being enhanced into this narrative Builder so that you've just got that more control over

the first draft of what you're getting rather than it just being a oneand done kind of deal next up we have presentation translations so if you're in a multilingual environment uh I think we've got up to 40 languages coming in here which is extraordinary the language translation has gone a long way since it started first couple couple of years ago when we first started looking at language translation it was largely the major sort of European languages and not a lot else you'll see here we've gone into Japanese so you know different script entirely so this

is something where you'll immediately be able to translate your presentation into any of those other 40 languages which is amazing and we also have couple more things here this one is being able to create a presentation from a brand template so this is the other thing that people are really Keen to have obviously most of us in a workplace need to create a template based on the brand this is something that's started to come through but it's relatively limited so we're seeing some enhancements here as well this one will allow you to create a present

using brand images from templafy I didn't know templafy but I'm going to go and learn about that as well as the SharePoint organizational asset Library um this is one I haven't kind of gotten that far into it but again let me know if you're interested in more on this I think this one and the create presentation from existing files are kind of the two things that make this a high value thing for uh work rather than just a cool trick and I'm very happy to see that we are now able to use co-pilot with the

text on the actual screen this is something we haven't been able to do before so we can go in there again I'll just um kind of rewind and play that one again so you can go in here and say condense and this is actually able to rewrite the text on your slide to make it shorter I would argue still too much text on a PowerPoint slide but that's a definitely an improvement and last but not least in our PowerPoint section here we have the ability to just create speaker notes so this is something where in

the past when you create the presentation from scratch it will create speaker notes for for you but now you can actually just have something here where you say please add speaker notes to the slides based on the content that you've got in there and it will generate that for you and finally in our app series here co-pilot in Excel um the co-pilot in Excel with python which has been around for a while is going to become generally available only in the US as a starting point I will come back to that at some other point

I haven't got my hands on that one yet but the main new thing that has been announced here is this new co-pilot in Excel getting started experience this is interesting right this is actually basically allowing you to generate a templated like a common sort of use case or use this to describe what you want and then generate it up until now the copilot and Excel experience has only been for starting with an existing spreadsheet so this lifts it up to be a little bit more equivalent with some of the other types of features here and

allows you to create really common kind of use case templated scenario for um for things so for beginner users if you're not quite sure where to start as I said I'm always fan a fan of things that can help you start with something that isn't a blank page and it kind of parallels many of the other experiences where you describe what you want to create it so that will be fun to play with all right I'm going to wrap up here with adoption and measurement but don't go anywhere I'm going to recap my three the

three things I want you to take away after this so in the adoption and measurement site we already have this is live right now the Microsoft co-pilot dashboard included in your Microsoft 365 co-pilot license this gives you a heap of information about readiness impact adoption this has actually come a long way quite fast there's going to be some more reporting and things coming through here as well and the other thing I want you to be aware of is a name change we love a name did you really expect me to get through the whole video

without there being a name change co-pilot this is a good one though co-pilot lab becomes co-pilot prompt Gallery this is a better name for it the co-pilot lab has been the place where you can go and get suggested prompts inside all the applications it gives you ideas of things that you can use for prompts which I think is really cool but prompt Gallery is a much better name for it all right my top picks here we go and let me know in the comments what your top picks are what do you think is most important

what is your favorite but I'm going to give you three things to go away with here the thing that I think is the most important announcement the one to watch and my just favorite because I have feelings about these things so the thing that I think is most important is that the SharePoint advanced management is included in your co-pilot license now this is where we started the video this is one of the biggest blockers it's one of the biggest concerns for organizations is that they're worried about the oversharing and the data protection and it all

gets too complicated and too hard having this as part of the license is an enormous value ad and an enormous way of giving you that confidence you need to get started with all of that amazing stuff that we've just seen and so much more that keeps being added my one to watch is this one around co-pilot actions my first instinct is but isn't that just flow but actually it's not this screen in particular is the one that helps explain it I'm going to get right into this one this whole Space of agents and automations and

how we can automate business processes is the biggest area to watch and then my favorite do you want to take a guess could you tell from what I was doing it's actually this one in word I I really really am enjoying using co-pilot in word and the ability to draw on all of these different data sources including emails and meetings and have co-pilot suggest for me where I might find information I think is really high value let me know what you think is the highest value let me know if you've got any questions stay subscribed

please for more information on all of this stuff and other videos here about night announcements thank you for watching