Episode 3 – What Is Copilot and Why Use It?

Ross Jordan: Deb, thanks for joining us today. We sure appreciate your help and guidance on the Copilot here. Let’s start off with something simple. So what is Microsoft Copilot?

Deb Walther: Microsoft Copilot’s an AI-powered productivity tool. It enhances the way we work. It uses large language models. It actually uses ChatGPT. Uses the Turbo 4 for using a license and then something called Microsoft Graph. And Microsoft has designed it to be your AI assistant. It’s designed to help you work more efficiently and more effectively with your work.

It searches the web, it can search your work on SharePoint and it does it to answer questions. It can summarize content, answer questions, and it looks at the meaning of the words, not just the actual words, which is what makes it so much better than the search engines we’ve used in the past.

When it searches for things, it can actually do something with that information once you get an answer back. You can ask it to develop, to write a paragraph for you, develop a slide deck, create a meeting for you, summarize, chat and give you action items. So that’s where it becomes an assistant and saves a lot of time.

You don’t have to take the time with the answer and go and interpret the answer. It’s already doing that for you. It gets you to about 60 to 80 percent there. That’s how I think about it.

Ross Jordan: Very cool.

Deb Walther: There are two versions of Copilot. There’s the business Copilot, which is available pretty much free for all of us.

Microsoft was talking about using ChatGPT 4 and 3.0 if it gets really, really busy. But I just read something this week that they’re actually starting to use the TurboJet GPT as well. And then when you buy the license, you’re using the fastest and greatest. 

The licensed Copilot also integrates with all of the Microsoft apps. So everything from Microsoft Office, Word, PowerPoint, oneNote, Loop, Whiteboard, Planner… all of the tools you probably haven’t even touched. It will help you figure out how to use those tools and to use them more effectively.

It’s also integrating into things like Microsoft Entra and Purview and our workflows and Power BI and Power Automate, Power Apps, all of those things to make it easier for us to be able to use those tools.

Ross Jordan: How cool is that? That’s awesome.

Deb Walther: Very cool. With that, though, comes some new vocabulary, and you’re going to hear me use some of these words during our podcast today.

“Grounding” is when I take my Copilot and I point it to something, which is what makes Copilot so much better than GPT. ChatGPT is just looking at the Etherweb, looking everywhere for the answer. I can take Copilot and say, only look at this document, only look at this library, look at these files and it can give me a much better answer.

I’m less likely to get a “hallucination.” So a “hallucination” is when the AI creates something out of thin air. It gives you a falsehood. So we want to try to prevent that. 

The last new word I’m going to talk about is “prompt engineering.” That’s a whole new skill set that we’re going to be developing.That’s where we learn how to ask the GPT, the Copilot questions, and learning how to ask questions in a way that you’re more likely to get the answer that you want. And then understanding that you can iterate that. With our previous search engines, if you didn’t ask the question the right way, you had to go reword the question and ask it again. Here I can just keep asking follow-up questions and follow-up questions. And you can do that 30 times, then it shuts down and says you have to start over again. So that is a huge time saver and gets you just better results.

Ross Jordan: Now that’s critical, too, because it’s one thing to use the tool, but be able to use it effectively, right? If an organization was looking at using Copilot, how would you describe what they need to consider before using it?

Deb Walther: So you have to understand how much time it’s going to save your workers. I know I was just having a conversation with my boss about this and you know, I pointed to one document. It saved me an hour of research time. It helps me find code, PowerShell scripts. It helps me find actions for automation.

Something that would have taken me an hour to two hours to research. I get it in five minutes. That alone, with the hourly rate that I get paid compared to the cost of Copilot; the return on investment is huge.

Ross Jordan: And then multiply that across an entire organization.

Deb Walther: I use it a lot for drafting content and polishing content. I tend to be a little verbose in my content, so I can ask it, “how do I summarize this and make this a little less verbose?”

I can do that in my emails, my documents, in my PowerPoint decks. Again, I’ve talked about finding answers: I think of this as search on steroids, because it’s not just looking at the words, it’s looking at the meaning of the words.

I can use it to set up meetings. So I can take this information and say, “set up a meeting with Ross,” and it will give Ross this information, this result and it will automatically find the first available time. If that doesn’t work, I say, “how about next week?” And instead of me having to go through the assistant in Inside Outlook and spending 10 minutes finding meeting times that the two of us could meet. It saves you even more time the more people you’re adding to that meeting, right?

Ross Jordan: Of course.

Deb Walther: To me, the biggest one is summarizing and analyzing content. I think this is going to be one of the biggest improvements to our work life. Because it can summarize an email chain. So you can ask it to, in four or five lines, summarize this week-long email chain with 20 people on it.

I can summarize chats in Teams. I can summarize documents. 

Here’s where I think it’s going to be really helpful: Organizations that do a lot of compliance. You know, I come out of the biotech sphere, so regulatory has to do these filings with the FDA. Then after they do the filing, they’ve got to create a PowerPoint deck to present the results of that to the board.

That can take days to do. So we can get you 60 to 80 percent there by asking Copilot to summarize. These documents are really big. You may have to break it down into smaller bits, but you can ask it a question and create a slide, ask a question, create a slide. It’s doing it for you.

Then trust, but verify, right? You’ve got to go back and look at the document and make sure the information is correct and make sure it didn’t miss a meaning that you meant to have, but the way you asked the question wasn’t there. But again, it’ll save you 60 to 80 percent of your time. 

Ross Jordan: For busy people, busy executives, you can find a way to attend meetings that you can’t actually physically be there for. And it’s a great thing to do a summary and say, tell me what happened during this meeting or what the takeaways are.

Then all of a sudden, when I’m following up with a client, a customer or another peer, I can always say, “so it looks like you guys talked about this. Explain to me what’s going on.” You weren’t even there and you know what you were talking about. It’s a beautiful tool.

Deb Walther: So Microsoft gave us a stat. They said about a third of people feel that if they didn’t attend a meeting they wouldn’t be missed. But they attend the meetings because of fear of missing out, right? It’s real.

Ross Jordan: Absolutely. But then they multitask, right?

Deb Walther: Right. Then they asked what makes meetings worthwhile for them. The top answer was, “I receive information that will help me do my job better.” So if I don’t have to be at the meeting, I use this all the time with Teams. I have a meeting with a client. I run my recap after the meeting. I get a summary of the meeting and I get a list of action items.

Still, trust but verify, right? If I open it up in Stream, Stream will actually give me the timestamp so I can actually go back and hit the timestamp if I want a little more information. So instead of having to spend an hour, hour and a half, two hours, relistening to a meeting, I’m spending 15 minutes. It’s huge.

I get all these action items. But again, I can modify. It gets me 60 to 80 percent there. I modify it, and then I can send it out. And I’m only charging a client 15 minutes instead of an hour and a half for that meeting summary.

Ross Jordan: For those people that are time-starved anyways, it’s a way to be more effective with the time that you do have. So we’ve talked a lot about the positives, the exciting parts of Copilot. Obviously, there’s got to be some challenges too, right?

Deb Walther: Yeah, a couple of them. You know, every organization has a digital debt. Microsoft is really starting to recognize this. I think they gave us a number of years ago that 75 percent of the organizations start up SharePoint and dump documents in. What’s happened is there’s no data governance to it. There’s no organization, there’s no process for what to do with our finalized copies versus different versions. Many people never like to delete anything. 

So there’s a lot of digital debt. It takes you so long to find things and uses a lot of energy to do your job. Copilot helps you reduce that digital debt because the way you ask the prompt; you can say, “give me the results after 2022,” or “give me the results from December” and it will know which version to look at, which version to point at and give you your answer off the document that you’re looking for.

The fear of change, though, is one of the biggest ones, right? This is a huge change to how we work. I remember reading one of Thomas Friedman’s books. He talked about one of the biggest changes to how we, as a human race could function was the invention of the printing press, which was, what, 1458?

So, 550 years later, we invented the internet. Now we can find information really quickly. We don’t even have to go down to the library to find information. And here we are now, 35 years later, having AI help us write things, helping us deal with grammar issues, dealing with content.

This is a huge change in 35 years. The next major change is here. It’s going to change how we go to work, how we work ourselves, how we respond to things. And I think a lot of workers they’re worried about losing their job. They’re worried about reduction of head count. 

So the thing is, when Microsoft asked leaders, they said that was last on their list of what they’re looking for AI to do, especially with information workers. Business leaders were two times more interested in using AI to increase productivity than to cut headcount. So it allows us to work more effectively, we can do a better job, we’ll feel better about ourselves, hopefully reduce some of the stress that we have and trying to get to that thing we can’t get to.

Copilot is assisting us. It’s kind of like having your own executive assistant, right? If you think about it.

The other thing is, it’s just really going to help us with collaboration. So there’s a new skill called prompt engineering. It’s going to be scary to learn something new. We all learned how to ask questions of Google and Yahoo and Bing and whatever your search engine is. We all learned that skill 30 years ago. But now we have a new skill to learn: prompt engineering.

It’s going to change the way you ask questions. So for example, I’ll say “I’m a SharePoint administrator. I want to know how do I set up backup for my SharePoint site and give me instructions from 2023 onward.” I had to learn how to do that prompt because initially I was just going, how do I do this? It wasn’t giving me the answers I wanted. 

So learning how to do prompt engineering is going to be a big thing. You’re going to have to train people on it. People are going to have to learn how to provide context in how they’re asking questions. Then you have to learn not to be afraid to iterate, to keep asking more questions of it.

I think collaborative communication about what I’ve learned is going to be important. There are some things out on the web. GitHub has got a whole area there where people are typing in their prompts that worked for them, so that we can teach each other. You know, those of us who are learning how to use this, we’re learning how to teach you guys, right?

I think it’s going to be important to do feedback and follow through with your end users, making sure that they’re using Copilot and that they are getting the most out of it. So I think continuous training, continuous learning, communication, finding out what worked for you, what didn’t work for you… getting that feedback is going to be important.

Then I think one of the most important ones is making sure the content that you’re grounding your Copilot to is secure: that means permissions, looking at multiple copies, multiple versions. Everybody’s got multiple versions all over the place. You’ve got to make your Copilot look at the one you really want to get the right information from and that’s good data governance.

You need to start to think about applying data governance to your content so that you will get the most out of copilot.

Ross Jordan: That’s a great point because the controls that you put on the data itself is going to mandate and dictate what somebody gets, even if they’re a great prompt engineer, if they don’t have access to a file, or if they have access to files, you don’t want them to.

Deb Walther: Copilot respects rights. It looks at everything and goes, “do you have permission to see it? Nope? You don’t see it.” Is there a Microsoft Purview policy on this? Because it’s got personal information. It’s got PHI, PI, proprietary business information.

Is it IP? Is it an employee record? You know, you set up these policies in Microsoft Purview so that you label the file. If the file is labeled, then, and you don’t have access to that label, Microsoft goes, “nope, you don’t get that information.”

Ross Jordan: So your experience is you don’t deploy Copilot without having these policies and procedures in place, correct?

Deb Walther: It’s really important. We talked about how to deploy it. You have a pilot group and you choose the people in the pilot group who should know this information so that if this stuff is filtering through, it’s not Joe Schmoe who’s running a line thing who doesn’t really know what to do with this information and might share it with their friends.

You’ve got someone who truly understands, who has been trained with this confidential information and knows what to do with it and then can provide that feedback when something needs to be locked down.

Ross Jordan: That’s very important. And I’ve seen you do that with beta testing within organizations that you’ve deployed this. So very important. So I’m an an executive. I’ve decided, okay, we’ve got processes in place. We want to deploy Copilot. What benefits should I expect to my organization?

Deb Walther: You’re going to see research with references. It’s a super search, right? It’s going to summarize my content. So especially for an executive, I’m going to be able to summarize those emails, but that huge email-filled box that I’ve got, I can ask Copilot questions about my email box and get that information. If you’re expecting an email to come in, you can ask it a question about that information, about that email that came in to get the information you’re looking for.

You can use it to help you create content. Again, it avoids that blank page syndrome, right? So I use it a lot in technical documents. You can use it for marketing. 

An example: I asked Copilot once, “why is it a good to use backup in SharePoint?” It wound up adding points that I hadn’t considered. Then it gave me a couple of links for the references that I dealt in. There were a couple of things that didn’t come out of the context of the question I asked Copilot. So I was able to spend not an hour, but 10 minutes coming up with the information for that introductory in my document. But I was able to do a better job than I would have if I had just done it on my own.

Ross Jordan: I’m going to add an example to that because, on the business development side of the organization where I’m at, I use Copilot if I’m working with a client and they address me with something that I’ve never heard of before. “Have you guys ever dealt with…?” I can literally use Copilot and search all of the documents we’ve ever done, presentations, statements of work, PowerPoint… It searches all of that, and it pulls that data for me, and it’s so rapid that it allows me to understand what it is that we’re talking about. “Yes, we’ve done that. Hey, we did a project in 2021 for a client.” That immediacy of data is so important to me in business development because I have to build trust. I have to build reliance. I have to build this trust. This presence that no one person can know everything.

Deb Walther: You can’t. It’s coming at us so fast and so much that you just can’t, but what I love about Copilot is not only is the super search giving me that information, but I could tell it what to do with that information and that’s where the license comes in. I could tell it to create a slide, create a document, create an email. It could do something with that information after it’s given it to me. So that also saves me time. 

Excel, I think, is going to be one of the biggest areas. It’s still not 100 percent ready for primetime, but Microsoft made a big leap back on September 16th when they came out with Wave 2. It’s going to help you analyze data and create formulas and graph things.

Ross Jordan: What’s Wave 2?

Deb Walther: Wave 2 came out on September 16th, 2024. I honestly haven’t had a chance to play with it. I know I was frustrated using Excel this summer. It could do very basic formulas, but not complex formulas. My understanding is it could do those more complex formulas now and it’s getting even better at analyzing data.

Ross Jordan: You and I might have to pull that aside because I had a client actually this week…. Funny story. I met them at a restaurant. I overheard a conversation… I actually imposed on that conversation. Turns out she owns this HR firm and for five years had an employee that was like a genius at Excel and created a document that gives her everything she needs to express to her clients. But it is a document with 30 tabs and 63 pivot tables, right? Now when things break and that genius person isn’t there anymore, this is such a critical part. It’s one of our differentiators. So looking at that, maybe Wave 2 can help us define that or describe that a little bit.

Deb Walther: It might. Also integrating with Power BI might also be a help there as well. And then Power BI, again, with Copilot, just Power BI is your dashboard creator. So it could take a look at the data source, Excel. It can look at a SharePoint list, which is a database or any other database that it can combine on that information… help you analyze things.

Ross Jordan: Isn’t that beautiful? 

Deb Walther: I love it with Teams. I mentioned before, recapping meetings, providing my action items… It can summarize chats. I can summarize chats for, you know, seven days up to 30 days, I believe it is. The emails we talked about you can go into OneDrive. 

Now, here’s the thing: If I’m using SharePoint Business, it’s not going to look at my OneDrive. Your OneDrive is considered personal, it keeps it out of there. But recently, Microsoft opened up OneDrive with Copilot. If you’ve got the license Copilot, you can summarize up to five files. I can select five files and say, “summarize these.” I can ask it questions of up to five files. So I can ground it to those files. So that’s how you can use it in OneDrive. 

You can use it in Loop. You can use it in OneNote. Summarize content in OneNote. I haven’t even played with it yet in Whiteboard. Whiteboard’s a great little tool for drawing things out and brainstorming and things like that. Also with the Project and Planner. You can use it for that as well, so. It’s integrated into all of our apps.

Ross Jordan: So when you say the OneDrive piece, one more question on that. If I’m using it in my OneDrive and I’m summarizing my documents, that’s one thing. But if I’m, like I just described, using it as a business development tool and saying, “Hey, have we ever done a project like this?” It’s not going to pull from our partners’ or co-founders’ OneDrives, right? It’s only using OneDrive. Okay.

Deb Walther: See that’s why it’s important to understand OneDrive is for my stuff. SharePoint is for our stuff. And a lot of people store things in their OneDrive and share it out that really should be in SharePoint. And that goes back to your data governance.

Ross Jordan: Yeah, very cool. Great example. Alright, so I’ve heard you say on more than one occasion that Copilot is the worst it’ll ever be, right now, is that right? Okay, explain that to me.

Deb Walther: So it’s constantly improving and Microsoft, you know, ChatGPT is looking at every prompt that goes in and feeding the results of that in. Microsoft is not doing that.

What Microsoft is doing is a combination of doing their own improvements along with feedback. So if I find that it’s not giving me the right answer, I go thumbs down on my feedback and then I give it a screenshot and I give it context and I tell it what I’m doing.

And that’s really important. I’ve seen some of the things I have provided feedback on get fixed. I was at a presentation last night and the presenter was saying the same thing. So Microsoft actually does pay attention to that feedback. If it works well, you give it a complex thing, give it a thumbs up and let it know that it’s doing a good job as well.

Most of us complain when it’s not well done rather than giving it a thumbs up. 

I mean, it’s getting better and they’re always improving the performance there. You know, like I said, Wave 2 came out September 16th. There’ll be a wave 3 sometime next year. So, you know, it’s just always getting better.

So today’s the worst it’s ever going to be. Tomorrow it’ll be better.

Ross Jordan: So we keep talking about the positive. We have to keep going back to the negative once in a while. Right? So, if again, I’m an executive and I’m anxious deploying this in my organization, what do you recommend I do first?

Deb Walther: So you have to look at your data. I mean, you have to take a look at your data governance. What’s the risk of someone getting an answer from something they shouldn’t have access to? That, to me, is number one. Do you have multiple copies of my files? Is somebody going to get an answer from an earlier version and get the wrong information? That’s the other thing I worry about. 

But there are some things we can do in prompt engineering to try to cut that back. But I do think it’s a combination of getting rid of those older versions and making sure your permissions and policies are up to date. I mentioned this earlier about setting up your pilot group being the type of people that it’s a low risk if they get access to something they shouldn’t have access to. They’re a leader. There’s somebody who’s higher up in the organization. 

You use those people to create a pilot group. We provide training for them. We give them support. So let them answer questions and ask questions, maybe have some feedback groups, give them some feedback of what’s working, what’s not working.

Then once we’re comfortable with what we’re seeing and we’re now deploying our data governance, then we can start to expand that group and then rinse and repeat. Just provide training for that group, support for them and then follow them up with feedback. And the key is making sure that people aren’t scared of the technology and that they feel confident in using the technology.

Ross Jordan: And it’s very important. These are not a passive group of individuals. You need them to test the limits of the tool.

Deb Walther: Yeah, I think if you’ve got folks who just are not comfortable with technology, that’s probably not a good person to have in this kind of a pilot group. I think maybe the second round where you start to include the people who might be a little more negative to get them to be positive about it so that they will then sort of give accolades to the tool and help other folks in the organization jump on board.

Ross Jordan: Yeah. Nothing’s more priceless than somebody that’s a naysayer all of a sudden being excited about it, right?

Deb Walther: And that’s change management 101, right?

Ross Jordan: Yeah, it is.

Deb Walther: You get squeaky wheels.

Ross Jordan: There you go. So there’s a lot of bad press that comes with AI as well. Right? I mean, we’ve all heard the horror stories. How do you help them squelch that fear?

Deb Walther: Yeah, I think it’s choosing which AI tool you want to use, right? So we all heard the story about the Samsung code and ChatGPT, right? A couple of Samsung developers put some code in and asked GPT if it could improve it. Well, it was proprietary. And so unfortunately that code now is out to the whole world and the whole world can now see that code. Microsoft does not allow you to do that. It’s only the stuff that’s in your tenant that it’s going to looked at, and if it’s asking out on the web, that information is not feeding the model. It’s really important. Microsoft takes that very, very seriously. 

The person speaking at the talk I went to last night works at Microsoft. He said they constantly have us doing training about this. Microsoft is taking them very, very seriously. So you’re grounding the information to content that’s in your tenant, and with Microsoft’s way they’re running the model, your information is not getting outside your tenant.

Ross Jordan: I like that. And that brings me to the next question as well, because there’s a lot of AI hitting the market, right? If they’re a big player, Google’s got one, Amazon has one. Those are just some of the bigger ones out there, but Copilot, ChatGPT, there’s all these AI large language models. Help me understand why this one?

Deb Walther: So Microsoft stays in your tenant. It uses the public algorithm to improve the model, along with your feedback. Along with just sort of general, this is what we’re learning. They’re playing in their lab. They have these labs that they have in their facilities. I know one’s down in Cambridge called The Garage, where they allow their employees to actually go in and fiddle and play with things.

And when they come up with ideas, they bring that in and use that as improvements to the tool. Microsoft has been dealing with feedback for quite some time. It used to be called User Voice, and now we have feedback and they listen to us. I’ve actually impacted Stream from one of my feedbacks a couple of years ago. It was kind of cool, you know, kind of boosted my ego a little bit. It was nice, but they listened to us. So use that feedback. 

Again, I’ve talked about it respecting permissions and policies that you have set up in your environment. It’s going to respect that and it’s going to be enforced. The key is you have to make sure you have that set up properly, right? If you don’t have access to something, it’s not used by Copilot. 

And it’s always integrated into all of your apps with connectors. We can also use those connectors to connect to third-party tools. So are some connectors that are available already from ServiceNow and some ERP systems, and they’re constantly giving them to us. But developers can also create those connectors themselves well, third-party sources data. But the one thing you have to remember, if you’ve got SharePoint on-prem, Copilot will not work. They are not giving a connector to that. Because all the on-prem versions of SharePoint are being deprecated.

Ross Jordan: Absolutely. This year. I mean, it’s a beautiful thing, but it’s a fearful thing. And those that did invest in SharePoint online or on-prem, it’s a scary thing for them. But so you’ve mentioned ChatGPT a few times, and I know that ChatGPT and Copilot are associated. How do you have confidence that ChatGPT is not acquiring my information?

Deb Walther: So again, Microsoft has put up that wall. They’re not allowing the queries that we’re putting in to be fed into the large language model that ChatGPT uses. They’re just not allowing that to happen. So again, it relies on that user feedback, plus the natural sort of maturation of ChatGPT. So you’re letting everybody else using GPT improve that model.

And again, what I had heard prior to yesterday that if you’re using the non-licensed version of ChatGPT, the business, which you get on Bing.com or your Microsoft search page that was using ChatGPT 4.0. And if it was during a really high volume period of time, it was 3.0. But I heard last night that they’re actually starting to use the turbo, the latest version with the non-licensed version.

So, and I expect that to happen over time, you’ll see more and more of this get incorporated into our regular licenses. That’s kind of what I see the future coming to.

Ross Jordan: Okay. So, I’ve got copilot. I’m an organization. I’m using Copilot within my organization. There’s a wall between me and ChatGPT. Why is that even there? Not the wall itself, but why do I need ChatGPT if I’ve got Copilot? 

Deb Walther: That’s exactly it. I prefer, to use Copilot. I had a license with ChatGPT from about two years ago. I got rid of it. I use Copilot specifically because I don’t want my information being fed into the large language model. I have proprietary information. I have client information. I don’t want that to be added into the model. And so I want it kept in my tenant. I want it kept boxed in what I’m doing and Microsoft, it’s working. It’s what they do.

Ross Jordan: Alright, so they built it right, is what you’re saying.

Deb Walther: They built it right.

Ross Jordan: Very cool. Well, so, looking into the future of Copilot, tell me what you see going on.

Deb Walther: There’s a lot coming. Microsoft just had the Ignite conference about two weeks ago. You know, we’re in Wave 2 now. September 16th they launched what they talked about a lot at Ignite and what I saw again at last night’s meeting is Copilot Agents. This is going to be, I think, a game changer for a lot of businesses. It allows you to direct or do the prompt engineering almost for our end users. So for example, I can create FAQs using Copilot agents. Right now I’m working with a client; I’m building the question on a list. I’m building all of the answers and we have to make sure we go find the list that’s got that in there and edit it.

What Copilot Agents is going to do is say, you’ve got a policy, point your agent to the policy and let the end user ask the question they want to ask. Because again, Copilot is looking at the meaning of the words. not looking just for the word.

That’s big; that’s huge to me. So now all you have to do when you update your policy every year, those changes will be made. You don’t have to do anything to the agent. The agent will continue to work.

Ross Jordan: Very cool.

Deb Walther: That to me is really cool. So Copilot Agents is going to be, I think, big in 2025 because you can set it up to point to almost any kind of data. And let the end user come up with a question. They announced the ability to talk to Copilot rather than having to type it. Now I actually can do this in Word right now using the dictation function. 

I actually found by accident it was working, and it worked in OneNote as well, but it’s coming. In the next couple of months, I think by January, I think they said. Don’t quote me on that date. But it’s coming soon, the ability, you can just talk into your microphone. That was the whole point of Copilot, to make this a natural language ability for an end user, is to just ask the question of your computer and your computer is going to give you the answer.

Ross Jordan: Phenomenal.

Deb Walther: That’s coming soon. Then we’ve got these Copilot Actions, these self-made workflows to take any kind of normal personal everyday task you do and you can Use Copilot Actions. That’s coming really soon. That’s going to be out of your OneDrive, so it’s just for you. 

If you need to create an action though that your company needs to use, you need to think about that because you need to have a service account. The one thing you’ve got to think about is, “if I make this action and I win the lottery tomorrow and leave the company, that action’s going to die once my account gets deactivated.”

So those are some of the things. We can help you guys create something that’s reusable and scalable for your company. There’s also a control system to help the IT admins manage Copilot and all the agents that get created, because that can be a real issue for compliance. You want to know what’s being made, how it’s being made, how is it being managed? How is it being updated? Change control… things like that on tools that you’re using within your organization. So, there needs to be some sort of dashboard that IT managers can use. Like I said, it’s integrating into everything in the Microsoft sphere.

So managing Entre, managing Purview.. and then they’re offering it to help us create workflows, but in my experience, it doesn’t do a great job. Sometimes it’s helped me get over a hump, but many times it’s just not quite sophisticated enough yet to do some of the cool things that we do with workflows.

It does make interactive flow charts now that I think that’s already come out of the business Copilot. And like I said, Microsoft is constantly adding more connectors. So it’s going to be easier for you to connect to third-party content right now. They’ve got ServiceNow. They’ve got there’s a couple of other businesses, but mostly ERPs and things like that. They’ve got it in Microsoft Dynamics as well. It’s a separate licensing structure for Dynamics, but they have it for that as well. So that is just going to allow you to reference and ground to more types of data.

Ross Jordan: Okay. Awesome. A lot of good things on the horizon.

Deb Walther: Yeah, definitely. And like I said, they’re going to take a lot of these functions, you know, start to see them slowly integrate into what we’ve already got. I saw this with fast search back in 2013. You used to have to pay for it separately. And then by, by 2016, it was incorporated in the product.

Ross Jordan: Well, that’s great. We hope those days come. Well, you spent an invaluable amount of time with us today, explaining Copilot, some of the hiccups, some of the challenges, but a lot of the benefits and the positive things, In closing, is there anything that you’d like to add any tidbits or highlights of your experience with Copilot that would be beneficial to the listeners?

Deb Walther: Sure, and I think I want to summarize some of the points, like today is the worst that Copilot is going to perform; tomorrow will be better. I think you’ve got to look at Copilot helping you get to 60 to 80 percent there. It’s not going to give you everything, but it’s going to get you there, right?

You can trust, but you’ve got to verify those results. Do you know, I had that happen to me early on. I went, Oh, I got the new tool and I gave the summary of the meeting and I threw it off to somebody and they’re like, what is this? There was no context. There were a lot of errors because this was back in April, and there were a lot more hallucinations.

So I learned a very valuable lesson that day to make sure I review everything and go through it and make changes before I move it forward. I think when you create that query, you’ve got to provide context. So I will say, “I’m a SharePoint admin or I’m a SharePoint site owner.” Or an executive or give it context as to what your role is. Ask it what you want it to do. Tell it what you want the output to be, and then also put some limits on it for the period of time that you’re looking for it to come up with the results.

Maybe you’re looking for somewhere between 2016 and 2018. Maybe you want something newer that was, you know, it came out in 2024. So give it that information. So you’re more likely to get the result you’re looking for. And then again, don’t be afraid to iterate. Just keep asking it more and more questions about the data that it got. And it needs to be imperfect. I mean, it’s just going to be and that allows you to continue to ask it questions when you do that. Use that feedback. It’s going to help us all get the better product that we need. 

One of the things that I like and I think is going to help people with anxiety issues, is to use CoPilot to ask the dumb questions you’re too afraid to ask other people. It really is. It’s great on that. I saw a little talk on this about folks who have anxiety issues or are neurodiverse. Those folks are finding CoPilot to be a huge help to them. Because they can ask questions that they don’t feel comfortable asking other people.

Ross Jordan: Yeah, there’s no judgment Copilot, right?

Deb Walther: There’s no judgement. It’s a robot, right?

There is no judgment. There’s no empathy. There’s no anger. It’s just going to give you the information you’re asking it to give you. So those are the things you’ve got to consider with it. And I think it’s a game changer for everybody and how we work. And going forward, it’s just going to make your life a little bit easier.

Ross Jordan: Deb, we can’t thank you enough for your time today. Thank you so much for highlighting some of the benefits and drawbacks of Copilot, and more than anything else, thanks again for just gathering the knowledge to be the subject matter expert we all rely on you to be. It’s a great thing and we appreciate you. Thank you so very much.

Deb Walther: Oh, it’s my pleasure. I love doing this kind of stuff. So thank you. Ross Jordan: Thank you for your time today. We appreciate you listening to the SkyTerra Technologies podcast. For further information, you can find us on LinkedIn or at www.skyterratech. com. Have a great day.