With all the AI products being hyped by so many vendors, it is hard to understand the value they can provide your business and whether they are worth the investment. Microsoft Copilot offers a free version that can help generate ideas or assist with general problem solving and a paid version for $30 per month that integrates with your existing M365 products. Is it worth the investment? Let’s walk through the life of an extremely busy sales leader to show you how Copilot can help.

Imagine you are the sales leader for a small business with 40 employees. Nine prospects reach out in the same week. They are all very interested in your product, but you’ve never worked with more than two major clients in a month, never mind in the same week. The challenge is that your sales cycle is complex and each customer will have different concerns and challenges that you need to address.

 On Monday and Tuesday, you have a Teams meeting with each prospect that lasts a little over an hour. On Wednesday morning your head is spinning. You need to prepare for a second meeting with each prospect with the goal of developing a proposal for each and hopefully making a sale, but it is impossible for you to keep all the facts about each customer straight. Even worse, you have a high service, high value product where knowing your customer is critical.

Enter Microsoft Copilot.

Copilot can review your meetings with each customer and in minutes can give you the following:

• An organized list of notes summarizing what was discussed, who talked the most, and a list of action items for each party.

• Links by topic back to the video so you can rewatch key points in the meeting.

• Copilot can draft thank you emails to each participant, highlighting key issues they raised.

• Copilot can suggest topics for the next meeting with each customer and even create a PowerPoint presentation to keep you on track.

• Copilot can create your proposal for you.

In this scenario, Copilot took the place of a very efficient assistant, saving hours of work in just fifteen minutes by integrating with Outlook, Teams, Word and PowerPoint. Imagine an assistant with a near perfect memory for meeting content and the ability to draft presentations and proposals in minutes! What an excellent return on a $30 investment.

There are risks with any AI product. The first is that Microsoft Copilot will have access to all M365 data that the current logged in user has access to. Even if the files are in a shared folder somewhere that the end user might never find, Copilot will find the data and return results based on that data. A threat actor gaining access to one of your accounts also has access not only to the data, but to the power of AI to quickly summarize and extract information from that data. So, with AI in your environment, attention to security is critical to prevent threats from insiders and threat actors alike.

Finally, with any AI product, you must beware of AI hallucinations. There are times when AI returns information that turns out to be false. So, while AI is a great tool to summarize information and create drafts, it is critical to evaluate the results and make sure they are valid. There is no substitute for human intelligence here. Not yet.

 We hope you find introduction to Microsoft Copilot helpful and that your AI journey is a positive one.  If you want more information on Microsoft Copilot and related security, reach out to our sales team.