Me, Myself and AI

In this blog post, Andries den Haan - Solution Architect at Wortell - talks about the added value Microsoft 365 Copilot offers for organizations and how to get the most out of this investment.

Monday night! Time for the gym...and the keynote for the first OpenAI DevDay. I installed myself on the cross-trainer, phone screen tactically placed, Airpods in and just watch while moving.

I watch intently as innovations are announced. GPT is evolving so fast in such a short period of time. Impressive! An overview of those developments are on the OpenAI Blog.

It gives me the same kind of jitters I had when Office 365 was introduced in 2011. Something really special is happening and it is happening at high speed. It is an exciting and educational time.

Tip of the iceberg

And then in early November, Microsoft 365 Copilot became available. As a Microsoft partner, we were able to use this early on to prepare ourselves on how to help customers make optimal use of this new functionality.

In the beginning, I still experienced quite a few minor bugs with Microsoft 365 Copilot (and also ChatGPT at the time), but it is becoming more powerful by the day. I'm also getting better at formulating prompts to make it clear what I'm looking for.

And when I see the speed of GPT's continued development, Copilot will only become more powerful by combining text, images and speech in the context of my work.

What appeals to me tremendously about Microsoft 365 Copilot is the integration with the Microsoft 365 Graph for content and context and using Copilot in the applications I'm currently working on. And super awesome! It's pluggable. There are ways to make data from enterprise systems available to Copilot via Microsoft Search, for example.

Information in order

From my role as a solution architect, I deal a lot with issues surrounding the organization and management of information in organizations. What always turns out to be important is how an organization handles the information in Microsoft 365. Topics such as governance, compliance and security play the leading role. Preventing redundant, outdated and trivial documents has always been the credo, but also one of the biggest challenges.

This creates risks, for example, that decisions are made based on incorrect information that emerges from search results. Or that there is unintended access to sensitive data that should really only be accessible to a specific target group.

In itself, nothing new. This has been going on since SharePoint became a success within organizations. And it still is. The difference now is that Microsoft 365 Copilot relies (in part) on the information in an organization.

If that information is incorrect, outdated or unintentionally accessible, then the aforementioned risks become a reality. I reassure myself that we at Wortell already have years of experience in the field of information management which, with the advent of Copilot, gets a new context. I myself have a focus on data migrations to Microsoft 365 and there I see a momentum to get information in order.

Impatiently waiting for the next iteration

As an outright technology addict, I can't wait to see how Copilot will evolve. I see this in the slipstream of OpenAI developments.

In the DevDay keynote, for example, I already saw that the capacity of a prompt is going to increase significantly. Then I think of future possibilities to analyze, for example, large data sets in Microsoft Excel.

Now this is limited to 150,000 cells. If this capacity is also expanded, this is going to bring a lot of productivity gains for file-share data analysis, for example.

What I am also, with some impatience, waiting for...smarter voice assistants that can become much more powerful than they are now and thus will play a much more important role in organizations and personal life.