Companies weigh costs of flying with Copilot 365

Sometimes after a business trip, Gordon McKenna enters a state of email anxiety.

“I always declare ‘email bankruptcy,’ and kind of say to people, ‘If you responded to me last week, I’m going to be slow getting back to you,’” said McKenna, cloud evangelist and VP of alliances at the managed services provider Ensono.

He and about 50 members of the 3,200-person company have been testing out Microsoft 365’s Copilot, however, and a prompt like summarize all emails from last week quickly pulls important emails from the inbox, and McKenna from inbox debt. The effect has been “massive,” according to the UK-based cloud pro.

“Outlook shouldn’t be something that you have to drive. It should be like an autonomous car. It should drive you,” McKenna told IT Brew.

Employers and their employees are testing out Microsoft 365 Copilot to see if the automatic recaps of Teams meetings, summarizations of email threads, almost-instant creation of PowerPoint presentations, and other features are worth the investment (priced in November at $30 per user, per month). A business case requires employers to consider, and maybe quite literally calculate, a hard-to-define stat: time saved.

Can I trust the pilot? Microsoft released Microsoft 365 Copilot for enterprise customers on Nov. 1. The tool uses artificial intelligence to understand natural-language prompts and quickly create outputs for the well-known products in Office, like Word, Teams, and Outlook.

While McKenna appreciates Copilot’s easing of email anxiety, prompts at times require further prompts, like a narrowing of output to highlight certain individuals’ data from specific Office-ware.

“If I get a lot of content, I will ask it to pivot on something within the content. So, for example, ‘Show me a summary, but pivot on these particular responses,’” said McKenna.

The systems are not human after all, said JP Gownder, VP and principal analyst at the advisory Forrester Research; they will sometimes misunderstand “emotional tenor” and words on a transcript.

“You need to teach people that there are things they need to do, like you have to vet any factual claim that you get out of these systems,” Gownder told IT Brew.

Forrester still predicts that approximately 6.9 million knowledge workers will be using 365 Copilot by the end of 2024.

Gownder says the business case will come down to estimations of time saved and cost, which he mentioned in a recent post.

“If it provides four hours of time savings per month—just one hour per week—an employee would only need to earn $7.50/hour to break even on the cost of Microsoft 365 Copilot over the course of a year,” Gownder wrote on Oct. 25.

The Copilot pilot program. Dentsu, a global advertising and marketing agency of about 72,000 employees, has connected Copilot to an asset library that allows creative teams to pull images: Maybe a car advertisement needs a car going full-speed around a snowy mountain.

“We can ask Copilot now in natural language for what those assets are. We can describe it in natural language and receive it back in MS Teams through 365 Chat in a couple of seconds,” said Brian Klochkoff, EVP of innovation and emerging technologies at Dentsu.

The quick pulls, Klochkoff told IT Brew, enable the creative teams, especially junior staff members, to focus on storytelling, not administrative overhead.

“Now that junior resource can be a part of that client discussion and bring more of the creative nature of what people do into that conversation, rather than going through and being a gofer for information or gofer for assets,” said Klochkoff.

The company has paid for 300 licenses, the maximum number in Microsoft 365 Copilot Early Access Program, wrote Paul Buranosky, VP of global marketing and communications at Dentsu, in a follow-up email to IT Brew.

McKenna will likely roll out the technology, too, but start with teams that are in the Office apps the most, like the company marketers.

“I think if it was a little bit cheaper, or even built into the M365 costs, we’d probably roll it out tomorrow,” said McKenna, who’s still figuring out the expenses—a task that, at least for now, has him doing a lot of the driving.

Update 11/28/23: Microsoft has changed the name of its product to Copilot for Microsoft 365.