The Copilot Connection

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In this episode, Zoe and Kevin discuss their thoughts on the biggest topics of the year in Copilot and what that means for next year before Kevin goes solo to talk about the importance of building a comprehensive AI strategy centered around Microsoft Copilot. They explore the evolution of AI tools, the need for alignment with organizational goals, and the significance of understanding agents and their capabilities. The conversation also delves into measuring success and ROI in AI implementation, the future of AI tools, governance and compliance, and the role of generative AI in business processes. They emphasize the need for a Center of Excellence to support AI initiatives and prepare for the future of work.

Takeaways

• Building an AI strategy is essential for effective implementation.
• Alignment with organizational goals reduces risk and enhances productivity.
• Understanding the capabilities of AI agents is crucial for their effective use.
• Measuring success in AI implementation goes beyond ROI; consider overall impact.
• Democratization of AI tools will make them accessible to more users.
• Governance and compliance are critical in the responsible use of AI.
• Generative AI can enhance business processes but should be used judiciously.
• The hype cycle illustrates the fluctuating expectations of AI tools.
• Preparing for the future of work involves understanding AI's evolving role.
• A Center of Excellence can facilitate the successful adoption of AI.

Key links

• Future of work report 2024
• GitHub Copilot free tier
• Simon Owen talking of CoE and C4E in his blog

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With Zoe stuffed full of deep pan pizza and Kevin trying to recover from the remote FOMO, we discuss the key takeaways from Microsoft Ignite 2024  focusing on the latest Copilot updates, the role of agents, integration and alignment at Microsoft, security updates, and more. We explore the significance of the Prompt Gallery and the evolution of Copilot Studio, emphasising the importance of collaboration and automation in modern workplaces.

Key Takeaways:

• Security has become a major focus for Microsoft.
• The Ignite conference had a significant turnout with over 20,000 attendees.
• Agents are a popular topic, with many mentions during the conference.
• Integration between Microsoft products is improving, making workflows smoother.
• The Copilot Prompt Gallery allows for better user engagement and prompt sharing.
• The evolution of Copilot Studio is enabling deeper connection between low code and code first.
• There are new features that enhance governance capabilities.
• The keynote atmosphere was noted to be less energetic compared to previous years.

Key links

• Microsoft Ignite 2024 Book of News
• Agents - From no code (Introducing Microsoft Copilot actions, new agents, and tools to empower IT) to low code to code first - Azure AI Agent Service: Revolutionizing AI Agent Development and Deployment
•  Document tuning - Copilot Studio is enhancing its platform with knowledge improvements, Azure AI integration, and more
• Alignment within MS is allowing AI Adoption at scale
  • Redefine development: AI-first innovation with agents and Microsoft Copilot in Power Platform
• Azure AI Agent Service: Revolutionizing AI Agent Development and Deployment
• The next wave of Azure innovation: Azure AI Foundry, intelligent data, and more
• Purview DLP Accelerate AI adoption with next-gen security and governance capabilities
•  Windows Copilot Runtime for devs https://aka.ms/AAti5u5
• Microsoft Places Introducing the AI-Powered Workplace: Technology solutions for flexible work
• Copilot Lab = Copilot Prompt Gallery https://aka.ms/AAthyfg
• Copilot Analytics aligned - Copilot Control System https://aka.ms/AAti5rh
• SAM included in license Introdu

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In this episode of Copilot Connection, hosts Zoe and Kevin discuss the latest developments in the Copilot space, share insights from recent events like Scottish Summit and anticipate upcoming announcements from Ignite. They explore the significance of agents in the AI landscape, the challenges of governance, and the evolution of AI models. Hopefully, they managed to dodge any NDA content this close to Ignite...

Takeaways

• Excitement builds ahead of the Ignite conference.
• Bluesky offers a refreshing social media experience.
• The Copilot Fireside Chat will provide live insights post-Ignite.
• Anticipation for new agent announcements is high.
• Governance is a critical consideration for AI agents.
• New AI models are being tailored for specific industries.
• Understanding the hype cycle is essential for AI adoption.
• Strategic implementation is key to realizing AI's potential.

(Auto generated by Riverside.FM)

Useful links:

We’re on Bluesky! Copilot Connection 

Scottish Summit 2024 Closing Keynote With Dona Sarkar

Building a Centre For Enablement for your Copilot Strategy - Kevin & Simon

Copilot Fireside Chat

AGENTS

Earth copilot

Microsoft Viva community call (November 2024): New Employee Experience Announcements at Ignite 2024 | Microsoft Community Hub

Description of agents https://www.linkedin.com/posts/abramj_the-agentic-scope-of-work-ugcPost-7259233983639519234-0Rbh?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_ios

ADAPTED MODELS

Adapted AI models 

 Is Microsoft building their own model?

COPILOT UPDATES

Web page summary is back

Multi tenant orgs 

Reflecting on a year of copilot

Gartner Hype Cycle

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In this episode of the Copilot Connection, hosts Zoe Wilson  and Kevin McDonnell discuss the latest updates in the Microsoft Copilot ecosystem, including a new feature called Copilot Labs (not Lab...), insights from the upcoming Microsoft Ignite conference, and the importance of AI integration in business. They also touch on the significance of empowering neurodivergent employees and the community's engagement in upcoming events. They also have a new AI generated summary - what do you think?

Links

• Introducing Copilot Vision
• Meet the new Copilot

Ignite sessions
Session catalog at https://ignite.microsoft.com where you can search for codes.

Build and extend agents with Microsoft Copilot studio  | LAB433
Code-first development workshop for Copilot agents  | LAB441
Extending M365 Copilot with Copilot agents: Best practices  | BRK170
Part 1:2 Declarative Agents: Build Agents for Microsoft 365 Copilot  | LAB445
Reinventing business processes with autonomous agents  | BRK169
Smarter workflows with ServiceNow Now Assist and Copilot integration  | ODFP974
 
Ground Microsoft 365 Copilot in your business knowledge  | BRK275
Microsoft 365 Copilot advantages: How does it compare with other AI solutions  | BRK276
SharePoint content management reimagined with Copilot  | BRK279
 Unlock smart collaboration with Microsoft Teams  | BRK280
  
 Revolutionizing Employee Experience with AI  | BRK283 
 The Future of Power Platform: Intelligent Apps  | BRK171
 
From Copilot to code-first: the power of Microsoft Fabric and AI  | THR618
Bring on-device ML to enterprise apps with Windows Copilot Library  | BRK303
Copilot+ PCs: Your new superpower  | THR650
Mastering custom plugins in Microsoft Security Copilot  | THR653
 Build real-time collab experiences with Fluid and Copilot  | LAB440
 Empowering neurodivergent employees with Copilot  | BRK297

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It's our birthday today! We've managed to pull together some fantastic guests including Loryan Strant, Caroline Kallin and Tom Morgan to help us celebrate by sharing their thoughts on Copilot Wave 2 so hear what we thought and then a few interviews that we have been able to do.

Great summary post from Sara Fennah on all the useful links for Copilot Wave 2 https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sarafennah_did-the-deluge-of-announcements-in-the-wave-activity-7241481645957029888-gyfa?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

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As the days in the UK get shorter, the grass looks brown and tired and the kids looked bored and ready for school, it's time to recap some of the news that has crept out while many were distracted with holidays. There's certainly been a few things coming through as momentum builds towards the second conference season of year. Zoe and Kevin cover some worrying news on hacking Copilot, some positive news on accessing models and some great events coming up.

Related links:

• Nominate your favourite community folks at the UK Technology Community Awards - https://www.ukcommunityawards.co.uk/
• Sign up for Scottish Summit and plan in for the Connecting the Copilots panel with Chris Huntingford, Dona Sarkar, Jose Lazaro Pinos , Sara Fennah and us - https://www.scottishsummit.com
• Zoe is co-hosting a webinar for Syskit with Luke Evans on Copilot for M365 after one year https://www.syskit.com/company/events/copilot-for-microsoft-365-after-one-year/
• New speaker workshop with Sara Fennah, Luke Evans and us - http://www.communitydays.org/event/2024-09-06/microsoft-community-new-speakers-day  - if you're in the UK and doing interesting things with Copilot that you'd like to share 
• Check out the brand new Copilot for M365 MVPs! - Search | MVP Communities (microsoft.com)
• Hacking Copilot
  • Microsoft’s AI Copilot can be weaponized as an ‘automated phishing machine,’ but the problem is bigger than one company | Fortune
  • https://www.perspectives.plus/p/copilot-bigger-security-threat-than-chatgpt
  • https://labs.zenity.io
• Models in Github - Introducing GitHub Models: A new generation of AI engineers building on GitHub - The GitHub Blog
• What’s new in Copilot | July 2024 - Microsoft Community Hub
• OneNote in Copilot supports Inked Notes - https://insider.microsoft365.com/blog/onenote-copilot-now-supports-inked-notes?ocid=usoc_TWITTER_M365_spl100006091250593
• Updates to Microsoft Copilot to bring enterprise data protection to more organizations - Microsoft Community Hub

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After a slightly quieter time on the podcast, Kevin and Zoe are back and we pick some of the Month of Copilot sessions to share some interesting ideas from them that will interest you.

Check out the rest of the Month of Copilot sessions in the Copilot Connection - YouTube.

Kevin mentioned Commsverse and Experts Live UK so check out the links for more info.

Finally, if you want to try out the super hero prompt that Zoe mentioned, copy the prompt below and let us know what it finds!

Look at the emails and Teams meetings that I have sent in the last 6 months. Use these messages to distill a personal brand voice document that I can use to inform copilot of my personal voice and style.

Based on the above analysis, what superhero represents my style of work best? What would my super powers be? Can you format that as a dossier for superheroes -- listing my real name, and most similar existing superhero, and include the rest of the information formatted and edited in dossier style?

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In this episode of the Copilot Connection, Kevin McDonnell is joined by Garry Trinder, a developer advocate at Microsoft focused on Microsoft 365 and Copilot. With Microsoft Build taking place this week, they recap the Copilot related news that came out with a special focus on extensions and custom copilots. Plenty of chat about why you should extend, the different ways to extend and when to extend or go custom.  Plus find out how many times Copilot was mentioned in the first day keynotes thanks to Vlad Catrinescu.

Useful links:

M365 Conf sessions - some online now including the age of copilots -Introducing the Community News Desk with essential content from Microsoft 365 Community Conference

Vlad Catrinescu comedy recap Microsoft Build 2024 Keynote Recap in under 5 minutes!

Book of News - https://news.microsoft.com/build-2024-book-of-news/

GPT-4o demo by Seth Juarez - Conversational website: Satya Nadella at Microsoft Build 2024

Copilot+PC - Introducing Copilot+ PCs - The Official Microsoft Blog

VS Code for Education - https://vscodeedu.com

Note that you need a Copilot license to use this with Copilot Studio - Use graph connections with knowledge sources - Microsoft Copilot Studio | Microsoft Learn

https://aka.ms/extendcopilotm365/decide

Useful Build sessions:

BRK 150: Developers guide to customizing Copilot - slides available too
BRK 151: Developer deep dive on building plugins for Microsoft Copilot
BRK203: Building a copilot: Azure AI Studio or Copilot Studio

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With all the announcements made last week at the M365 Conf in Orlando, Zoe and Kevin take a dive into the roadmap to see what is coming up in the short to medium term. With a lot of key updates around Excel, cross application capabilities and graph grounded chat in other applications, take a listen to find out what you can expect in the world of Copilot over the next few months.

Key links:

• Month of Copilot
• May Copilot be with you
• Dona teases Project Copilot College

 M365 Conf announcements

• What’s New in Copilot | April 2024 - Microsoft Community Hub
• What’s New in Microsoft Teams | April 2024 - Microsoft Community Hub
• Announcing SharePoint advanced management innovations for the AI and Copilot era - Microsoft Community Hub

Microsoft 365 Roadmap - See What's Coming | Microsoft 365 - Copilot Rolling Out items
Microsoft 365 Roadmap - See What's Coming | Microsoft 365 - Copilot In Development items

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Is your tenant ready for Copilot? Do you know what needs to be done to be ready? This week, Kevin was joined by Michal Pisarek, CEO and Janitor at Orchestry, who has been involved in governance in Microsoft 365 for many years. We talk about Copilot Readiness and three key areas for governance:
- Understand the environment
- Review oversharing
- Sort out your sensitivity labels

Zoe and Kevin also cover a few bits of the latest news, including some Drama Llama action with Whats App, some impressive custom copilot creation from Microsoft Research and a plea from Kevin to provide ideas and feedback to Microsoft.

Don't forget that we are holding a Month of Copilot in June and still looking for people to share sessions. Submit your sessions at Month of Copilots: Call for Speakers.

Useful links:

Project VASA - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/vasa-1/ 

Lllama 3 launched - Meta steps up AI battle with OpenAI and Google with release of Llama 3 | Meta | The Guardian
Comparison of recent models - https://x.com/rschu/status/1781007659493212215

Meta AI in WhatsApp - How to chat with Meta AI in a group | WhatsApp Help Center

Privacy and Meta AI - https://www.facebook.com/privacy/guide/genai?entry_point=whatsapp_genai

Feedback portal has Copilot for Sales and for Service - Community (microsoft.com)

For more news, subscribe to your newsletter on LinkedIn at LinkedIn

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With Copilot for Security released on 1 April, we thought we should bring some real experience of trying it out from one of the top MVPs in Security. Ru Campbell (Twitter, LinkedIn) joined us to talk about:

- What is Copilot Security?
- What is it used for and by who?
- How has his experience with it been compared with the marketing?

This was a great chat that cut through into the reality of using Copilot for Security to help with right of bang and left of bang (listen to find out what that means!) as well as how the product will evolve over time.

Useful links:

Ru's tweet threads on his initial experience with Copilot for Security
https://x.com/rucam365/status/1778703094630523065
https://x.com/rucam365/status/1775181041474711702

Ru's book on Mastering Microsoft 365 Defender (co-authored with Viktor Hedberg) - Mastering Microsoft 365 Defender: Implement Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, Identity, Cloud Apps, and Office 365 and respond to threats

Copilot for Security group on LinkedIn - LinkedIn

News and other updates:
Sorry, there's a lot of Kevin stuff this week!

• Sign up for Month of Copilot and register to speak too
• MVP Summit interviews
• Kevin chats with Peter Rising on Copilots
• Think Copilot with Kevin McDonnell - Kevin talks with Garry Trinder and Waldek Mastrkarz in the build up to the Global Copilot Summit
• Kevin's Meeting Automator - a way to create meetings with transcripts for demoing Copilot for Microsoft 365

Announcing new Microsoft AI Hub in London - The Official Microsoft Blog
Microsoft Copilot Dashboard now generally available - Microsoft Community Hub
Extensibility options for Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 | Microsoft Learn
Google Workspace adds AI features to help with meetings and improve data security | VentureBeat
Zoom announces Zoom Workplace

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Twelth of twelve mini episodes as we bring our interviews from MVP Summit.

Interviewee today - Mark Rackley

Mark thinks that copilot is a vague term that can mean different things to different people, and he wants to help people understand what it is. Mark has some great use cases like finding presentations that were shared with him by using natural language queries.

Listen to find out how he thinks the equity of availability of Copilot could impact the future and what he wishes for next.

Mark Rackley | LinkedIn
Mark Rackley 🐗 @NACollabSummit @Techsplaining (@mrackley) / X (twitter.com)

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Eleven of twelve mini episodes as we bring our interviews from MVP Summit.

Interviewee today - Angeliki Patsiavou

Angeliki sees copilot as a way to increase productivity, creativity, and innovation for individuals, teams, and organizations. She uses copilot for M365 to get technical content and learn about power FX queries and functions.

Listen to find out about what concerns her around governance in Copilot.

Angeliki Patsiavou | LinkedIn
Angeliki Patsiavou 🎶 MVP Biz Apps (@a_patsiavou) / X (twitter.com)

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Tenth of twelve mini episodes as we bring our interviews from MVP Summit.

Interviewee today - Angel David Carillo

Angel uses Copilot a lot in Microsoft Teams, especially for searching for information. He finds it easier and faster than using other tools or navigating to the location of the information. He also uses Copilot as his personal assistant for finding answers to any kind of question.

Listen to find out how he tries to focus on the value and confidence that Copilot provides to his customers.

Ángel David Carrillo | LinkedIn

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Ninth of Twelve mini episodes as we bring our interviews from MVP Summit.

Interviewee today - Pragati Jain

Pragati finds Copilot helpful to start developing something, add comments to her calculations, and learn PySpark coding but worries that Copilot is not always right and she needs to validate results.

Listen to find out how she thinks Copilot will soon be able to help with the most painful parts of her delivery.

Pragati Jain | LinkedIn
Pragati Jain (@pragati1187) / X (twitter.com)

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Eighth of twelve mini episodes as we bring our interviews from MVP Summit.

Interviewee today - Gosia Borzecka

Gosia works in the AI space and talks here about the comparisons between Copilot Studio and AI Studio/Azure Search.

Listen to find out more about how she thinks that this plays with Copilot.

🐱‍💻 Gosia (Małgorzata) Borzęcka | LinkedIn
Gosia Borzęcka (@GosiaBorzecka) / X (twitter.com)

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Seventh of twelve mini episodes as we bring our interviews from MVP Summit.

Interviewee today - Chris Lloyd-Jones

Chris was impressed by how GitHub Copilot could generate code from comments and help him achieve a flow state.

Listen to find out how he thinks the Copilots could follow him across applications.

Listen to find out which areas of Copilot frustrate him and his hopes for what Copilot will become.

Chris Lloyd-Jones | LinkedIn
Chris Lloyd-Jones is on Mastodon (@Sealjay_clj) / X (twitter.com)

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Sixth of twelve mini episodes as we bring our interviews from MVP Summit.

Interviewee today - Rishi Sapra

Rishi sees Copilot as a tool for creativity and insight, rather than automation. He thinks it can help technologists understand the business questions and the data model better

Listen to find out which areas of Copilot frustrate him and his hopes for what Copilot will become

Rishi Sapra ACA, MCT, Microsoft MVP | LinkedIn
Rishi Sapra MVP (@rsaprano) / X (twitter.com)

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Fifth of twelve mini episodes as we bring our interviews from MVP Summit.

Interviewee today - Vesa Juvonen

Vesa is a principal product manager in the Microsoft 365 platform who works remotely from Seattle. He is excited about Copilot's potential to increase productivity and innovation for enterprise customers.

Listen to hear his favourite features and also the magic he thinks partners can bring.

Vesa Juvonen | LinkedIn
Vesa Juvonen (@vesajuvonen) / X (twitter.com)

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Fourth of twelve mini episodes as we bring our interviews from MVP Summit.

Interviewee today - Simon Doy

Simon likes the development side of things and breaking down application barriers with Copilot. He is excited about the opportunities to bring business data and take actions with Copilot.

Listen to find out how he used Copilot to make his daughter's birthday even more special.

Simon Doy | LinkedIn
Simon Doy | MVP #Copilot (@simondoy) / X (twitter.com)