Copilot Features: Utilizing AI Across Microsoft Ecosystems

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Microsoft Copilot features can help your organization and the users who power it integrate and use Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities across your Microsoft ecosystem.

Copilot reshapes how you approach work, automating mundane processes, delivering valuable insights for strategic planning, and driving efficiency, productivity, and innovation. If you are running Microsoft business solutions, you can use Copilot in nearly every part of your business, including:

• Microsoft 365 apps
• ERP Systems like Dynamics 365 Business Central and Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations
• Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement and the solutions it includes for:
  • Sales
  • Customer Insights – Journeys (Formely D365 Marketing)
  • Field Service
  • Customer Service
• The Microsoft Power Platform

In this blog, we will highlight some key Copilot features in each solution and detail how these features help your business run better.

Microsoft 365 Copilot Features

Copilot brings many capabilities to Microsoft 365. Whether it’s streamlining document management, automating tasks, or providing guidance, you can use it in many ways. Here are some of the top features I want to highlight:

1. Integration Across Productivity Suite: Copilot integrates across the entire M365 productivity suite, including Teams, Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and even web browsers like Edge within the 365 environment.
2. Automated Document Creation: Within applications like Word and Teams, Copilot assists in quickly generating PowerPoint presentations or creating content based on the provided information.
3. Template Utilization: Copilot can leverage existing templates or find relevant templates to structure presentations or documents.
4. Continuous Improvement: Microsoft continuously adds new features and capabilities to enhance functionality and relevance to your needs.

Dynamics 365 Business Central Copilot Features

Dynamics 365 Business Central users can use Copilot to streamline inventory management and enhance financial analysis. Here are a few CoPilot features within BC worth noting:

• Automated Bank Reconciliation: Copilot can streamline the reconciliation process, offering valuable assistance in a task often dreaded in finance departments.
• Marketing Text Generation: Copilot simplifies marketing content creation by automatically generating text based on items.
• Copilot for Sales Line Assistance: Copilot assists users in creating sales orders and quotes by leveraging natural language input. This includes navigating item catalogs and customer histories to provide relevant suggestions.
• Enhanced User Interaction: CoPilot understands and responds to natural language commands, simplifying user interactions through typing or voice input

Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations Copilot Features

In Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations, Copilot contains a versatile toolkit to customize and streamline various tasks. Here are some key functionalities and enhancements that Copilot brings to the Finance and Operations:

• Natural Language Navigation: You can leverage Copilot’s natural language capabilities to quickly access guidance and assistance within your system.
• Excel Add-in Tools: Copilot extends its functionality to Excel add-ins to help with tasks such as reconciliation and data import/export.
• Query-Based Insights: You can effortlessly retrieve information on various financial aspects, such as vendor payment schedules or pending transactions, by inputting natural language queries.
• Procure-to-Pay Optimization: You can anticipate enhancements to purchasing processes, including simplified PO modifications and comprehensive impact analysis.
• Human-Readable Summarization: Copilot facilitates comprehension of complex data by providing human-readable summarization. This gives you access to data insights that can guide your decision-making.

Dynamics 365 Sales Copilot Features

With its initial rollout in D365 Sales, Copilot quickly garnered attention for its innovative capabilities in summarization and contextual assistance. Here are some additional features D365 Sales users can expect with Copilot:

• Integration with Outlook: CoPplot seamlessly integrates with Outlook, enabling your sales teams to create opportunities and contacts directly from their email interface.
• Automatic Opening of Copilot Pane: Within the D365 Sales app, the Copilot pane automatically opens upon application launch, providing contextual prompts and summarizing key information.
• Summarization and Querying:  By leveraging natural language capabilities, you can obtain concise summaries of lead activities and query data effectively. This feature is still in preview.

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys Copilot Features

Copilot can help your marketers create and manage marketing communications and monitor customer journeys from prospective clients to repeat customers. Here are some key features Copilot brings to Customer Insights – Journeys:

• Customer Targeting: Use natural language to describe your criteria and create segments for your journey.
• Journey Creation: Effortlessly articulate your journey goals and objectives in natural language to Copilot.
• Email Creation: Easily generate email content by providing key points or selecting a topic and tone, allowing Copilot to draft fully fleshed-out emails that are grammatically correct, contextually relevant, and stylistically appealing.
• Smart Image Recommendations: Copilot offers image recommendations that enhance email communication by interpreting both written and visual context. Users can select from a gallery of relevant images tailored to their message.
• Perfect Your Message: Utilize Copilot to refine and enhance your content by providing it with passages to rewrite. It will correct grammatical errors, improve sentence structure, and make enhancements based on advanced grammar.

Dynamics 365 Field Service Copilot Features

Copilot can assist your field service agents and customers to ensure a smoother experience. Here are some Copilot features that will enhance your Field Service Operations:

• Copilot in Field Service web application: Copilot summarizes work orders and service accounts, providing updates on recent record changes, aiding in preparation for onsite visits, and answering queries about related information for dispatchers and technicians.
• Work Order Management: Copilot will assist you in creating and managing work orders through various features, including:
  • Work order recaps
  • Work order updates
  • Drafting an email response for unscheduled work orders
  • Viewing, moving, and editing work orders
  • Scheduling or rescheduling work orders

Dynamics 365 Customer Service Copilot Features

Keeping your customers happy is paramount for success, and Copilot is making it easier to do this in timely and creative ways with the power of AI. Here are some key Copilot features in Customer Service:

• Knowledge Source Consolidation: Agents can use natural language to ask Copilot to point them to the information they need to help answer a customer query. This could include internal data, knowledge-base articles, or external sources.
• Draft Replies: Users can enlist Copilot’s help drafting replies to emails and other conversations. Copilot will tap into your knowledge base and present agents with automated responses they can approve or edit.
• Analytics to Measure Copilot’s Impact: Supervisors and managers can assess Copilot’s impact on their customer service operations, revealing metrics such as daily active users, percentage of Copilot responses used, agent ratings, and average handle time for conversations, cases, and email responses.
• Filter Copilot Content Sources: Filtering content sources ensures that Copilot responses align with agent queries and are not mixed across different source types, thereby minimizing the risk of displaying inaccurate responses.C
• Copilot Summaries: You can use generative AI to create summaries for support cases and conversations, which can then be reviewed and used for training.

Microsoft Power Platform Copilot Features

The Microsoft Power Platform is already a very effective suite of solutions that automate and streamline many parts of your business. Adding Copilot to the mix only takes this further. Here are summaries of what you can expect from each Power Platform solution:

• Copilot Studio: With Copilot Studio, you can easily create copilots without the need for data scientists or developers, facilitating tasks such as sales support, providing information, and addressing common inquiries.
• Power Apps: You can ask Copilot to help you build applications by describing it using natural language prompts. Copilot will automatically pull in the data from your system so it will automatically be included in the app. This feature can be turned off if you want to do that.
• Power BI: You can ask Copilot to assist in creating reports and report pages, suggesting content, creating a narrative visual, and summarizing various aspects of reports.
• Power Pages: Copilot can assist you in creating business websites by simplifying processes. This includes creating forms, generating text, embedding chatbots, and many other tasks.
• Power Automate: You can use the AI Builder in Power Automate to create AI models, which adds intelligence to your workflows. You can also describe a workflow to Copilot and it will build it for you.

The Importance of Effective Prompting

AI tools are great for productivity but can’t replace your human team members. That’s why understanding the significance of strong prompting is paramount in getting the most out of Copilot. Some high-level tips include:

• Start Simple: Begin with straightforward and asking concise questions to gauge CoPilot’s response. Avoid overwhelming the system with overly complex prompts initially.
• Iterate and Refine: CoPilot encourages iterative interaction, allowing you to refine their prompts based on initial responses. If the first prompt does not yield desired results, you can iterate and refine your queries until satisfactory outcomes are achieved.
• Use Natural Language: Utilize natural language when interacting with CoPilot, but ensure clarity and specificity in your prompts. Avoid ambiguous or convoluted language that may confuse the system.
• Be Patient: Recognize that mastering the art of prompting takes time and patience. Be prepared to iterate, refine, and adapt your approach as you become more familiar with CoPilot’s capabilities.

You can read more in-depth in our blog post, How to Write AI Prompts: 10 Tips to Get The Most Out of Microsoft Copilot.

Security and Governance

Another crucial aspect of setting up Copilot in your Microsoft systems is making sure your security and governance strategy is solid. It’s important to consider these points:

• Complete an access and permissions review: Ensure that CoPilot’s queries and actions align with individuals’ authorized roles and responsibilities.
• Ensure compliance: Regularly assess and update compliance measures to mitigate risks associated with data handling and processing.
• Enact Role-Based Access Control (RBAC): Assign roles based on job responsibilities to prevent unauthorized access to sensitive data and functions.
• Consider Data Privacy: Implement encryption, anonymization, or data masking techniques where necessary to safeguard confidential information.
• Continuously monitor and audit: Regularly review logs, access trails, and usage analytics to detect and address any anomalies or security breaches promptly.
• Implement training and awareness: Educate employees on security best practices, data handling guidelines, and how to use Copilot appropriately to minimize the risk of human error.
• Future-Proof Security Measures: Continuously adapt security protocols to accommodate evolving integration points and data access pathways within your organizational ecosystem.

You can find four in-depth tips here.

Want to Learn More About Copilot?

These are just snapshots of the amazing AI-based features Copilot is bringing into your environments. Get in touch with the Stoneridge team to learn more about what Microsoft Copilot can do for you.

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