Microsoft Copilot has slid seamlessly into multiple platforms and solutions across the Microsoft ecosystem since September 2023. Microsoft explains the technology as a combination of ‘large language models (LLMs) with your organisation’s data’ and it works across applications within Microsoft 365 as well as in Power Platform, Microsoft Azure and GitHub.
The question now is – how can you optimise your Microsoft Copilot capabilities and skillsets so you can get the most from the technology?
Starting with Microsoft Azure, the artificial intelligence (AI)-powered toolset can help you better manage and optimise your cloud expenditure in Azure. Copilot for Azure has the ability to assess your infrastructure and provide you with a cost estimate based on the Microsoft Cost Management tool. The latter is built on FinOps foundations to provide you with cost-based data analysis that refines your billing, resource management and costings.
Copilot uses the data within Microsoft Cost Management alongside targeted prompts to provide a variety of different cost estimates and analyses you can use to refine your Azure expenditure and strategic planning. For example, Microsoft suggests prompts that include:
– Summarise my costs over the past six months
– Why did my costs spike on [insert date]?
– Show me the resource group with the highest spend
Moving deeper into the tech and its capabilities, Microsoft Copilot can also be used within GitHub to optimise the performance of more complex queries. It helps you to refine your query efficiencies and has the ability, if managed correctly, to navigate tasks such as query optimisation, database structures and joining multiple tables.
Leveraging Copilot, dev teams can save swathes of time and optimise their development cycles in measurable ways – code is generated at speed, bugs are detected quickly, and the AI makes relevant suggestions designed to boost productivity and efficiency. And, for the citizen developer [link to our Power Platform series] Copilot is an intelligent aid helping them to create solutions, workflows and processes with ease.
Microsoft Copilot isn’t only about optimising code and costs.
The value of this technology is certainly felt by the bottom line when it comes to Azure optimisation, and by developers when it comes to GitHub mastery and magic, but the transformative role it plays in saving time, and by default the bottom line, on a day-to-day basis can’t be understated.
Copilot within Microsoft 365 slices time off tasks with surgical precision. For content-heavy roles such as marketing, Copilot helps to write, edit, suggest, and create content alongside its human users. When teams are under pressure to deliver content to tight deadlines or to manage email heavy inboxes, Copilot in Word and Outlook can make a huge difference to workloads and time spent on admin. For those working with presentations or data, the change introduced by Copilot allow for quick and easy data analysis and visualisation. Copilot is designed to make it easier for users to play around with, and use, data across multiple applications.
Optimising Copilot with Mint
Mint has developed a Microsoft Copilot Readiness Assessment for Microsoft 365 tht helps you to get the most from this AI tool. Our Copilot solution covers three core areas: Readiness, Deployment and Expansion. In our readiness phase, we ensure your content and M365 tenant are ready for Copilot, then in Deploy, we focus on ensuring your people are ready to use the technology and get the most value from it. In our Expansion phase, we then expand the reach of this technology deeper into your ecosystem so you can fully realise its potential across multiple touchpoints.
We can help you manage and deploy Copilot at speed, and with the right capabilities, so your teams derive measurable value and return on investment.
