Microsoft’s AI chatbot Copilot isn’t slowing down, and we’re particularly enjoying its integration with Microsoft Teams. It’s a match made in collaboration heaven, and it’s changing how we interact with technology to communicate in the workplace and streamline workflows. As Copilot evolves, some exciting new features have been added to its integration with Teams that we want to look at today.
But first, a recap on what Copilot is.
What is Copilot?
Microsoft 365 users will have no doubt come across Copilot already. The AI-powered assistant is embedded in the tools you use every day, like Word, Excel, Teams and PowerPoint, and is designed to assist you in their operation. It automates processes, provides real-time insights, manages tasks, analyses data and saves a whole lot of time!
It works seamlessly across the Microsoft 365 platforms, leveraging existing data to provide actionable recommendations.
New Copilot Features in Teams
The updates to Copilot just keep coming, and with them are several new features in Teams. They’re aimed at making your interactions with Teams more intuitive and user-friendly, helping boost productivity in the process.
Let’s break them down for you:
Features to Improve Collaboration
Teams has revolutionised how colleagues work together – it’s a collaboration powerhouse that keeps us in touch and in tune on an individual and group level. Copilot can now be at your side as you use Teams, helping organise meetings, summarising conversations or making suggestions in real-time as you engage in discussions. Now there are more fresh features to enhance how you collaborate:
Automated meeting summaries: You have a group meeting on Teams. It goes deep – you cover lots of ground, ideas fly back and forth. It ends after an hour, and you realise you were too involved to take decent notes of proceeding. Copilot to the rescue! The AI assistant automatically generates meeting summaries. It highlights key points, details what decisions were made and lists actionable items. You’ll probably never take notes in a meeting again!
Catch up on chats: No more scrolling through a long chat thread to try and find the information you need. Copilot helps you review the main items quickly and use them to make your decisions.
Intelligent Task Management: Get clarity and stay on top of your daily tasks with this impressive feature that helps you manage tasks more effectively. It analyses your chats and meetings, identifies tasks, marks them as actionable and can even assign them to team members.
Smarter AI Suggestions
AI is here to stay, and it’s only going to get better. The positive trajectory it’s on is evident in the more refined suggestions that Copilot makes in Teams. The better recommendations are founded in historical data and the current context of the suggestion.
Context-Aware Responses: By being more context-aware, the relevance of any suggestion made by Copilot is increased. There’s less chance of misleading suggestions, helping communications stay on point and staff members stay focused.
Personalized Insights: Copilot learns as it goes, taking on board past behaviours as it interacts with a team over time. As it learns more about you and how you interact with Teams and other Microsoft apps, it can offer personalized insights and recommendations that really complement how you work. As an example, it can suggest the best times to schedule meetings based on your availability. It will even adopt your tone of voice when it makes chat suggestions
Agents in Copilot: A New Way to Work
One of the more recent updates has brought a very exciting feature to Copilot – agents. Agents help you customize the AI to your specific business needs and processes, greatly improving on the support and automation they offer and improving the capacity of individuals, teams and organisations.
Agents are task-driven assistants that can be custom built around handling a particular function or workflow. An agent can then focus on a specific domain, such as customer support or managing a project, where it will be equipped to carry out specialised tasks.
Here are some of the key capabilities agents can bring to Teams:
Automating Routine Tasks: Use an agent to automate routine tasks that would otherwise take up huge amounts of time. Respond to customer queries via email, update report records and create support tickets – freeing up time to focus on big picture and value-adding activities.
Integrating with Business Tools: Agents connect to your knowledge and data sources within Microsoft 365, drawing data from SharePoint, Dynamics 365 and Outlook. This seamless integration enhances the smartness of the insights and suggestions from the agent, allowing tasks to be completed using historical and real-time data gleaned from your business systems.
Multitasking: Agents can handle several tasks simultaneously. For instance, a customer support agent could manage several customer queries. Advanced agents can also act autonomously, independently creating and performing plans, managing other agents and even learning when a team member needs to be notified about an issue.
The Future of AI in Teams
The AI juggernaut continues to roll on, and we can’t wait to see what tools Copilot brings in the future. If we had to put money on it, we’d say you’re looking at deeper integrations with systems outside of Microsoft 365, as well as smarter and more capable agents able to tackle more and more complex workflows.
Whichever way it goes, that personal assistant living alongside your Microsoft 365 apps is going to get more helpful and intuitive. It’s going to free up more of your time, improve your decision making and enhance your output.
AI-powered tools like Copilot represent a golden opportunity for organisations to stay ahead of the curve and unlock new growth opportunities. Want to leverage them to maximum effect in your business? We have Microsoft tech experts here at Smile IT who can do exactly that for you. Get in touch today and let’s have a chat.
When he’s not writing tech articles or turning IT startups into established and consistent managed service providers, Peter Drummond can be found kitesurfing on the Gold Coast or hanging out with his family!