Microsoft's Copilot improves work quality. (Image source: Microsoft)

Copilot for Microsoft 365 can help users across Africa save time and become more productive and creative in their day to day work.

This is according to Kejendree Pillay, Microsoft Portfolio Manager at First Distribution, who was speaking during a webinar hosted by First Distribution and Microsoft, in partnership with ITWeb, for business and IT decision makers in SADC, Angola, Ghana, Ethiopia, Tanzania and Botswana.

Pillay outlined how Microsoft Copilot leverages AI to automate tasks and analyse data, helping users in marketing, sales, customer service, finance, operations, IT and HR work smarter.

She said: “AI has been quite a controversial topic, but this is not the robot uprising. Copilot is taking over those time-consuming, repetitive admin tasks to help you work smarter and unleash creativity in your day to day work.”

Pillay added: “Copilot is embedded into all the everyday productivity and collaboration tools we use in Microsoft 365. It feeds off data in your chats, meetings, OneDrive or SharePoint. You can give it natural language prompts, and best results depend on refining the art of prompting.”

Pillay demonstrated a number of Copilot features: “In Teams, Copilot will take detailed notes, offer summaries of the topics, help you come up with questions to ask during a meeting, and offer recaps and summaries of meetings. If you have clashing meetings, Copilot allows you to follow a meeting you can’t attend. Afterwards, you can ask for a transcript, summary, where you were mentioned in the call, what decisions were made in the meeting, and what the action points were.”

“As a user based license, Copilot learns how each individual user communicates and helps you create Word documents such as new hire contracts, press releases or reports - in your usual style,” she said.

“With PowerPoint, Copilot helps you create a presentation with slides and speaker notes. You can easily request changes in the presentation, using natural language text or with voice prompts.”

Pillay highlighted how in Excel, Copilot converts data range into a table, and can be used to analyse and highlight particular data, add a formula, explain a formula, or present data such as ‘total profits’ on a graph.

She said: “Copilot in Outlook summarises email chains, offers suggestions and helps you draft mails in a variety of tones - from direct, to neutral, to formal. Coaching by Copilot offers suggestions on ways to improve emails for best results.”

A poll of webinar attendees found that 52% expect Microsoft Copilot to significantly increase productivity, with the remainder expecting some increase in productivity. 37% said they were most excited about Copilot’s data analysis and insights capabilities. 14% were excited about email drafting, another 14% about meeting summaries, and 11% about automated content generation.

Pillay noted that Copilot is available as an addition to Microsoft 365 SMB or Enterprise SKUs on a 12-month commitment, either billed annually upfront or monthly. She said: “Copilot is ideal for users inundated with tasks, particularly those who need to analyse data. Before deployment, First Distribution does a security analysis of the customer’s environment first, to assess the licensing, policies and configurations of every user, before deciding which users should have Copilot licenses.”