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It All Depends on the Person and How They Use Office
Personal perspectives of using technology are often valuable guides to how useful products will be in production. Given the current hype around Copilot for Microsoft 365, I was interested to read a LinkedIn post by Microsoft employee Luka Perne. Based on his use of Copilot over several months logged on a per-task basis, Perne believes he saves 14 hours per month. That’s quite an impressive number that more than justifies the $30/month Copilot license.
It’s always important to put personal observations in context and ask yourself if a product would work as well for you, especially when reading a report written by someone who works for the vendor. I’m sure that some gain enormously from Copilot for Microsoft 365, just as I’m equally convinced that success with Copilot depends on many individual factors.
Not a Marketing Document
What I liked about this report is that it is not trying to sell Copilot. If you look at Microsoft’s marketing material, Copilot works wonderfully because what you see are carefully selected scenes that show Copilot working with data selected to demonstrate its strengths. This coverage is more practical and informative.
For instance, Perne makes the point that people go through a learning curve as they interact with Copilot. Some progress faster and discover how to extract value quickly. Others struggle with prompts or are unsure how Copilot can help. That’s why it’s important to educate and support users during a Copilot deployment project.
Where Success is Found for Copilot for Microsoft 365
Microsoft employees working in engineering and services roles tend to be more comfortable with new technology than the average Microsoft 365 user. Copilot support for users (informal and formal) is likely better and more comprehensive than elsewhere, and users are motivated to explore the capabilities of the technology, including mastering the technique of constructing effective prompts. Overall, I suspect that a technology like Copilot is adopted more easily inside Microsoft than in customer environments.
Perne says that he’s been working with Copilot for four months. Some will gain the same increase in productivity he reports, but I suspect it will take others many months before they do the same.
As Perne notes, he values specific Copilot features. This matches my own experience where the summaries generated by Copilot for Teams meetings, Outlook email threads, and documents (Figure 1) are easily the most valuable in terms of time savings. Anyone who has ever worked with Microsoft (especially the corporate teams) can attest to the number of meetings that people attend and the ability to generate a quality summary based on the meeting transcript is much appreciated, especially when multiple meetings occur at the same time.
Copilot’s ability to create and rewrite text can help people unsure of their writing skills. In my case, I think I do as well in terms of rewriting text by reviewing the suggestions made by Editor or Grammarly. Copilot is good at generating the outline of a document. However, the accuracy of the material Copilot uses to flesh out the outline depends on being able to find relevant information in SharePoint Online or OneDrive for Business. Without something to use, Copilot often strays into made-up text that reads well without being accurate.
Perne generated the graphics in his article with Excel. but notes the limitations Copilot currently has in Excel, like only working for tables with less than 10K rows. I’m sure this is an area that Microsoft will improve in the future. For now, I agree with the observation that I’ve picked up enough Excel over the years to survive without Copilot for the kind of worksheets I deal with.
The assertion that Copilot always delivered improved results for a non-native English speaker when it came to generating or rewriting text was insightful, and I think fair. Many large organizations have a corporate language that most communication is in. For Microsoft, that language is English, and I can see how useful Copilot is when asked to rewrite or correct text. The output will be bland, but it will be precise and readable, and that’s important in email and documents.
Can You Track Your Copilot Results?
The net is that many factors influence the ability of Copilot for Microsoft 365 to save time for people. If you’re technically literate, skilled in using Word, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Excel, and attend a lot of meetings, and store the material you work with in SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business, the probability is that you will achieve good results. Whether you save 14 hours per month is another matter. Tracking savings using the same methodology as Perne is certainly one way to assess the outcome, if you’re as good as he was at noting results.
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