Your feed is probably full of "Copilot is great", here is a no sales pitch, list of observations on what is good and what needs further development. Let's go through the main applications.
Teams - Brilliant in a word. Having Copilot available in almost all user scenarios is great. Regardless of whether you are in Chat, Meetings etc. the icon is there, nicely done and increases the likelihood of you using it. For meetings, the benefit is huge, so much so that we are considering turning on Transcription by default for Copilot users. 'What did I miss?', meeting summaries, reference points and actions are pretty darn accurate, and the 'What questions can I ask?' and 'What questions have not been answered?' feature is absolutely fantastic. Big time savings.
Outlook - Summarizing of long email chains, that you somehow have been added to against your will, is extremely useful. Very good summaries and the reference points is, again, very good. 'New' Outlook now makes sense to me from a user perspective. Drafting responses with Copilot is ok, but it is still learning and I am not yet blown away by it. Coaching is very good and provides some really interesting points for review around content and tone.
Word - It is good but you need to work out how to get the best from it. Generating content from scratch is ok, not the best I have seen, but it is ok. Using it to generate documents from a set of meeting notes (hint hint Copilot in Teams) and matching it to a template etc. is great and full of substantial time savings.
Excel - First thing to note is that Copilot will only work on Tables in Excel, so existing spreadsheets will need to be converted. Formulas used in Excel are only visible when you select the cell, so values will be populated and might look right, but the formulas will need to be checked. There is a good chance if you had created the same thing manually, you would not have done it the way Copilot does. Unlike Word and PowerPoint where the content is obvious to you, this one is worth learning properly to really get a hang of what it can do. Top tip, involve your Excel ninjas early to help unlock its full potential. It is very powerful, but needs you to have a good grasp to be able keep it both efficient and accurate.
PowerPoint - Creating presentations from a document is really very good for giving you a start. The image creation is a little clunky and lacking at the moment. I am sure this will come but I find myself creating presentation structures and then adding the imagery myself, and importantly, in my style.
Mobile Apps - Copilot is appearing in the mobile apps too now. It's good so far but I don't see why the Copilot icon is different in Outlook for example. Nice, they do the job, they just need some polish.
One thing that is super clear, and that we have known from day one, is that the Business Change and Adoption is going to be very important. This is proving to hold true so don't expect users to get their subscription and then start saving 20 hours a month. There will be immediate savings, yes, but the more you put in the more you will get back. To really get value, learning how to write good prompts and supporting your employees as they learn is critical. Remember, this is only the start of a new way of working. Large Language Models are really very good, but they can't correct poor prompts. (yet)
In summary, even with the parts that are not yet where they need to be, M365 Copilot is a great addition and I am getting a pretty big ROI... and there is still loads for me to learn.
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