Preface

Realities are barging in on my euphoria about Microsoft 365 Copilot. After a day of sharing shorter and longer versions of the Microsoft announcement, I’m starting to track my questions and those I hear from others.

Business Chat works across the LLM, the Microsoft 365 apps, and your data—your calendar, emails, chats, documents, meetings, and contacts—to do things you’ve never been able to do before. You can give it natural language prompts like “tell my team how we updated the product strategy” and it will generate a status update based on the morning’s meetings, emails, and chat threads.

I have no doubt (and even have placed bets) that our work will transform in the months and years after its release. (Still months away if you’re not in their preview group of 20 companies). Already I’m dealing with frustrations as I can’t bring myself to work on a Powerpoint deck without the flashy support of Copilot.

Deeper Considerations

My colleague, Prof. Mila Lazarova, wondered if this would be another case of the rich getting richer. I waved off her concerns by saying Copilot was part of 365. Another colleague, Prof. Matt Beane had just tweeted that 345 million people use Microsoft 365. That’s a broad base. However, a text from author Phil Simon about premium features sent me back to the announcement document.

Pricing reared its ugly head.

I hope that Copilot won’t be an upcharge beyond the basic 365 pricing. Given all the enterprise language in the announcement document, I also hope that personal and family accounts get the magic too. For years, I’ve asked for my personal “graph” to be leveraged to improve my work (albeit generally in the context of Google).

My Copilot euphoria is based on the AI ability to leverage the work we’ve already done (our graph) to support the work we need to do.

The power I’m seeing in the Microsoft demos would put knowledge workers without Copilot capabilities at a severe disadvantage. Mila would be right. Already I’m frustrated that only 20 organizations have access. I also expect my organization won’t be first in line for the next wave.

Another fear is that the work history that powers these benefits will be locked within organizational walls. Remember when you couldn’t share collaborative documents or discussions outside your organization’s domain? Yes, security and provisioning will be of huge import - but perhaps a virtuous circle of AI will make it easier to build the walls and bridges we need.

We need to own our own tools.

My biggest fear is about my personal work. Will it be locked inside my organization’s account?

The better our “graph,” the better our work. Own your own tools.

Learn more here: Microsoft 365 Copilot Site

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