The things I’m not hearing about in Copilot 365 implementations
Written by Matt Shaw, Chief Operations Officer, oobe, 2024
Essential elements for maximising Copilot for Microsoft 365
By now, you, like me, will have heard a lot about Copilot for Microsoft 365, the AI-powered productivity tool that integrates with the Microsoft 365 suite. It holds a lot of promise, and if you do it right, it will pay for itself in the first month. But to make the most of Copilot for 365, you need a couple of things that I’m not hearing a lot about. Sure, there is the usual training and OCM that comes with any new tool, but two specific things have been keeping my attention.
Copilot for 365 isn’t magic, it’s using company data to give you results, so to really make it shiny, you need both clean and reliable data.
Clean data is data that’s had all the inaccurate, inconsistent, duplicate, or outdated parts removed. Data quality is essential for any business that wants to lean into data-driven decisions and leverage AI solutions like Copilot for 365. If your data is sub-optimal, your insights and algorithms will be unreliable, and your search experience will suffer. We created our Copilot 365 Readiness Assessment to put you on the right path to clean data in just a couple of weeks, building on our partnership with AvePoint and our rich history in Enterprise Search.
Integrating knowledge with data - The role of Viva Topics
But data cleaning is not enough. You also need to have a way to reliably connect your data with the knowledge and expertise of your organisation. That's where Viva Topics comes in. It needs some tuning, but it’s got a short time to value.
Viva Topics uses AI to automatically organise content and expertise across your organisation and deliver topic cards in the apps you use every day. Like when you see a topic word in your documents or emails, you can hover over it and get a pop-up with a description, a link to a SharePoint page, and a list of experts. No more remembering who did what on which project or having to look up an org chart.
But the real bonus with Viva Topics and Copilot for 365 is Viva Topics entries get returned and bumped up search results when team members are looking for content. The organisational AI data gets grounded using Viva Topics – something that you can’t currently do with a Copilot for 365 license alone. As part of the Fujitsu family, we have rich offerings in the whole Viva suite, not just Topics.
By combining Copilot for 365 and Viva Topics, Copilot for 365 is your banana smoothie, and Viva Topics is your cinnamon. Sure, it's cool by itself, but the cinnamon makes it amazing.
At oobe we’ve been thinking about Copilot for 365 for a long time, and like everything we do, we want to do it right. So, if you’re keen to know how we can help you make your Copilot for 365 journey a shiny, successful and seamless one, drop us a line.
Matt has worked with oobe for 10 years and been in IT for 13 (lucky?). He’s seen a lot of things from the early days in his career deploying XenDesktop and remembers when Intune was not as good as…Good. He now works in his dream role doing continuous improvement, process automation and strategy. He terms himself as a recovering techo but people still let him on the tools every now and then. He’s all about efficiency and doing more with what you have.
