Microsoft Copilot in SMEs: Intelligent assistant for daily work
Microsoft Copilot opens up numerous new opportunities to increase efficiency and productivity, revolutionizing everyday work for users. Since last week, Microsoft 365 Copilot is now also available to SMEs in Switzerland. The focus of this blog post is integration in SMEs - from its definition to practical application examples. Find out how the intelligent assistant specifically meets your needs and what added value it offers for your everyday work.
What is Microsoft Copilot?
Microsoft Copilot is an AI-powered digital assistant that provides personalized assistance with various tasks and activities to increase the productivity of your employees. He's right in the M365 apps such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook or Teams. Copilot uses powerful language models that are trained to understand natural language and generate text-based content.
These language models can be combined with company data to create accurate, business-specific and contextual content. When creating content, the intelligent assistant takes into account both the anchored company resources, such as company documents, emails and chats, as well as the current work context, which includes, for example, email or chat history.
Example of integrating your data:
During a meeting to define the scope of an upcoming project, you lack accurate information about the financial and time resources required. In such a situation, you can involve the copilot and ask about the resources from a past, similar project. Microsoft Copilot analyzes the current work context of the upcoming project as well as information from business documents to find a comparable project and determine the resources required. He then gives you information about the resources used in the past project, which allows you to draw conclusions about the resources required for the future project.
What can you use Microsoft Copilot for?
With Microsoft Copilot, users can formulate their requirements verbally and receive quick results from their AI assistant.
In Word, for example, he can create a draft for the next project planning and then convert the text-based schedule directly into a table. In Excel, the Copilot supports analyzing data through automatic calculations and visualizations. In PowerPoint he can create presentations on a specific topic or based on a text document. Copilot also increases your efficiency in Outlook by cleaning up your inbox and creating draft replies. In Microsoft Teams, the copilot can summarize meetings and provide important information such as distributed tasks.
By carrying out these and other tasks, you can massively increase the productivity of your everyday work. You can find further application examples in the video from Microsoft.
To what extent can the Copilot be used in SMEs?
Microsoft Copilot has also been available to SMEs in Switzerland since last week. It is available as an add-on Office365 and Microsoft 365 E3/E5 and M365 Business Standard and Premium available. There is no add-on for M365 Business Essentials. Costs are another relevant point, as M365 Copilot currently costs CHF 322.80 per user per year. A subscription model with monthly payment is currently not available.
This means that Microsoft Copilot is immediately available to SMEs and can be purchased as a test license for individual users. If you don't know which M365 plan your company has, we'll be happy to tell you.
How helpful is the copilot?
Our Microsoft Copilot specialist Christian Wernli has been working intensively with the intelligent AI assistant since its introduction in January. You can read here what his first steps with the copilot look like and how helpful it is in his daily work: Microsoft 365 Copilot: Our specialist reports.
Would you like to know how you can use the Copilot in your company? We are happy to help!