1. Preparing Your People

Understanding how to get ready for Microsoft 365 Copilot starts with preparing your employees. Without proper training, teams may underuse it or struggle to understand how it fits into their existing workflows. But here’s the catch: general training isn’t enough. Different teams have different needs, and training must be tailored to specific roles.

Develop Role-Specific Use Cases

Each department will interact with Copilot in unique ways. Whether it’s drafting documents automatically for HR or generating data insights for marketing, someone needs to work with each team to map out where Copilot will add the most value.

Championing Early Adopters

Identifying key employees to lead the charge can make a huge difference in adoption rates. These early adopters will help guide their teams through the process, but they’ll need ongoing support to succeed.

 

2. Organising Your Data for AI Efficiency

Copilot relies on well-structured, accessible data. If your content is disorganised, filled with outdated files, or scattered across poorly structured systems, Copilot’s effectiveness will be severely limited. Ensuring your digital environment is prepared requires much more than a quick cleanup.

Data Clean-Up and Organisation

Are you prepared to go through every folder in SharePoint and OneDrive to clear out redundant or outdated content? Probably not. But this is essential for Copilot to function properly. ROT (redundant, outdated, and trivial) content will result in inaccurate responses from Copilot.

Metadata and Taxonomy Setup

Structuring your content with logical tags and categories ensures that Copilot retrieves the right information at the right time. This might sound straightforward, but getting it right can be a big undertaking.

It’s one thing to know your data needs organising – quite another to actually do it. This is where having experts on hand to manage the process becomes invaluable. We can audit, clean, and restructure your data for optimal AI performance, so you don’t have to worry about it. Get in touch if you want to find out more about how we can get your business Copilot ready.

 

3. Securing Sensitive Data and Permissions

Copilot’s access to your company’s data can be incredibly powerful, but with that comes the responsibility of ensuring sensitive information is secure. Permissions must be set, access reviewed, and security protocols tightened – especially for remote or external users.

Regular Access Reviews

How often do you review who has access to sensitive documents or data? If it’s not regularly audited, there’s a good chance overexposed assets are creating security risks. Without frequent reviews, Copilot might surface confidential information to the wrong people.

Security Protocols and Multifactor Authentication (MFA)

Beyond access, protecting sensitive sites with MFA and conditional access policies adds a layer of security that’s crucial in today’s remote-working world. But implementing this requires not only technical know-how but ongoing oversight.

These are not tasks to delegate to your already busy IT team. Managing permissions, access controls, and implementing advanced security measures is something that should be left to specialists. By trusting us to handle this, you can rest assured that your data will be safe – and that Copilot will only retrieve what’s meant to be seen.

 

4. Tailored Training for Ongoing Success

Understanding how to get ready for Microsoft 365 Copilot doesn’t stop with the initial rollout. Employees need ongoing support as they adapt to Copilot’s capabilities. But organising continuous, department-specific training is a significant commitment—and your teams need more than a quick demo to get the most out of it.

Hands-On Training

Beyond the basics, each department requires practical training that aligns with their daily tasks. This isn’t something generic—you need a plan that walks employees through using Copilot within their unique workflows, whether it’s for finance, marketing, or operations.

Regular Feedback and Optimisation

As your team becomes more comfortable with Copilot, their needs will evolve. Regular feedback sessions allow us to adjust the tool’s implementation and uncover new use cases, ensuring Copilot continues to add value as your business grows.

Do you have the time and resources to plan, execute, and refine this level of training? We can develop and manage the entire process, ensuring that every team gets the training they need to thrive with Copilot.

 

5. Ongoing Optimisation and Expansion

Once Copilot is set up, that’s just the beginning. To fully capitalise on its capabilities, you’ll need to monitor its performance, refine its usage, and explore additional ways it can benefit your business.

Monitor and Optimise

Copilot’s usage reports provide insights into which teams are making the most of the tool – and where improvements can be made. But interpreting these reports and turning them into actionable strategies is time-consuming. That’s where we come in.

Expand Use Cases

Once your teams are comfortable, there’s no reason to limit Copilot’s role. We can help you identify new areas where AI can drive efficiency, from customer service to project management.

Customisation

If your business has specific needs, we can customise Copilot Studio plugins to tailor the experience further, ensuring Copilot works precisely how you need it to.

Why leave these opportunities untapped? By partnering with us, you’ll have experts on hand to continuously optimise your Copilot experience and identify new ways to leverage its power.

 

Ready to Get Started?

The path to understanding how to get ready for Microsoft 365 Copilot can seem overwhelming, but with the right support, it doesn’t have to be. Whether it’s managing data clean-up, securing sensitive information, or delivering ongoing training, we’re here to help every step of the way.

By working with us, you’re not just implementing a tool—you’re transforming the way your business operates, with experts ensuring everything runs smoothly from day one. Get in touch with us today and let’s get started on unlocking the full potential of Microsoft 365 Copilot for your organisation.

 

About Us

Comparing the Differences of Microsoft’s Copilots

 

Microsoft Copilot

Price: Free

Availability: Available now on Windows 11, in the Microsoft Edge browser, via copilot.microsoft.com

Key Uses: Answering questions, summarising content, searching the internet, generating images

Summary: Microsoft Copilot, distinct from Copilot for 365, is a pioneering AI-powered chatbot by Microsoft, capitalising on advanced large language models to significantly enhance productivity, foster creativity, and simplify information comprehension through an intuitive chat interface. Initially introduced as Bing Chat in February 2023, it is seamlessly integrated within Microsoft Bing and Microsoft Edge, marking Microsoft’s strategic shift towards AI-driven assistance and serving as the successor to the phased-out Cortana.

Further embedding itself into the fabric of daily computing, Microsoft Copilot has been adeptly incorporated into Windows 11, offering users an enriched experience aimed at boosting their productivity and creativity. Whether seeking concrete answers, creative inspiration, or pragmatic solutions for an array of questions, projects, and tasks, Copilot stands as a testament to Microsoft’s commitment to leveraging AI technology to empower users in navigating and managing their digital environment more effectively. But what’s the different between this and Microsoft’s other Copilots?

Microsoft 365 Copilot

Price: £24.70 per user, per month (annual committment)

Availability: Available now for Business and Enterprise customers

Key Uses: Generate content in Word, create PowerPoint presentations, analyse data in Excel, draft emails in Outlook, generate meeting summaries in Teams.

Summary: Copilot for 365 directly enhances productivity within the Microsoft 365 suite by automating and simplifying tasks across Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams. It generates content, analyses data, designs presentations, manages emails, and facilitates collaboration, all through natural language commands. This tool streamlines document creation, spreadsheet analysis, and communication, enabling users to efficiently tackle complex projects and everyday tasks. Users must have a Business Standard, Business Premium, or E3/E5 subscription to use Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Microsoft Copilot Pro

Price: £19.00 per user, per month

Availability: Available now for Microsoft 365 Personal or Family subscribers

Key Uses: Generate content in Word, create PowerPoint presentations, analyse data in Excel, draft emails in Outlook, generate meeting summaries in Teams.

Summary: Copilot Pro is a cross between Copilot and Microsoft 365 Copilot. It offers enhanced features over the free Copilot service and adds AI capabilities to the Microsoft 365 apps, but it’s designed for individuals, not businesses. It offers subscribers priority access to advanced AI models like GPT-4 and GPT-4 Turbo, ensuring faster response times and content creation, including AI-powered image creation with DALL-E 3. Designed to work in conjunction with a Microsoft 365 Personal or Family subscription, Copilot Pro extends its capabilities to key Microsoft 365 apps such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and OneNote, enabling features like drafting and summarising documents in Word, generating outlines and designing slides in PowerPoint, managing emails in Outlook, and organising notes in OneNote. Additionally, subscribers receive 100 boosts per day for AI image creation, significantly enhancing their creative output​​​​. Here again, understanding what’s the difference between Microsoft’s Copilots, particularly Copilot Pro’s individual-focused approach versus the broader or business-centric versions, is crucial.

Microsoft Copilot for Dynamics 365

Price: Varies

Availability: Available now across various Dynamics 365 applications

Key Uses: Enhancing productivity and efficiency in customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP), automating tasks, generating ideas, providing insights using natural language, and improving customer service and sales processes.

Copilot for Dynamics 365 represents a significant leap in leveraging AI to enrich employee experiences and streamline operations across CRM and ERP systems. It empowers employees to automate routine tasks, generate creative ideas, and derive insights using natural language, thereby focusing on high-value activities. For sales teams, it optimises seller productivity by enabling automation of sales processes and augmenting seller actions with AI-powered insights. In customer service, it offers capabilities like summarising cases and conversations, composing emails or chat responses, and providing quick access to knowledge base sources. Marketing teams benefit from AI-driven customer insights, segment suggestions, and content creation tools, enhancing the personalisation and efficiency of marketing campaigns. Additionally, it supports various operations such as field service, project management, finance, and supply chain management by providing AI-assisted insights and automations to streamline workflows, improve decision-making, and enhance customer engagement​​​​​​.

Copilot for Power Platform

Price: Free

Availability: Copilot is generally available in Power Apps, Power BI and Power Automate.

Key Uses: In Power Automate – build, edit, and extend workflows using natural language and get help from AI powered chat. In Power Apps – build enterprise-grade applications faster and more easily with generative AI. In Power BI – use AI to illuminate hidden patterns, opportunities, and anomalies in your data.

Summary: Copilot for Power Platform is an AI-powered assistant designed to facilitate the creation of intelligent apps within the Microsoft Power Platform ecosystem. By leveraging large language models, it accelerates the development process, enabling users to build apps, automate workflows, and create virtual agents through conversational inputs. For app development in Power Apps, Copilot simplifies the process from data integration to app publishing, offering suggestions based on your data and preferences, ensuring that applications are both efficient and aligned with your business needs. Importantly, Copilot operates within a secure environment, ensuring that data and information are processed locally and in accordance with Microsoft’s responsible AI principles.

Microsoft Security Copilot

Price: Unconfirmed.

Availability: Currently available in an Early Access Program for commercial customers.

Key Uses: Incident response, threat hunting, intelligence gathering, posture management, security reporting.

Summary: Microsoft Security Copilot is a generative AI-powered security solution designed to enhance the efficiency and capabilities of security professionals. It operates at machine speed and scale, providing a natural language, assistive copilot experience for a wide range of security scenarios including incident response, threat hunting, and security posture management. Security Copilot leverages OpenAI architecture and security-specific plugins to generate responses, offering wide visibility into threats and the opportunity to extend its functionalities. It integrates with Microsoft’s security portfolio products such as Microsoft Defender XDR, Microsoft Sentinel, and Microsoft Intune, as well as with third-party services like ServiceNow. The solution is focused on improving security outcomes while adhering to responsible AI principles​​​​.

GitHub Copilot

Price: From £7.60 per user, per month (with annual commitment)

Availability: Available now for individual developers and businesses

Key Uses: Code suggestions, function generation, test acceleration, security vulnerability identification

Summary: GitHub Copilot is an AI-powered coding assistant that supports a multitude of programming tasks across various languages and IDEs. It is designed to enhance developer productivity by offering code completions, generating function and line suggestions, and providing chat and security vulnerability filtering. For individual developers, Copilot is priced at approximately £7.60 per month (or £76 annually), offering a 30-day free trial. The Business plan, targeted at organizational use, stands at approximately £14.40 per user per month, including advanced features such as chat support in IDE, CLI assistance, and IP indemnity, among others. An Enterprise option is also available at approximately £29.60 per user per month, requiring a GitHub Enterprise Cloud subscription, and includes personalized chat features, documentation search and summarization, and enhanced code review capabilities. GitHub Copilot is accessible for verified students, teachers, and open-source project maintainers at no cost, promoting educational and community development use.

 

Conclusion

Understanding the diversity and specificity of the Microsoft’s different Copilot offerings reveals a strategic vision aimed at leveraging AI to enhance productivity, creativity, and security across a broad spectrum of professional and personal computing environments. From the freely accessible Microsoft Copilot, which introduces AI-powered chat capabilities into daily computing via Windows 11 and Microsoft Edge, to 365 Copilot’s business-oriented enhancements for Microsoft 365 suite users, each variant is designed with distinct use cases and user bases in mind. Copilot Pro bridges these worlds, offering advanced AI features for individual Microsoft 365 subscribers, while GitHub Copilot targets developers with AI-assisted coding. Furthermore, specialized versions like Copilot for Dynamics 365 and Copilot for Power Platform cater to specific professional needs in CRM, ERP, and app development, respectively. Microsoft Security Copilot’s focus on cybersecurity underscores the importance of AI in safeguarding digital assets.

This comprehensive approach underscores Microsoft’s commitment to embedding AI across its product range, ensuring that whether one is coding, managing corporate resources, or simply browsing the web, there’s a Copilot designed to make the task more efficient and intuitive. Hopefully, you will now be able to understand the difference between Microsoft’s Copilots: a suite of tools poised to redefine our interaction with technology, tailored to meet diverse needs across the digital landscape.

 

About Emerge Digital

Emerge Digital is a technology and digital innovation business and Managed Services Provider (MSP) which provides solutions to SMEs that drive efficiency, competitiveness, and profit. Using comprehensive solutions, including outsourced IT support, cyber security, cloud infrastructure, and innovative technologies like process automation, data visualisation and AI – Emerge Digital enables businesses to invest in technology that supports them in achieving their goals.

The Voyage Time: Understanding CRM Implementation Duration

The duration to implement a CRM system can vary as widely as the sea itself. It’s influenced by numerous factors including the complexity of your existing processes, the size of your crew (or team), the CRM’s sophistication, and the level of customisation required. Typically, this journey can take anywhere from a few weeks to over a year. However, for most small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), the voyage often spans between 3 to 6 months.

Imagine navigating through the misty mornings of initial planning, the afternoons of configuring and customising your CRM, followed by the tranquil evenings of training your crew. Each phase of the journey requires careful attention and time.

Charting the Course: Key Phases in CRM Implementation

1. Preparation and Planning – Like charting a map before setting sail, this phase involves defining the goals, scope, and specifications of your CRM project. It’s where you decide the destinations (objectives) you wish to reach.

2. System Selection – Choosing the right vessel for your journey is crucial. This entails selecting a CRM system that aligns with your business needs and goals.

3. Customisation and Integration – Tailoring your CRM to fit the unique contours of your business landscape involves customising features and integrating existing systems.

4. Data Migration – Akin to transferring cargo, this phase involves moving your existing customer data into the new CRM system safely and securely.

5. Training and Adoption – Preparing your crew for the voyage ahead, training ensures everyone knows how to navigate the new system efficiently.

6. Deployment – The moment of setting sail, where your CRM system goes live.

7. Evaluation and Adjustment – After embarking on your journey, it’s vital to assess the voyage thus far, making adjustments as necessary.

Navigating Through Mist: Avoiding Common CRM Implementation Pitfalls

Embarking on the CRM journey without recognising potential storm clouds can lead to perilous outcomes. Here are some strategies to ensure a smoother voyage:

1. Underestimating the Importance of Clean Data – Ensure your data is as clean and organised as a ship’s logbook before migration. Dirty data can lead to chaotic seas, making navigation through your new CRM system troublesome.

2. Skipping Customisation for Expediency – While it’s tempting to sail straight ahead with out-of-the-box solutions, failing to customise your CRM to fit your business can result in a journey filled with inefficiencies.

3. Neglecting Crew Training – A crew unfamiliar with navigating the vessel will struggle. Invest time in comprehensive training to ensure smooth sailing.

4. Ignoring Change Management – The seas of change management can be tricky to navigate. Address human elements and resistance to ensure your crew is ready and willing to embark on this new journey.

5. Failing to Set Clear Objectives – Without a destination in mind, it’s easy to get lost at sea. Define clear, measurable objectives for your CRM implementation to ensure you reach your desired port.

6. Overlooking Continuous Evaluation – Continuous evaluation is like keeping a lookout at the crow’s nest. Regularly assess the system’s performance and user feedback to make necessary adjustments.

Conclusion: The Harbour Awaits

Implementing a CRM system is a journey filled with anticipation, challenges, and learning. While the answer to the question “how long does it take to implement a CRM system?” can vary, understanding the phases involved and recognising potential pitfalls can significantly smooth the seas of your CRM implementation voyage. With careful planning, a dedicated crew, and a clear map, the journey can lead to the prosperous lands of improved customer relationships and business efficiency.

Remember, the goal is not just to reach the destination but to ensure that the journey strengthens your vessel, enriches your crew, and prepares your business for the many adventures that lie ahead.

 

About Emerge Digital

Emerge Digital is a technology and digital innovation business and Managed Services Provider (MSP) which provides solutions to SMEs that drive efficiency, competitiveness, and profit. Using comprehensive solutions, including outsourced IT support, cyber security, cloud infrastructure, and innovative technologies like process automation, data visualisation and AI – Emerge Digital enables businesses to invest in technology that supports them in achieving their goals.