Copilot, a generative AI chatbot based on GPT-4, was first introduced as Bing Chat on February 07, 2023. It was integrated into both Bing and Edge as Cortana’s successor, but by September 2023 it was released into the enterprise as Microsoft 365 Copilot as a tool to boost enterprise productivity.

As of October 2023, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella reported that the company had more than one million paid Copilot users across more than 37,000 companies.

By 2025, that number is estimated at hundreds of thousands of customers, according to Nadella’s official LinkedIn account.

The smart Microsoft tool’s uptake has been impressive. Integrated across Word, Excel, Teams and Outlook, it blends generative AI with Microsoft Graph data to summarise meetings, write content, and automate repetitive tasks.

The solution has fundamentally changed the narrative for companies wanting to improve workload management and optimise human talent. Companies are leveraging it to work faster and think better.

Today, Copilot is everywhere – Word, Excel, Teams, Outlook and beyond. And it does more than assist people, it collaborates with them to draft reports, summarise meetings, generate presentations, and automate workflows.

Copilot combines large language models (LLMs) with contextual awareness across calendar invites, Teams messages, SharePoint files and other data to provide users with optimised time and resource management capabilities.

The AI knows your next meeting, the prep doc you worked on, the stakeholder comments that need to feed into the document and the meeting, and the last presentation you shared.

This deep integration allows it to generate emails, write PowerPoint decks and even build Excel dashboards that provide you with recommended insights. And all this is done in minutes, not the hours usually spent on this admin-intensive work.

However, perhaps one of the most profound value-adds is how Copilot has transformed access to knowledge. It is a zero-cost interaction which allows users to retrieve anything. When the right prompts are used, users have access to infinite insights on demand.

Copilot is also no longer just reactive. Users can use Copilot Studio to create AI agents capable of executing multi-step workflows such as emailing reports, updating CRM systems or analysing Excel data.

This agentic approach to AI changes the story from AI that responds to AI that acts autonomously across integrated platforms. Agentic AI is defined by its ability to understand context, chain tasks and make decisions within defined boundaries.

You can instruct an agent to create a proposal, attach key figures to it, and then email it to the relevant stakeholders without any intervention on your side.

The process just gets done with the AI deftly managing the entire action stack. Microsoft’s Copilot Studio allows users to create these workflows with minimal coding which democratises a task that was once only possible with engineers.

While productivity is an obvious gain, there are other, unexpected benefits. You can synthesise internal knowledge as easily as Googling a fact, which is both a cultural transformation and a process improvement.

Other use cases include intelligent meeting recaps, real-time proposal drafting, and internal document search that rivals enterprise-grade search engines.

Companies are now deploying thousands of copilots just to crawl through petabytes of data because the answers they provide are invaluable.

However, the implementation of AI remains challenging. Companies have AI on their strategy list but aren’t sure where to start. Data is messy, security frameworks aren’t compliant and employees often don’t know how to prompt the AI effectively.

There is a growing need for training that takes people beyond just clicking an AI button and into the realm of understanding the right questions to ask and how to interrogate the AI correctly.

The future of Copilot and AI in general comes down to orchestration. Companies want bespoke Copilots tailored to their workflows and an agent ecosystem that solves their problems.

They also want to create a culture which embraces AI and this means building skills in curiosity, experimentation and critical thinking.

There is a danger in over trusting AI, it has to be validated, challenged and directed to ensure it is delivering value.

Winning at Copilot, or any form of agentic AI, will come down to companies being willing to learn how to ask better questions, explore the potential of the technology, and that are open to learning, failing and experimenting.

These are the routes to finding new ways of benefitting from AI’s capabilities, and ensuring it works hard for the business.

“The investment we are making with Microsoft takes our long-standing partnership to the next level, helping our clients accelerate and integrate AI at scale as a catalyst for reinvention,” said Julie Sweet, chair and CEO, Accenture. “The powerful combination of Microsoft Copilot, agentic and generative AI technologies, and Avanade’s and Accenture’s deep industry and functional expertise will help enable enterprises to reimagine their processes and operations, discover innovative ways of working, strengthen their security and open up new pathways to value.”

The Copilot business transformation practice will provide the technology and industry experience clients need to help accelerate and expand their use of Copilot and agents across the enterprise.

The companies will collaborate on AI and Copilot agent templates, extensions, plugins and connectors to help organizations leverage their data and gen AI to reduce costs, improve efficiencies and drive growth.

The companies will help clients leverage Microsoft’s gen AI-powered security capabilities to elevate the efficiency of their security operations and help analysts make better, faster decisions.

The practice consists of 5,000 professionals from Accenture and Avanade, supported by Microsoft product specialists who will work closely with the Accenture Center for Advanced AI.

The team will tap into more than 50,000 Microsoft Copilot-trained professionals across Accenture and Avanade to help deliver industry and functional transformation.

Clients will have access to specialized engineers and early access to the latest technologies, including the Accenture AI Refinery, to create custom models and solutions. Accenture will leverage learnings from its use and deployment of 100,000 Microsoft 365 Copilots and agents, with a commitment to expand to approximately 200,000 users.

“We are pleased to deepen our collaboration with Accenture to help our mutual customers develop AI-first business processes responsibly and securely, while helping them drive market differentiation,” said Judson Althoff, executive vice president and chief commercial officer at Microsoft. “By bringing together Copilots and human ambition, paired with the autonomous capabilities of an agent, we can accelerate AI transformation for organizations across industries and help them realize successful business outcomes through pragmatic innovation.”

Accenture and Avanade have already developed agents to streamline workflows, boost revenue and enhance customer experience.

For example, a supplier discovery and risk agent can deliver real-time market insights, agile supply chain responses and better vendor selection, which could result in up to 15% cost savings.

A procure-to-pay agent could improve efficiency by up to 40% and enhance vendor relations and satisfaction by addressing urgent payment requirements and avoiding disruptions of key services.

They have also invested in building functional and industry Copilot solutions that are delivering client value, including:

Microsoft 365 Copilot

The companies have developed Microsoft 365 Copilot solutions such as a readiness assessment and value accelerator, among others, to help clients effectively implement and successfully adopt and scale the technology for maximum value.

They are helping Repsol, a global multi-energy company, deploy Microsoft 365 Copilot and a four month study has shown impressive results. Employees are saving a gross average of 121 minutes per week, enhancing productivity and the quality of outputs by 16%.

Additionally, 61% favor the AI-enhanced workflows, noting improved confidence and motivation. Productivity gains were most significant in technical and professional roles, with engineering roles saving nearly 97 hours annually per employee.

Maintenance roles saw even greater benefits, saving about 225 minutes weekly, which significantly enhanced the precision and consistency required in their tasks. These results underscore the transformative potential of generative AI in optimizing business operations and boosting employee satisfaction across the board.

Industry and Functional Copilots

Together, the companies have developed Copilots for a variety of industries and functions including finance, manufacturing, supply chain, retail and consumer goods and healthcare.

For example, they developed a Manufacturing Copilot powered by Microsoft Manufacturing Data Solutions in Fabric, to transform the shop floor and the way factory workers operate.

Custom Copilots and Agents

The companies are using Microsoft Copilot Studio to extend foundational Copilots, like Microsoft 365 Copilot and industry and role-based Copilots, with enterprise knowledge to create autonomous agents that act on certain triggers or on the intent of the user to implement AI-powered, responsible and efficient workflows.

Avanade and Accenture helped Bricorama, a French home improvement retailer, create a custom home improvement Copilot called “pAInt.”

The pAInt app uses Azure OpenAI to guide customers through their projects.

Udacity, part of Accenture LearnVantage, and Microsoft have co-created a new Azure Generative AI Engineer Nanodegree program to equip learners with the skills to design, build, and operationalize AI-driven applications on Azure.

In this fully online program, learners will use AI models to solve real-world problems through automation, data insights, and generative AI solutions. Learners will develop custom Microsoft 365 Copilot applications and implement models through hands-on projects with personalized support from industry advisors.

Udacity’s Nanodegree program is available today and, for a limited time, learners can get started with the first lesson for free.

Deeper collaboration

Accenture will continue to support Microsoft in the transformation of its functions – including finance, sales, marketing and HR – with Copilot, leveraging its industry, functional and generative AI consulting services.

Microsoft also selected Accenture to establish four Microsoft Co-Innovation Labs to incubate blueprints for AI-led design and experimentation, with immersive showcases within Accenture offices and Microsoft Co-Innovation Labs.

At the labs, the companies will build pilots, leveraging assets developed by the Copilot business transformation practice, to inspire reinvention.

Having seen the value of Microsoft Copilot in its business, Accenture will leverage the latest Copilot agentic technologies to facilitate AI enabled augmentation and help transform clients’ business processes across corporate functions and industry-specific operations.

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We are entering the third wave of AI where autonomous AI agents will go beyond simply generating and analysing content, as chatbots and copilots did in the first and second waves and will be able to reason and autonomously take action for human colleagues.

Indeed, they’ll work 24/7 to tackle individual, low-value, time-consuming tasks or collaborate with other agents to get larger, more complex jobs and projects done.

In sales, for example, they’ll engage with prospects, answer questions, manage objections, and schedule meetings based on CRM and external data, allowing sellers to focus on building deeper customer relationships.

With dynamic, conversational self-service, they can be configured to answer customer questions using companies’ existing knowledge base so they can automatically resolve account access.

They can also triage registration and payment issues, directing customers to the appropriate resources.

Put simply, the future of AI is agents, and it’s here. Companies need to get ready to implement fast as these autonomous agents will become central to organizations’ customer engagement and experience strategies.

Working together, these customisable agents can autonomously take action on tasks and free up workers to focus on the jobs only they can do.

At Dreamforce, Salesforce unveiled Agentforce – a groundbreaking suite of customizable, autonomous agents and tools, makes it easy for customers to build their own ‘agent force’ — a revolutionary step forward in enterprise AI that will boost productivity, efficiency, and customer satisfaction across service, sales, marketing, commerce, and more.

Agentforce is how humans with AI drive customer success together and it’s been designed so that any organisation can build, customise, and deploy their own agents quickly and easily, with low-code tools.]

Complementing skills, and ensuring accountability

The leap from generative to agentic AI will transform how humans work.

Despite business eagerness to experiment with and deploy AI, many still worry about how to do so safely, how to keep data under their control, and make sure they can trust the AI’s output.

There is considerable concern about AI ‌displacing workers or becoming too powerful and working at odds with humans.

Agents require guardrails, and they have to be monitored to make sure that they’re doing what they’re supposed to.

Success requires not just finding the AI models or building AI actions that best suit a company’s needs, but having the infrastructure and data security to do so responsibly.

Audit trails are necessary to hold autonomous AI agents accountable, just as employers might establish key performance indicators (KPIs) to keep human workers marching toward their expected goals.

It’s important to think about the role of agents at work as a partnership between people and AI. Complementing skills and intelligence will bring better business outcomes.

While agents can orchestrate complex actions on behalf of the user, they require those skills to be configured and need a degree of hand-holding to perform at their best.

Businesses need to take their employees on the AI journey. They will require training to work with autonomous AI agents because they need context and onboarding much like new employees.

Setting direction, clear goals, and giving feedback ultimately helps AI train itself better.

The future of work is a hybrid workforce

Together, agents with humans will drive customer success. This is what AI is meant to be.

Every company has more jobs to be done than the resources available to do them. As a result, many jobs go unaddressed or uncompleted.

An estimated 41% of employee time is spent on repetitive, low-impact work, and 65% of desk workers believe generative AI will allow them to be more strategic, according to the Salesforce Trends in AI Report.

However, it’s essential for AI agents to understand and execute their expansive capabilities. It’s equally, if not more, important for them to recognize their limitations and understand when human intervention is necessary.

The future of work is a hybrid workforce composed of humans with agents, enabling companies to compete in an ever-changing world. With AI, humans can focus on what’s really important: human relationships.

While much of the fear mongering is based on hearsay and outright speculation, there certainly are legitimate concerns.

However, businesses and consumers have more than enough reason to believe — and trust — AI’s ability to add significant value to their processes and lives.

Customer communication management (CCM), infused with complementary AI, has literally shifted the goalposts for what businesses can achieve with personalised, accurate and compliant customer communication at scale.

On the other hand, screaming headlines work people into a state. Rumours have surfaced that Sam Altman’s departure from OpenAI, before his return amidst the furore, was linked to concerns among OpenAI board members that significant breakthroughs in artificial general intelligence (AGI) had been made, and that Altman was rushing these into production without sufficient safeguards for society at large. The stuff of horror movies.

AGI refers to an advanced form of AI that can perform many activities as well as, or better than, humans. Many followers of AI think that AGI is closer than we may believe.

Let’s be clear: the real reason behind Altman’s departure is not known, and may be unrelated to AGI. It is also important to highlight that AI experts are divided on whether true AGI is imminent, or even likely.

I would suggest that even if the output of AI approximates that of the human mind, such as when Deep Blue stunned the world when it beat a reigning world chess champion, there is a critical difference between the approaches used by AI compared to those used by humans.

Sophisticated AI algorithms such as Large Language Models (LLMs) do not understand the meaning of concepts in the way humans do.

Computer algorithms tokenise words into numbers from the outset, which means they don’t imbue words with meaning in the same way as humans.

The AI Talk: Breaking Down ChatGPT and Google Bard – Which One Speaks Your Language?

More generally, for AGI to become a reality, there will need to be significant advances in AI’s ability to understand the meaning and context of patterns in the data, and not just detect them.

The question, then, becomes: What does any of this mean for businesses who wish to leverage the power of AI to improve their business processes and customer service?

As a point of departure, it’s interesting to read the views of Kevin Scott, Microsoft CTO, referring to Microsoft’s AI tool for its Office suite, in an article in the New Yorker.

“The Office Copilots seem simultaneously impressive and banal. They make mundane tasks easier, but they’re a long way from replacing human workers. They feel like a far cry from what was foretold by Sci-Fi novels. But they also feel like something that people might use every day,” he is quoted as saying.

The article goes on to say that if Scott, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Chat GPT CTO Mira Murati get their way, then “AI will continue to steadily seep into our lives, at a pace gradual enough to accommodate the cautions required by short-term pessimism, and only as fast as humans are able to absorb how this technology ought to be used. There remains the possibility that things will get out of hand—and that the incremental creep of AI will prevent us from realising those dangers until it’s too late. But, for now, Scott and Murati feel confident that they can balance advancement and safety.”

This is a sound approach. What about the rest of us? Businesses have a responsibility to serve their shareholders, but also their customers and society more broadly. Treading a thoughtful line in the release of AI functionality to the market requires regular consideration of the benefits and potential risks.

It is crucial for business leaders to support the notion of good corporate citizenship in how they serve customers and develop products.

Regulation will play a massive role.  It appears as though EU lawmakers have concluded marathon discussions to put in place a regulatory framework for AI.

The framework will probably maintain a list of all AI models deemed to pose a systemic risk, and providers of general-purpose AI will be required to publish summaries of their algorithms and the content used to train them.

The EU is leading the global regulatory response to AI and could become the blueprint which other governments may follow.

If we cast our gaze back towards CCM, GhostDraft’s use of AI is specifically focused on supporting the generation of documents to capture contractual agreements between companies and their customers quickly and accurately. CCM is an absolutely crucial part of modern customer communication.

Gone are the days when document automation was sufficient. The smart and calibrated use of AI is a great example of how technology supports a transformative evolution of businesses’ capabilities to create mass communication that’s personalised, compliant, well-designed, dynamic and fast.

If a company cannot communicate clearly, quickly and accurately to its customers, it will lose them.

GhostDraft uses AI for design and development of communications templates and generative AI to analyse sample data, informing the structure and production of future documents.

It is enhancing the readability and completeness of key customer documents and forms, so that customers can feel comfortable about their business interactions.

It is clear that AI can improve customer service and interaction and it can make more relevant recommendations to customers, ensuring that they receive products and services tailored to their needs.

In addition to this, using AI can deliver cost efficiencies to businesses, which can then translate into more accessible and affordable services for customers. These benefits engender trust.

On the other hand, we already know that AI doesn’t understand context the way humans do. It doesn’t understand nuance, hope or fear. If we allow AI to have unfettered access to run business activities, it will miss things, and that is where customer trust will be damaged. In fact, the term “AI hallucination” refers to instances where AI tools identify patterns in the data which are actually non-existent or nonsensical.

There are practical ways this can be addressed over and above regulation. Businesses can restrict chatbot scope to simpler questions, and the routing of complex or nuanced business functions to humans. Giving users more control is also important.

Businesses can do this by offering users control over their data and the extent to which AI is used in their interactions, and by allowing users to easily opt in or opt out of AI-driven features.

When AI practitioners are building and training models, they would do well to record and selectively audit AI recommendations, and use this to refine their models.

Responsible businesses, meanwhile, should communicate clearly to customers how AI is being used in their products or services in a way that is understandable to non-technical users.