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 study analyzed 30 work-related platforms, considering data on the number of major global outages, the average duration of these outages, and the total number of affected users to calculate a reliability score for each service. 

The focus was solely on major global outages where the platform was completely unavailable for all its functions.

Global Outages: Summary of the Findings

Key Highlights

Monday.com was the platform with the most frequent outages, experiencing 10 major crashes last year — almost once every month. These outages lasted an average of 45 minutes and impacted 225,000 users, resulting in the lowest reliability score of 25.5.

Gmail and Microsoft Teams each experienced six major crashes, but the impact was largely different. Gmail’s crashes affected over 1.8 billion users, over 20% of the world’s population, with an average outage duration of 3.5 hours. 

Microsoft Teams, however, had the longest outages in the study, with each lasting over five hours on average, affecting 280 million users. Despite this, Gmail maintained a higher reliability score of 55.0 compared to Microsoft Teams’ 20.7.

Slack and Outlook both had five crashes, but like Microsoft Teams, Outlook’s outages lasted an average of five hours, impacting 400 million users. In contrast, Slack’s crashes were much shorter — just 45 minutes on average — affecting a smaller user base of 18 million, leading to a significantly higher reliability score of 45.8.

Other platforms like Google Drive, GitHub, ClickUp, Salesforce, Zoom, and Notion each experienced four major outages over the last year. Google Drive, despite its widespread usage affecting over a billion users, managed to maintain the highest reliability score in the study at 61.7. The platform’s outages were shorter, averaging 1.5 hours.

Zoom had longer outages, averaging 2.5 hours, impacting 300 million users, resulting in a reliability score of 44. Notion‘s outages were slightly shorter, averaging 2 hours and affecting 30 million users, earning it a reliability score of 42.5.

A spokesperson for TRG Datacenters commented on the importance of these findings:

“The reliability of a platform is easy to maintain when the user base is relatively small. However, the game changes when a single mistake can affect millions or even billions of users, even if the downtime is as short as 30 minutes. Reliability becomes crucial when enterprises depend on these platforms to deliver results. It’s also important to consider that these platforms serve users across different time zones, so not all users may be impacted equally by an outage.”

This study revealed the challenges faced by widely used platforms in maintaining reliable services, especially as their user bases grow. Both businesses and individuals continue to rely heavily on these platforms for daily operations, hence the importance of minimizing downtime and speedily addressing outages cannot be overstated.