Microsoft’s Copilot: A force multiplier for KM

Chatbots. Copilot’s GPT-based Chat reproduces the Bing Search capabilities and adds more to optimize customer service, so customers can query the chatbot for helpful automated replies. Bing Chat Enterprise for business comes in Microsoft 365 and as a mobile app and uses multimodal search—for instance, via the Image Creator tool to search with images.

With the Copilot search/Chat combo, users work across Microsoft 365 apps to comb their work—emails, meetings, documents, and other content. Copilot learns the needs of a user’s company role and holistically personalizes its actions to address them. For instance, those capabilities and more in Teams can summarize and display to participants all meeting notes and personalized visuals because they are also translated into different languages.

Workers can tame their data volume and variety with this combo, so it does the drudge work they were heretofore buried by. As a KM assistant, through this functionality, but especially with personalization, the combo mines existing—and creates new—knowledge and simplifies its complexity, so it maximizes productivity and frees workers to do higher-value tasks.

Native Apps. Copilot best distinguishes itself from other vendors’ GenAI ecosystems by its pervasive inclusion in Microsoft’s ubiquitous 365 office apps. Workers don’t waste time doing inefficient searching—Copilot readily finds, summarizes, and classifies data. They can use the relevance settings in Bing to focus search for broader, more inclusive data with Creative, for shorter, factual data in Precise, or a balance of those with Balance.

Data Studio and Cloud. Azure cloud provides a robust GenAI infrastructure, especially in its multiple vertical solutions such as financial services and retail. Microsoft offers its GenAI studio via Azure called Azure OpenAI Service. Workers access powerful OpenAI LLMs they train on their own datasets for tasks like those already mentioned but also to work with code to improve programmers’ productivity. All work is securely managed in Data Studio in compliance with organizational policies and user access rights.

Of course, any vendor in this space will leverage its native strengths with its GenAI ecosystem. I’ll hazard a guess, though, that no other vendor has created a GenAI ecosystem as visionary as Copilot—that is, with such comprehensive functionality that’s seamlessly integrated and leverages its installed base of productivity apps so it optimally impacts this market space. Indisputable also is that Copilot will pack a wallop for KM.