On Friday 7 June, we welcomed clients and local businesses to Norwich Theatre for a morning of knowledge sharing.
After a light breakfast and time to network, Breakwater Co-Owner, John Gostling, took the floor to share insights and live demos of two recently released Microsoft products: Copilot and Teams Premium. Our aim? To discover if both products are really worth it for your business. Here are some highlights from the talk:
Copilot
There are two versions of Copilot available to businesses. Copilot in Windows and Copilot for Microsoft 365. Watch our video explainer here.
Copilot in Windows is:
- Free to use – in the Edge Sidebar, Windows app or on the web
- It uses publicly available data
- You should not be putting workplace data into this version of Copilot
You can use Copilot in Windows to ask questions, generate text, ask questions about an image or file, or generate images.
Copilot for Microsoft 365 is:
- £294 per user per year with an annual commitment (there is no free trial)
- Uses the workplace data you have access to
- Is integrated in your 365 apps (Word, Outlook, Teams), and it can be accessed alongside Copilot in Windows when you have the licence
Here is what Copilot can do in each 365 app:
Outlook: Summarise email threads, draft emails for you, give you tips/coaching for writing your emails.
Teams: Takes notes in meetings, generate tasks from meetings, summarise chats. You also get Copilot chat which is a hub for Copilot. You can ask for updates, generate content and ideas, track tasks, and more.
Word: Generate text from scratch or existing documents, summarise content, or answer questions about content.
PowerPoint: Create presentations from scratch or existing documents, ask questions about a presentation, add content.
Excel: Find insights from your data, get formula suggestions.
Copilot for Microsoft 365 is also integrated in OneNote, Loop and Forms.
Teams Premium
Teams Premium is an add-on licence for standard Teams. You can see our full breakdown here.
There is an additional cost for Teams Premium, but you can also get a 30 day free trial for up to 25 licences.
The most notable features of Teams Premium include intelligent recap. This includes some features of Copilot without the need to buy the Copilot upgrade. These features include:
- AI summary/notes
- AI generated task lists
- Live translation of captions
- Transcription
- Markers on the recording when you were mentioned
Additional features mentioned at the event include watermarks on meetings, branding in the lobbies, the ability to make meeting templates, meeting engagement reports, using AI to ‘clean’ your background and custom Together Mode scenes. For the full list of Teams Premium features, view our insight.
Our conclusion
Copilot for 365 is still very much in its infancy, as it develops, it may be a worthwhile investment for your business. However, you must ensure that your data is accurate, up to date and stored correctly to be able to use it effectively. If you put bad data in, you’ll only get bad data out. It’s worth trying the free version but do not put sensitive company data into it.
With Teams Premium, the intelligent recap features could certainly be worth the upgrade for AI note taking alone. But you also get other features that could benefit your business more frequently. As Teams Premium has the option of a free trial, it’s worth seeing if it works for your business.
