Empower Your Business with Copilot: A Free and Secure Path to AI Usage

With the rapid expansion of your wider business users using AI, and with more and more boards and leadership teams encouraging the use of AI, it’s become increasingly important to facilitate the usage of it but with full protection and security of your corporate data. Born from the legacy of Clippy Bing Chat Enterprise, Microsoft Copilot (with Commercial Data Protection) allows secure, intelligent assistance, seamlessly integrating into the daily workflows of your end-users.

Microsoft Copilot is a web-based AI for the business world, free for your Microsoft 365 users. But there's lots of things called Copilot, so it takes a bit of effort to decipher them all, so Microsoft Copilot should not be confused with the paid Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Actually, lets break those down (or skip down to how to facilitate Copilot in your business)

• Microsoft Copilot – Consumer product - Available at copilot.microsoft.com and free for everyone – think re-skinned ChatGPT. Your data will be used to improve and train the Large Language Models (LLMs) of Copilot.
• Copilot Pro - Consumer product - A subscription-based upgrade of the last product, that offers faster performance and enhanced creativity capabilities
• Microsoft Copilot (with commercial data protection) – what this blog is about – is an everyday AI companion, providing AI-powered chat for the web. When authenticated as a business user, this is available at copilot.microsoft.com, at no additional cost Entra ID users. This is also optionally integrated directly into Microsoft Edge browser, and available as a Windows web app to be added “as an App” through Edge or Chrome browsers too.
• Copilot for Microsoft 365 – the heavily advertised Copilot that you may have heard of - designed for enterprise users to enhance productivity within the Microsoft 365 applications and ecosystem.
• Copilot Studio - an end-to-end conversational AI platform for customization and extensibility. Ideal for creating new business ideas and solutions, and tailoring Copilots for various scenarios.  Inde are experts at expanding your data and integrations required to drive your business success with Copilot Studio.
• Copilot for Security – a deeply integrated AI tool for accelerating your security team members, integrating with Sentinel, Intune, and Defender Threat Protection
• Copilot+ PC – a term for the latest generation of AI capable PCs from any vendor, which have specific NPU and hardware requirements that enable efficient and speedy local AI workload execution, and all-day battery life. As a successful partner of most brands, Inde can help you understand your options across a wide array of vendors including HP, Surface, Lenovo and Dell hardware, as well as any of your preferred peripherals.
• Copilot for Sales – Dynamics 365 Sales and Salesforce Extension for sales staff, to improve productivity and close more deals
• Copilot for Services – Dynamics 365 Service Extension assist case resolution, improve efficiency, and automate tasks for agents in their flow of work
• Copilot Github – (Business, Enterprise and Individual) – for developers and coding professionals to accelerate their work and perform security and performance testing dynamically
• Copilot in Teams Premium – AI-powered meeting summaries, action items, personalized timelines
• Copilot for Windows – A now deprecated App that was originally going to be ingrained into Windows, but can be somewhat replaced by using the “add as an app” feature of Edge and Chrome
• Copilot for Viva Suite – AI to support your user engagement, Viva isn’t particularly common in NZ

With such a wide array of Copilot offerings, it’s best to partner with a business who can truly support your team to deliver business outcomes. Feel free to reach out and lets discuss.

Back to enabling your business:

If you aren’t providing your business users with a secure AI tool to use at work, they probably are already using one that isn’t secure – which is concerning at how easy it is to expose your data and to have AI/LLMs learning off your data.

In Microsoft Copilot with commercial data protection, data is secured to Microsoft’s enterprise best practices. Your data is not used to train the LLMs used to facilitate Copilot, which run in private instance of Azure OpenAI Service. Because it is secure, no storage of the previous prompts or responses are saved, nor are they visible as history to anyone once the current instance or topic is closed.

Steps for staff to adopt your secure and free Microsoft Copilot:

1. Educate your staff on the benefits of using Microsoft Copilot, rather than other unsecured AI tools. PowerPoint, Messaging and Email templates are available to support these tasks. Feel free to ask the Inde team about it!
2. Ensure staff understand how to confirm they are authenticated with, and therefore secured with their business account when interacting with Copilot.
3. Consider doing a training for your staff to understand that your business both endorses and encourages using Copilot.
4. Look at the Microsoft Copilot Adoption Kit available here.
5. Seek feedback from your organisation, and set up user groups to enable success!