Microsoft Copilot is a powerful AI assistant that has the ability to save your business time and money, making it more productive and improving team morale. You may have heard about it already – maybe as a way to write blog posts quickly or automate email replies.
But what, exactly, is it? Read on to delve into the tech and learn how it delivers its incredible productivity boosts, as well as see what different versions of it are available…
Understanding LLMs
Microsoft Copilot is a chatbot, just like ChatGPT and other AI assistants. A chatbot is just a computer programme, or “bot” for short, that “chats,” or responds to human inquiries in natural language.
Although chatbots have been around for a while, newer ones like Copilot are unique due to the technology they’re built on: Large Language Models (LLMs).
An LLM is like a massive autocorrect machine that the chatbot uses to produce text that appears to have been written by a human – except much more complex.
The thing that makes it so complex is that it maps every word in a natural language, such as English, based both on the degree of their relatedness, and the type of their relatedness. And in regards to the second, it analyses literally hundreds of distinct parameters
As an example, “hot” and “cold” might be closely related in an LLM based on the fact they’re both temperatures. But on a different relational parameter, they might only be very distantly related as opposites of one another.
LLMs are great examples of machine learning systems, and they’ve been trained on billions of words of human-generated text from novels, internet forums, and more.
While LLMs simply predict the most-likely next word based on the word they’ve just read, the complexity of their semantic mapping makes each suggestion unique. This is because the probability of each word is weighted differently based on the context of previous words.
So an LLM won’t always suggest “meows” after it reads “the cat” – it can remember whether the cat was wearing a hat, whether it was hungry or sad or aggressive, and lots of other things too.
The outcome of all this is unique, natural sounding text that reads as if it were written by a human.
The many types of Copilot
Copilot is a unique LLM chatbot that’s been designed to work for businesses in particular.
It has three major advantages that should make it an obvious choice for companies searching for a chatbot, in addition to being based on the newest and most powerful LLM available:
- It’s been designed to work with Microsoft’s superb suite of enterprise tools.
- It’s a secure tool, and meets all regulatory requirements over data and privacy.
- It can be personalised through plugins.
Plugins are extra programmes that you “plug in” to Copilot to enable it to carry out particular functions (like getting the weather forecast every evening).
There are three versions of Copilot available: free, pro, and the enterprise-focused Copilot for Microsoft 365. This is the comparison between them taken from Microsoft’s own site:
Source: Microsoft
In addition to these three tiers, there are a number of specialised versions of Copilot available for individual industries (such as Copilot for Sales and Copilot for Security) as well as the Copilot Studio, which lets businesses build their own completely bespoke version of Copilot!Microsoft Copilot offers a quick, easy, and potentially free way for your business to make significant productivity, creativity, and morale gains in a matter of minutes. If you have any further questions concerning its integration with your business, please contact us via the form on our contact page.
