Is Microsoft Copilot right for you?

Microsoft Copilot is being pushed as the next big thing for businesses but is it right for your business?

Determining if Microsoft Copilot is right for your organisation depends on various factors such as your company’s size, budget, workflow complexity and specific needs. For housing providers and companies that rely heavily on Microsoft 365 applications, Copilot could be a valuable asset. It has the potential to streamline tasks, improve productivity and leverage AI-powered assistance. However, careful consideration of its features, costs and potential benefits is essential to make an informed decision tailored to your business requirements.

What is Copilot?

Copilot is an AI-powered assistant integrated into Microsoft 365 applications. It provides intelligent suggestions and assistance to users, helping streamline tasks, improve productivity and enhance collaboration. By leveraging natural language processing and machine learning, Copilot offers personalised support tailored to individual needs within the Microsoft ecosystem.

Key features of Copilot

AI-powered assistance: Copilot harnesses advanced AI algorithms to provide intelligent support across various applications including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams.
Enhanced collaboration: With Copilot, teams can collaborate more effectively by generating draft documents, summarising emails and facilitating communication within Microsoft 365 applications.
Customisable solutions: Copilot offers bespoke solutions for different business needs, including finance, sales and customer service. Whether you require assistance with data analysis, customer engagement or security, Copilot has you covered.
Seamless integration: Copilot seamlessly integrates with Microsoft 365 applications, ensuring a smooth user experience across different devices and platforms.

Copilot works by analysing user interactions and data within Microsoft 365 applications, then leveraging AI algorithms to generate relevant suggestions and assistance in real-time. It uses natural language processing to understand users’ queries and context, providing intelligent recommendations to streamline tasks and improve productivity.

How can Copilot help you?

Copilot in Word

Draft policy documents: When you need to create comprehensive policy documents, Copilot can help draft these based on existing data and notes, ensuring consistency and saving time. This is particularly useful for housing providers that need to maintain up-to-date policies on tenants’ rights, maintenance procedures and safety regulations.
Report writing: Generate reports on housing conditions, tenant feedback or maintenance schedules with AI assistance to ensure thoroughness and accuracy. Copilot can help structure these reports, analyse data and even suggest improvements to ensure that all necessary details are covered, making the reporting process more efficient.
Document standardisation: Ensure all documents adhere to the tone and style required by your organisation. With automated adjustments and suggestions from Copilot, you can maintain a consistent and professional tone across all communications, whether drafting tenancy agreements, tenant notices or maintenance guidelines.
Translation services: In the housing sector, where residents may speak different languages, Copilot can automatically translate documents, ensuring that important information is accessible to all tenants. This feature helps housing providers communicate more effectively with non-English speaking residents, reducing misunderstandings and fostering inclusivity.
Sentiment analysis: When drafting tenant communications or reports, Copilot can analyse the sentiment of the text, helping you to gauge how your message might be received. This is particularly useful when addressing sensitive issues, such as rent increases or eviction notices, ensuring that your tone is appropriate and empathetic.
Tone of voice adjustments: Tailor the tone of your documents to suit different situations. For instance, Copilot can help you adjust the tone of a tenant newsletter to be more friendly and approachable or modify a policy document to be more formal and authoritative. This ensures that your communication resonates effectively with your audience, whether it’s a casual update or a critical notice.

Copilot in Excel

With the huge volume of asset information, repairs history and tenant profiles, analysing and reaching conclusions for decision-making has never been more important.

Data visualisation: Use the data in your worksheets to generate charts and graphs that visually represent trends and patterns in tenant demographics, maintenance requests or financial performance.
Scenario analysis: Evaluate the impact of different variables, such as rent adjustments or maintenance costs, on your financial models or business forecasts with Copilot’s tools and techniques.
Automate repetitive tasks: Streamline Excel processes by automating repetitive tasks such as data entry, report generation and compliance checks, saving time and reducing errors.
Enhanced data insights with Power BI integration: Leverage Copilot’s integration with Microsoft Power BI to elevate your data analysis and visualisation capabilities. With Copilot’s assistance, you can effortlessly pull complex datasets from Excel into Power BI, where advanced AI-driven features can generate deeper insights.

Copilot in PowerPoint

Presentation creation: Create professional presentations for board meetings or stakeholder updates by integrating content from Word documents and Excel sheets, complete with relevant stock photos and design elements.
Speaker notes and interactive elements: Generate speaker notes for additional context or talking points and include interactive elements such as polls or surveys to engage your audience and gather feedback.
Visual storytelling: Enhance your presentations with AI-suggested layouts and graphics to effectively communicate your message about new projects, community initiatives or financial performance.

Copilot in Outlook

Email summarisation: Summarise emails missed during absences and flag important items, ensuring you stay on top of critical communications.
Drafting important communications: Create emails for sensitive matters such as rent-increase notifications or policy changes, with suggestions for appropriate wording and tone.
Organise your inbox: Optimise your inbox management with suggestions for filters, folders or rules to automatically categorise and prioritise incoming emails.

Copilot in Teams

Meeting scheduling and summaries: Schedule team meetings and suggest times that work for everyone by checking availability. Summarise key points from meetings and share them with your team.
Polls and surveys: Create polls to gather input on decisions or surveys to collect feedback on projects or tenant feedback for improved engagement, ensuring you capture valuable insights from your teams.
Collaboration tools: Facilitate better collaboration via tools that help generate draft documents and communicate efficiently within your teams.

Copilot in Dynamics

Boosted efficiency: Automate routine tasks such as data entry and report generation, freeing up time for strategic work. Copilot helps reduce response times and speeds up decision-making by providing quick access to relevant information.
Better decision-making: Leverage AI-driven insights to identify trends and patterns, enabling more informed decisions. Copilot can also simulate scenarios to predict outcomes and guide strategic planning.
Enhanced customer service: Copilot delivers personalised recommendations and solutions, improving customer interactions. It also shortens resolution times by providing agents with instant access to key information.
Improved collaboration: Facilitates knowledge sharing and best-practice suggestions across teams. It also supports seamless communication between departments, ensuring alignment on goals.

By using Copilot in Dynamics, Microsoft’s own customer service and support team saw significant improvements in its day-to-day operations. Response times became nine per cent faster and the time it took to close cases fell by around eight per cent. Even better, the time it took to find solutions decreased by 13 per cent and agents could resolve 13 per cent more cases on their own.

Pricing and availability

Copilot is available for an annual subscription fee of £24.70 per user per month. This pricing includes access to all features and updates, with no hidden costs or additional fees.

Your free Copilot assessment with Nexus

Before diving into an implementation of Copilot for Microsoft 365, it’s crucial for housing providers to assess their readiness and ensure a smooth integration of this powerful AI solution. Nexus is offering all Housing Technology readers a free ‘Copilot for Microsoft 365 Readiness Assessment’, featuring a comprehensive evaluation conducted by experienced Microsoft professionals.

We’ll assess your organisation’s readiness across various aspects, including the Microsoft 365 platform and infrastructure, licensing alignment, and data security and compliance measures.

Request our free Copilot assessment:

This assessment not only ensures that your organisation is fully prepared to leverage Copilot effectively but also addresses any potential security and data governance concerns upfront.

With our guidance and support following the evaluation, you can confidently move forward with implementing Copilot, knowing that you’re making the most of this innovative AI solution while safeguarding your data and maintaining compliance.

Don’t miss this opportunity to maximise the benefits of Copilot for Microsoft 365 – start with our free assessment today. Contact Nexus on 01392 205095 or email hello@nexusos.co.uk.

John Brett is the operations director at Nexus Open Systems.