Our thoughts on the future of digital innovation and the cloud.

 /  Invero

Copilot for Microsoft 365: What You Need to Know Before You Turn It On

If you are looking for a way to boost your productivity, collaboration, and innovation with the help of AI-powered assistants, you may be interested in Copilot for Microsoft 365, Microsoft’s brand name for its AI-powered assistants that can help you with various tasks across different products and services, such as summarizing, searching, and creating content, building apps, managing security, and more. Copilot for M365 uses natural language processing and large language models to understand your questions and requests, and provide you with relevant and contextual responses.

But before you turn on Copilot for M365, there are some things you need to know and consider, such as how to license, buy, and use it, what are the benefits and challenges of adopting it in your organization, and how to prepare your data and environment for it. In this blog post, we will provide you with some insights and tips from the experts at Invero, a Microsoft partner that specializes in helping organizations maximize the value of their investment in Microsoft cloud.

How to license, buy, and use Copilot for M365?

Licensing, buying, and using Copilot for M365 is easy and straightforward. You simply need to have a valid subscription to M365 that qualifies as a prerequisite for Copilot. This includes the following licenses:

  • Microsoft 365 E5
  • Microsoft 365 E3
  • Office 365 E3
  • Office 365 E5
  • Microsoft 365 Business Standard
  • Microsoft 365 Business Premium

Once you have a subscription, you can turn on Copilot for M365 from the M365 admin center, and start using it right away.

In terms of pricing, Copilot for M365 is an add-on to the price you already pay for your M365 subscriptions. The price is generally $30 USD/user/month in addition to the cost of the M365/O365 subscription as a prerequisite license. 

What are the benefits and challenges of adopting Copilot for M365?

Adopting Copilot for M365 can bring many benefits to your organization, such as increased productivity, improved collaboration, and enhanced innovation. By automating routine tasks, providing quick answers to your questions, and helping you discover new insights and opportunities, Copilot for M365 can help you get more done in less time, and focus on what matters most.

However, adopting Copilot for M365 also comes with its own challenges, such as ensuring compliance and governance, managing data privacy and security, and training and upskilling your users. To address these challenges, Microsoft provides a range of tools and resources, such as compliance and governance frameworks, data protection and security controls, and training and education programs.

Invero has developed its own proprietary software that does a deep inspection of every file, folder, SharePoint list and site across a targeted Microsoft 365 tenant to identify any oversharing of items on SharePoint and Teams before deploying Copilot. Oversharing is defined as data that has been (intentionally or even unintentionally) shared with the entire company.

This has become an extremely important topic to be aware of when it comes to M365 Copilot because of the way that this AI assistant accesses all data across your M365 tenant using Microsoft Graph for providing responses to end user prompts. As a result, Copilot could return any data that a user has access to, or that is not tagged with sensitivity labels (using Purview). The issue is that over years of using SharePoint and Teams, companies are unsure of how their data has been shared and in every case that we have investigated, clients have data that has been shared with the entire company without their IT department being aware of it.

Before Copilot, this issue existed, but it was not of high priority to address because people would need to know how to navigate to the data or stumble across it through a SharePoint search. However, with the advent of Copilot and the fact that it uses all data from the tenant in composing its responses, the risk of sensitive data being surfaced to people who shouldn’t have access to it is higher than it was before. This is the risk vector that Invero’s software has been specifically designed to cover off and to provide a detailed report that outlines all data that has been overshared so that clients can remediate the oversharing in key areas before rolling out Copilot to a wide audience.

For more information about our Copilot Readiness Assessment and custom software solution for uncovering oversharing, please visit our listing on Microsoft’s AppSource marketplace.

In addition to identifying oversharing, our Copilot Readiness Assessment evaluates your current state of readiness for deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot and provides a comprehensive document detailing the findings of the readiness assessment, highlighting areas of improvement and recommendations to address before enabling M365 Copilot. 

In conclusion, Copilot for Microsoft 365 is a powerful tool that can help you boost your productivity, collaboration, and innovation. But before you turn it on, you need to know and consider how to license, buy, and use it, what are the benefits and challenges of adopting it in your organization, and how to prepare your data and environment for it. By following the tips and insights from the experts at Invero, you can make the most of Copilot for M365 and realize its full potential.

This post covers just some of the content that was part of a broader episode of The Invero Show that did a deeper dive into Microsoft’s Copilots and Generative AI – Options, Licensing Models, Use Cases and Next Steps. You can watch the full episode by clicking the image below.