Firstly, I’d like to thank everyone who came along to my Copilot and AI sessions at enable 2024 in June. It was amazing to see so many businesses open minded about the future of AI and keen to find out how it could impact their futures.
The biggest question for anyone attended, and indeed anyone that has considered using Copilot, is what to do next? Can Copilot really live up to its own hype and can it really make a difference to your business right now? Well, it my honest opinion, that depends very much on you.
I can’t stress enough that Copilot is still in its infancy. It’s currently nowhere near what I’m sure it will become and that means that some elements of the product have failed to impress me so far. However, as I showed in my presentations at enable, there are some fantastic features too which are genuinely saving me and my team days’ worth of work every single month. As my primary role focused on marketing, a lot of our time saving is coming from the Copilot functionality in Word, where we’ve been able to create marketing content quickly and easily and to a standard that needs limited human intervention. We are also experimenting heavily with a combination of meeting transcription in Microsoft Teams and the Copilot summarisation capabilities of Copilot in Word. This has huge potential and the results so far have been really promising.
The key to our success with Copilot so far has been focus and commitment. I have personally spent the time to test a variety of AI tools, especially Copilot and ChatGPT, honing my skills and getting more useful output each and every time I use them. The potential of AI tools in general is huge, but none of them (in my experience) will solve problems without learning how to get the best from them. There are numerous courses online to help you learn about AI and, if you’re interested, I’m happy to share the courses I’ve been on so far too.
At enable 2024 I also invited people to sign up to our AI Roundtable discussions, which I plan to start after summer (once the holidays are over!) to give interested parties and chance to share their own experiences, challenges and successes of using AI tools. I’m hopeful that we can find a group of like minded people and together share some great example of AI usage as we go on this journey. If you haven’t already signed up, just let me know and I’ll add you to the list.
So, what to do next?
If you have the interest and the time, I would strongly advise that you start you AI journey as soon as possible, whether that’s with ChatGPT, Copilot or any AI tool that interests you. The speed that AI will move and impact businesses is hard predict, but we do expect that it will be rapid. If you don’t have the time (or the interest) then find someone in your organisation that does, and allow them to learn, test and experiment. Even in these early stages I’m convinced that almost every business can save hours (and maybe days) every month with AI tools.
If you are interested in purchasing Copilot then please reach out to your account manager but if you have any questions, or would like some advice, please feel free to drop me an email on pdenham@thehbpgroup.co.uk
Thanks,
Phil
P.S. I didn’t even use AI to write this! 😊