Microsoft’s recent launch of “Copilot Wave 2” has introduced significant updates and improvements to its AI assistant, including expanded AI capabilities, the power to build autonomous agents and a new AI workspace for teams to collaborate in. While this is not as ground-breaking as the original Copilot release, “Wave 2” offers substantial improvements for businesses across all Microsoft Office applications. We, at IRIS by Argon & Co, have updated our client-facing Copilot training materials in-line with this release and have a few thoughts to offer.

What’s new in Copilot’s Wave 2?

  • Accessible automation agents: Users can now create autonomous Copilot Agents to automate tasks and processes across various platforms including SharePoint and Teams. Accessible through Copilot Studio, Agents can provide immediate value in automating tasks such as updating regular reports or creating frequent documents.
  • New collaboration option: “Copilot Pages” extends the reach of AI using Microsoft Loop’s functionality, allowing users to create spaces for fast, online collaboration, including outputs from Copilot chat.
  • Analytics capability: Copilot now provides a low-code avenue for users to create and execute python code within Microsoft Excel, lowering the bar for business users to perform data science tasks.
  • Enriched narrative creation: Copilot’s Narrative Builder in PowerPoint is a significant improvement, allowing users to generate presentations in line with your company’s branding. However, we view this is an incremental step towards where Microsoft needs to take PowerPoint to create high quality, first-time outputs.
  • AI assisted prioritisation: Outlook’s new “Prioritise my inbox” feature lists emails in order of importance, including a rationale of the prioritisation and including a summary of the email.
  • Enhanced contextual assistance: Microsoft has adapted Copilot’s ability to understand the context of your work, improving the quality of your outputs.

Common mistakes to avoid when rolling out Copilot:

Despite the enhanced functionality of Wave 2, many companies will struggle to realise the full value from Copilot due to these common mistakes:

  1. Underestimating the transformation: automation implies tasks and processes require less effort for similar or better results. Copilot, on the other hand, is a tool that facilitates automation across numerous Microsoft applications, each with their own distinct features and interactions. To fully leverage this potential, training is required to firstly identify the automation potential of a task and then be able to take advantage of that potential.
  2. Not setting clear objectives: Copilot’s range of functionality across several applications often distracts companies from setting clear objectives they want achieve from their roll-out. Whether it be to automate a specific process or improve the performance of a business function, ensure the aims of your Copilot implementation support your overall business strategy.
  3. A lack of strategic targets:Not all processes or business functions are equally suited to automation. It’s important to understand where Copilot will drive the most value and prioritise the roll-out accordingly.
  4. Overlooking foundational Microsoft knowledge: one common feedback from our Copilot training is that users often lack a foundational understanding of Microsoft applications. To better leverage Copilot and access the advanced and powerful features, it is essential to understand core Office apps like Word, Teams and Excel, as well as the more specialised tools like Power Automate and Power Apps.

Wave 2 is an impressive extension of Copilot’s previous capabilities, building upon an already impressive suite of functionality. To continue to be at the forefront of AI, Microsoft will need to continue to improve Copilot’s functionality and ease of use in the core applications including Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook. As AI continues to learn and adapt, at IRIS by Argon & Co we see a clear trajectory towards increased sophistication, integration and business value. IRIS by Argon & Co’s extensive Copilot Training Programme now incorporates Wave 2 functionality and the most recent Copilot features.

Learn more about IRIS by Argon & Co or get in touch below.

Author: James Byrne

Bryan Johnson

Associate Partner

[email protected]

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