Augment your Microsoft Teams capabilities with Copilot for Microsoft 365

AI is being integrated into software products across industries, and Microsoft Teams is no exception: it is fast becoming an intelligent digital workspace. But what does it mean to be truly intelligent?

Top Fortune 500 companies are already using Copilot for Microsoft 365 – Microsoft’s new AI companion – to transform the way they work and make hybrid work even more productive.

This article highlights the features and functionalities of Copilot in Teams and how you, too, can leverage the power of generative AI to maximize value for your organization.

• ALSO READ → 5 things you must know before deploying Copilot for Microsoft 365

Copilot steers new ways of working

When Copilot was introduced in March 2023, it marked the beginning of Teams incorporating intelligence to unlock new possibilities in communication and collaboration.

Copilot for Microsoft 365 is an AI-powered tool designed to transform how we work, combining the power of large language models (LLMs) with your organization’s data to give you the most powerful productivity tool on the planet.

It works alongside other popular Microsoft 365 applications, such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook, to provide enhanced functionality and real-time intelligent assistance.

AI-powered productivity is just a prompt away

Copilot improves work efficiency by significantly reducing the time and effort you need to access, organize and manage information.

Using your own words or selecting a suggested prompt on Teams allows you to quickly locate the information you need to progress through your workday. This is because Copilot uses the power of Microsoft Graph to consolidate data from the internet as well as from your documents, presentations, emails, files, meetings, chats, documents and third-party applications.

For instance, instead of searching through emails, chats, meeting notes, presentations and other documents for a meeting, you can simply ask Copilot. It will locate and summarize everything related to your meeting, saving you valuable time. In addition, you can stay updated on the latest news on a specific topic, summarize project deliverables and achieve much more with ease.

• ALSO READ → Maximize your teams’ productivity with Copilot for Microsoft 365

Making Teams meetings more constructive

Copilot also improves your Teams meeting experience, making it more effective by streamlining and completing common meeting tasks.

Whether you’ve joined late or want to ensure that no detail gets overlooked, Copilot has you covered. It can get you up to speed quickly by capturing unresolved issues or compiling a list of unanswered questions. It can also identify the right people for specific follow-ups or create a pros and cons table for decision-making.

You can also follow an active discussion and create a table of questions asked in the meeting, and their answers. This makes knowledge-sharing easy and lays the foundation for a compilation of frequently asked questions. By asking your own questions or using the Copilot prompts, you can obtain information during a live meeting without interrupting the conversation, or get it afterwards with Intelligent Recap.

Most recently, Microsoft announced the expansion of Copilot in Teams with Copilot in Teams Phone and Copilot in Teams Chat, extending its functionality from meetings to impromptu chats and calls.

Copilot in Teams Phone

Imagine making or receiving a call through your Teams app on any device with Copilot in Teams Phone and getting real-time summaries and insights during your call – whether it’s with someone within or outside your organization.

Copilot can also draft notes for you, highlighting essential details such as names, dates, numbers and tasks – for both Voice over Internet Protocol and public switched telephone network calls.

It can save huge amounts of time by summarizing the call and capturing questions on timing, feedback and next steps – all of which you can send as an immediate follow-up note to confirm actions and next steps, based on your conversation. 

Under Copilot for Teams Phone with NTT DATA Cloud Voice, you can access Copilot through our Operator Connect connectivity and CoPilot Studio through our Azure Communication Services connectivity.

• ALSO READ → How can Operator Connect by NTT DATA help your organization?

Copilot in Teams Chat 

Copilot in Teams Chat helps you stay on top of your conversations by providing quick updates and summarizing essential information across your Teams chat threads. The standout feature? You achieve all of this seamlessly without interrupting your conversation flow or having to scroll endlessly through chats.

To fully understand the potential of Copilot in Teams Chat, think about all the times you’re away from the office or on vacation. During your absence, your team continues to discuss ideas over chat.

Now, rather than having to scroll through everything you missed, you can simply ask Copilot questions to get a quick summary of what you’ve missed, the key ideas that were discussed and a list of items to follow up on.

You can get back into the loop quickly by asking Copilot to create a table of the key ideas and their pros and cons, making it easy to focus on the next steps in a project with your team.

Take the next step with generative AI

Copilot for Microsoft 365 is now being made available more generally to organizations.

NTT DATA invites you to join our focused workshops to explore the nuanced capabilities of Copilot, learn from industry experts and chart your course to the future of collaboration.

We’re closely aligned with the exciting developments that Microsoft is planning for the employee experience (EX) and customer experience (CX) space. This vital intelligence is seamlessly integrated into our workshops, allowing us to push the boundaries of what's possible for GenAI and real-time communications.