"With Copilots, we are making the age of AI real for people and businesses everywhere."
That proved the headline statement in Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s opening remarks during an earnings call with investors and analysts yesterday.
He continued: "We are rapidly infusing AI across every layer of the tech stack and for every role of the business process to drive productivity gains for our customers."
In making these statements, Nadella wants to spread the message that a Copilot should be everywhere. It should run through Office 365, end-to-end business applications, and at-home consumer applications.
That’s a message for business leaders. Yet, Nadella also wishes to set new expectations for the consumer that a Copilot should be there in whatever they want to achieve – whether that’s paying a bill at home or talking to a customer at work.
In this sense, Microsoft is forging "a new life-to-business continuum", as Liz Miller, VP & Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, puts it. She continued:
It’s a journey to change the mindset and expectation of every user, not just establishing a baseline for a business user.
That puts pressure on businesses to build an AI strategy, considering how it will help people, customer, and business outcomes. After all, people don’t view AI as just a fun toy anymore.
Which Businesses Will and Won’t Succeed In a World of Copilots?
Organizations that will have less success with Copilot are those that consider it a plug-in for individual business functions.
For instance, a sales team that thinks of Sales Copilot as another micro-solution - alongside several sales enablement, performance management, and acceleration tools – will extract minimal value.
Copilot requires a different approach. To underline why, consider Viva Sales – which became an incredibly popular tool amongst sellers last year and a big success story for Microsoft.
Why did it garner such success? Because it doesn’t take sellers outside of the environment where they want to work – aka. Outlook.
Now, Viva Sales is part of Copilot – and available to employees outside the function.
So, if marketing or service personnel want to leverage that sales insight, they may do so in the panel in which they work.
Eventually, Microsoft will pull all this together. While it's currently introducing all these individual Copilots – including service, sales, marketing, field service, etc. – it will begin to automate and support cross-function workflows.
During the earnings call, Nadella shared another cross-function use case where marketing teams can use Copilot to leverage service data.
