Artificial Intelligence is becoming increasingly important for small businesses, especially as AI tools are integrated into everyday apps like Microsoft 365 Pro Pilot. According to Microsoft’s latest survey, one-third of SMEs see AI as a top priority, and 71% plan to accelerate their AI investments over the next year.
Although still new, the benefits of AI for SMBs, such as simplifying both common and complex tasks, are already clear. According to a Microsoft survey, 84% of respondents believe AI has a positive impact on their business, and those who regularly use it see a 40% in-product input. The real question is not if tools like Microsoft Co-Pilot can give SMBs a competitive edge, but rather how.
How Does Microsoft 365 Co-Pilot Help Small Businesses Get the Most Out of Their Investment
Get the most from AI tools like Microsoft 365 Co-Pilot. It helps to know what they can do. Microsoft keeps adding new features, but there are already many ways small businesses can use Co-Pilot today.
There are some ways small businesses are using Microsoft Co-Pilot to boost productivity and encourage new ideas:
- Creating an Effortless Experience Across Microsoft 365: Co-Pilot uses Graph Grounding to improve its responses by pulling in extra context extracted from your stored information. It does this by using Microsoft Graph, which connects to your data across Microsoft 365
- Content Creation: Co-Pilot in Word saves time by paraphrasing text, providing further details, or including helpful statistics in your documents
- Using email conversations: Co-Pilot can find emails by topic or form, summarize meetings, create to-do lists, and assist with crafting or editing messages, saving you valuable time.
- Increasing Response Rates for Forms/Surveys/Polls: Canon Co-Pilot suggests follow-ups, such as sending reminders or writing messages, to encourage people to respond.
- Reviewing and summarizing videos: for Teams meetings. Co-Pilot highlights key points adds time markers for topics or speakers, lists tasks, and can search specific topic words or phrases.
- Automating Business Tasks: You can build Co-Pilot extensions or plug-ins to work with data from different sources and targeted searches. Use natural language queries and set up custom prompts based on your data.
- Decreasing manual typing and formula work: Co-Pilot in Excel can use voice prompts to help analyze data, suggest formulas, show insights in charts and pivot tables, and add important data. It can automatically create and calculate formulas for complex spreadsheets based on your instructions.
- Improving content management and data governance: Co-Pilot for restricted SharePoint search lets you turn off organization-wide search and limit enterprise search and Co-Pilot to only the SharePoint sites you specify, no matter which search option you use. Users can still work with files and content they own or have accessed before in Co-Pilot.
- Gating Insights from Employee Feedback: Co-Pilot can record comments and help you add on suggestions using summaries, reports, and analysis from across Microsoft 365 Apps.
- Making budget management easier: Co-Pilot in Planner (review) helps you plan, manage, carry out, and review major projects more smoothly.
- Training employees to write better prompts: Copilot lab helps teams understand what drives successful AI-powered business practices.
- To develop secure applications, Microsoft 365 Copilot can write and analyze code, troubleshoot code, and handle data or security issues. Knowing how to use fonts is important.
This list is just a start. New features and updates are added every month. To learn more about what Co-Pilot can do, take a look at Microsoft’s AI Co-Pilot Success Kit.
How SMBs Can Use Microsoft 365 Co-Pilot To Drive Greater Success
Knowing what the product can do is just the beginning. A recent report on SMB technology adoption found that 77% of SMBs see a lack of knowledge as the main barrier to AI success. Early adoption and ongoing training with tools like Microsoft 365 Co-Pilot can help SMBs stand out.
If you are new to AI and want to get the most from your investment, try Microsoft’s free Co-Pilot training modules. If you’re unsure how Co-Pilot could help your business, take a look at these industry-specific examples
If you work in product-based or supply chain industries like retail, manufacturing, or transportation, Co-Pilot can help you:
- Predict demand changes with greater accuracy based on your sales data.
- Improve delivery routes through analyzing financial and geographical data.
- Monitor weather and world events that impact the supply chain, including situations influencing your materials, carriers, or distribution networks.
- Automatically draft emails to alert and engage partners or customers, reducing the likelihood of disruptions.
- Support customer service through the creation and analysis of support forms, surveys, and polls.
- Generate information on order status, delivery schedules, and shipping options.
For service-based industries like insurance, legal, consulting, or real estate, Microsoft 365 Co-Pilot offers support in several ways:
- Draft review and summarize essential documents based on business and industry data.
- Compiling a deck for marketing campaigns, targeted sales outreach, or other important customer-facing messaging.
- Translate documents, presentations, or sales and marketing collateral into 27+ languages.
- Develop Captivating PowerPoint presentations based on industry data and notable themes.
- Formulate comprehensive project management plans, including automated progress reports.
- Respond to client inquiries more efficiently with AI-powered suggestions.
Microsoft 365 Co-Pilot is more than just a product update; it’s a real gamechanger for SMBs. Microsoft continues to improve it with more language options, new features, and better performance. To stay up to date, check the Microsoft 365 roadmap.
How Partners Can Make the Best Use of This Opportunity
Microsoft 365 Co-Pilot gives resellers and managed service providers a great way to grow their businesses. Partners can boost their earnings by setting up productivity pools, adding business premium features, and offering training to help organizations start using Microsoft 365 Copilot. Partners can deliver important services, such as training users to write better prompts and use AI tools. Partners may also qualify for the Tier 2 Accelerator, which offers a 10.75% rebate above the user’s profit margin. Running SMB workshops and delivering ongoing support can make your services even more valuable and help you build steady revenue. This opportunity enables partners to earn more and take advantage of different incentives and rebates.
Source: How SMBs can use Microsoft 365 Copilot for a competitive advantage
