Microsoft will expand its Copilot artificial intelligence offering to its Viva suite of employee engagement tools “later this year,” the company announced Thursday.
The Redmond, Wash.-based vendor will also launch its Viva Glint employee engagement data aggregator tool in July. Glint will also have a Copilot function in the future.
“With Copilot, Microsoft Viva takes advantage of next-generation AI to accelerate this new performance equation, where engagement and productivity together lead to better business outcomes and success,” Microsoft 365 Corporate Vice President Kirk Koenigsbauer said in a blog post Thursday.
[RELATED: Microsoft 365 Copilot: 10 Things To Know]
Microsoft To Add Copilot To Viva
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Copilot in Viva is built on the Microsoft 365 Copilot System that marries large language models (LLMs) with Microsoft Graph data.
In March, Microsoft said that Copilot – familiar to programmers who use Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot to assist with finishing lines of code – would soon expand to applications including Teams, Outlook, Word, Excel and Power Platform.
That same month, Microsoft also announced a private preview for Security Copilot to bring generative AI to battling threat actors.
Kelly Yeh, president of Chantilly, Va.-based Microsoft partner Phalanx Technology Group, told CRN in a recent interview that Microsoft AI capabilities have been a topic of conversation with customers captivated by generative AI programs such as ChatGPT – which generates text and even code based on queries asked in natural language – and Dall-E, which generates images based on the same types of queries.
Both programs were made by Microsoft-backed OpenAI.
“People are really interested to hear about what Copilot’s going to do,” Yeh said. “It’d be cool for direct marketing campaigns and things like that – having like a chatbot give some metrics that you put on your website, or you embed a link into an email or something like that. Some sort of drip campaign to see what kind of questions it gets asked and then it can populate, ‘Hey, we’re noticing an uptick in interest in this product line.’”
Copilot In Viva
Once available, users can access Copilot for Viva Goals, Engage, Learning, Topics and the upcoming Glint.
In Viva Goals, Copilot aims to consolidate existing data to improve employee check-ins and guide company leaders through objectives and key results (OKR) creation and goal managing.
Copilot can suggest OKRs based on annual business plans, product strategy papers and other existing Word documents, according to Microsoft. Copilot can then summarize OKR statuses, identify blockers and suggest next steps.
In Viva Engage, Copilot helps company leaders create posts from prompts or trending topics in workplace communities. Users can adjust the tone and length of messages and suggest relevant images. Copilot can analyze engagement metrics, assess sentiment and recommend responses, too, according to Microsoft.
With Copilot in Viva Learning, users receive suggestions for curated learning collections and summaries tailored to roles and needs.
Copilot in Viva Topics gives employees a conversational interface for topics and projects. And Copilot in Answers lets users build questions and answers with citations, references, resources and experts.
Viva Glint, which Microsoft announced last year, will launch in July. Glint will aggregate employee engagement data with behavioral and collaboration data from Viva Insights and Microsoft Graph.
Copilot in Glint, once available, will summarize and analyze employee comments, letting company leaders ask questions for feedback in natural language.
Microsoft’s AI investment should prove an opportunity for partners.
Microsoft Chief Partner Officer Nicole Dezen recently told CRN that AI is “the No. 1 topic with partners right now.”
In a Partner Center post, Microsoft instructs partners to “be sure to reaffirm Microsoft’s commitments to data security and privacy, and to underscore key points of differentiation” when talking to customers about Copilot.
Copilot LLMs aren’t trained on customer tenant data and it automatically inherits security, compliance and privacy policies for Microsoft 365. Microsoft 365 E3, E5, Business Standard and Business Premium will also be part of the licensing requirement for AI capabilities in the future, according to Microsoft.
Although Microsoft hasn’t defined billing for Copilot yet, a clue might be available in how Microsoft bills for GPT-4 in Azure OpenAI Service.LEARN MORE: AI | Cloud Platforms | Cloud Software
Wade Tyler Millward is an associate editor covering cloud computing and the channel partner programs of Microsoft, IBM, Red Hat, Oracle, Salesforce, Citrix and other cloud vendors. He can be reached at [email protected].
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