EP 61: Copilot within Microsoft Teams

Transcript for this Episode:

INTRODUCTION VOICEOVER: Dive into the world of innovation with us as we unravel the challenges, breakthroughs, and latest trends that are shaping our digital landscape. This is Tech UNMUTED, your guide to the tech revolution.

SANTI: Welcome to another episode of Tech UNMUTED. Terry, today we're going to do what exactly?

TERRY: Today we're going to talk about how we leverage Copilot within Microsoft Teams. Everybody here is Copilot. We've talked about Teams multiple times. We've done Copilot webinars and everything. I went to a Microsoft conference a month ago, and it was their Converge Communication Conference that they held on campus, and every other word was Copilot. We talked about Teams Rooms, Teams Phone, Contact Center, the coming Queues app. Don't tell anybody about that.

Part of what they talked about, everything had Copilot. Finally, at the end, they said, you've heard Copilot from every person that's been up here. Here at Microsoft, regardless of the division you're in, Copilot is everything we're talking about.

SANTI: I got to tell you, Terry, I've been using it now for a while. I've been using ChatGPT for even longer. They're different because Copilot, it's grounded in your corporate data. It ties in with your apps. It's really nice what they've done with Copilot, honestly. My two favorite applications for Copilot is Excel. Just because, honestly, and I get it, you have to create a table of the cells that you want to analyze. It's not a big deal. Man, the formulas that usually you'll spend hours trying to figure out, what's the best format to use for this outcome? Copilot nails it every single time. I love it. My second and most used case for Copilot, it's Teams.

TERRY: Yes, it really is. I use it in Word all the time. Because I have to write some technical documentation. I have to write job descriptions, things like that I've got a high level. "Hey, this is what I'm thinking, but I don't want to write all the words." "Hey, Copilot, go write this for me." I use it in Word all the time, but you're right. The one I use it most often in is Microsoft Teams.

SANTI: It's Teams because, so listen, I love two things about it. When you're in a meeting and you're 10 minutes from the meeting wrapping up, and Copilot pops up and says, "Hey, you want me to summarize this for you?" "Is there something you need me to do now while we're getting close to the end of the meeting?" I've used it on a couple of occasions. I guess that's good when you're on time for meeting. The problem is sometimes I'm double booked or I can't get to a meeting on time. I already missed 15 minutes or so. What I do is I'll ask Copilot, "Hey, do me a favor. Can you just get me caught up so I know what's going on?"

TERRY: Exactly. I'll show you here in a few minutes.

SANTI: Then I'll know.

TERRY: Yes, I'm going to do a little click-through demo that I've got from Microsoft that it actually shows exactly that. It's great. I've used it many times because I get double and triple booked every day. I can go in and tell Copilot, "Hey, catch me up," and I'm not having to take somebody off of their concentration of the meeting. Because it may be three or four, and I can message somebody on the side and say, "Hey, what did I miss?" Now they're not paying attention, I'm not paying attention, and I've really disrupted the meeting. Copilot lets us not have to do that anymore.

SANTI: Yes. I got to tell you, right now, Copilot is great as it is, but it's going to get better.

TERRY: Oh, yes.

SANTI: I know for a fact, right now it's all, let's call it post-call. Right now, a lot of things that happen post-call. It'll read the transcripts and it'll summarize, or it'll make recommendations, it'll bring you up to speed. That's great. I know for a fact that--

TERRY: That's during the call too, but it'll only bring you up to speed of what it has transcribed already.

SANTI: That's correct. I know that pretty soon there'll be some type of announcement made about some enhancements to that, where it'll be listening to calls, especially the PSTN calls. Those are going to be awesome. To think about that. You can have somebody who's dialed in to your meeting and it'll be able to listen to that. That's going to come, it's a matter of time. I cannot wait for that autonomous behavior that I've talked about for a while now on other episodes. I'm starting to see that. I was just on a call with a technology vendor of ours, and they gave me a peek under the hood as to some of the autonomous behavior that they're developing in their AI platforms.

I'm like, yes, it is closer, but it is closer than we think. This is going to happen fast. I just can't wait. It's exciting to be in IT right now.

TERRY: The things that are going to happen between now and the end of the year are just going to be changing. It's going to be changing to the industry.

SANTI: It is. I can't wait. Tell me, what's this click-through you have? I don't think I've seen it before.

TERRY: Hang on a second. Let me pull it up.

SANTI: I'm curious now.

TERRY: Yes, it's actually just what we were just talking about. Let me share this screen. All right. Just a good old Microsoft background. Everybody is familiar with it.

SANTI: Yes, they are.

TERRY: Look here, I've got Teams running. I'm in this meeting, a supplier sync meeting, but I'm already an hour late. Now, it is a two-and-a-half hour meeting, so I'm a half hour late. I'm sorry. I'm a half hour late. It's a two-and-a-half hour meeting. I'm going to join that meeting. When I join the meeting, it's actually put me in here, everybody's in, they're talking. Just like you and I said, I'm going to go open Copilot, and I'm going to ask it. Recap the meeting so far.

SANTI: Absolutely.

TERRY: It has broken down for me the four key topics that really have been covered already. Supply chain breakdown and what happened there. It actually also has these little numbers next to it, one, two, three, four. You can click those, and it'll take you to where it was set.

SANTI: The timeline.

TERRY: It'll bring you to the timeline. I can then say, "Hey, suggest some follow-up questions while I've been away, so that when I start talking, I'm actually asking questions that are to the right person, and make it seem like I've read all of the transcript and caught up completely."

SANTI: You know what? I've never seen that button before, and I think it's fantastic. I didn't know that.

TERRY: It'll say, "Hey, can I ask a question?" The impact of the supply chain breakdown on the customers and the delivery schedule. Irvin, Christy, I'm actually calling people out specifically, how many customers are affected by the late arrival, and how much delay are we expecting to fulfill it? It's told me, ask these two people these specific questions. I'm not putting them on the spot, but I know who talked about it previously, and I know what to ask to get me the data to make sure I'm ready and can function the rest of this, the additional two hours that's left in this meeting at my peak performance. Same thing here. This says, talk to Lee. Ask Lee for context on these two. It's really neat. Then when I leave the meeting, so we're done, the meeting's all over.

Then I can go, and I'm going to go over here to my chats, and within the chat, I can go to the recap of the meeting. We've all seen this. We've seen the recap. It shows the picture, tells when people spoke. Really good set of meeting notes. I can go over here to the AI meeting notes, and it shows me, "Hey, here's what Lee and Christy and them have said," and it gives me their information here. Then let's go look at the mentions, and it tells me where people were mentioned. "Hey, Lee was mentioned here. Lee Gu was mentioned here. It was where they were thanking them and going forward," and then I can go to the transcript button.

SANTI: Traditional transcript. That's right.

TERRY: The full transcript, exactly. We can scroll through that, but the really neat thing is to go up here and select this Copilot button. Now I'm in Copilot, and I had all these AI notes and everything, but I can actually go to Copilot, and I can type in here, "Well, what decisions were made during this meeting?" Copilot is going to go, and it's going to think about the decisions that were made, and it's going to tell me what decisions were made, the decision to brainstorm in a whiteboard on how to recall these parts. To prioritize Lee's allocation of resources. To stay proactive and communicate. Really, it's given me those decisions. Then I can say, "Well, list me all the action items that we have to take." Because obviously, we've got action items and they're similar. It's those action items and it tells me who's responsible for them.

We said, Miriam and Lee, we're going to take care of this action item, and Christy is going to do this one. Diego is going to do this one. It really gives me all of that information in Copilot.

SANTI: It's fantastic.

TERRY: Yes, that's what I wanted to show is just to show-- that's the high level of the basic stuff that Copilot is letting us do.

SANTI: This isn't team specifically. This is why I love Copilot. Because here's what it is. We all know Teams is becoming the true hub for business.

TERRY: It is.

SANTI: Everything's happening there. Collaboration is happening there, file sharing. By the way, I don't know about you, but my e-mails are down to almost nothing. It took a while to get people. It's a cultural shift.

TERRY: My internal e-mails.

SANTI: Internal, correct.

TERRY: I get a ton of external.

SANTI: Sure. The internal e-mails because it's a cultural shift. They start to do more in Teams, less in e-mail. It's so much easier to find that attachment or that file.

TERRY: It is.

SANTI: Anyway.

TERRY: Hey, being able to go into my Teams in the morning. When I get in first thing in the morning, the first thing I do is I open Teams. Even before Outlook opens, I go into Teams and say, "Summarize my mailbox." Teams will go and summarize in Copilot, in Teams, it'll summarize my inbox for me. Let me know, "Hey, this came in as a high-priority thing. This is something that we think you might be interested in addressing quickly."

SANTI: That's great.

TERRY: It helps me identify. If I've got 50 e-mails when I first come in the morning, it'll tell me the five or 10 that I need to address quicker. Then I can go through all my e-mails. That's really nice.

SANTI: I was able to create a Power Automate within Teams to do two things. I get an alert if somebody asks me in an e-mail. If somebody writes an e-mail and tags me, I get an alert that, "Hey, there's an e-mail that you were tagged on." I have another one that tells me that I was added to an event, a scheduled event, and so my Teams will give me an alert. "Hey, in Outlook, you have an event that somebody just added you to." Those are the two Power Automates I built because I spent so much time in Teams, I forget about Outlook sometimes.

Having the notification pop up and say, "Hey, you got to take a look at this," helps me. What you described even better because I can just go to Copilot and say, "Hey, not only am I going to know about these two little Power Automates that I created in Teams but tell me what else is happening in that inbox that I need to know about."

TERRY: Summarize my inbox for me.

SANTI: I'm doing that tomorrow morning. [laughs]

TERRY: Yes, it'll help you just be better prepared for your day. It's a great little feature. These are just things that it'll do within the Teams application. Copilot is so vast, and we've talked about it before. You've got Teams Premium and then you've got Copilot. Copilot, it's $30 a month and you have to pay for a year, at least right now. That is feedback that I know all of us as providers and users of Copilot have given to Microsoft. "Hey, we really prefer this be monthly, not annual." Because you have to pay, it's annual on an annual. It's not annual on a monthly. That's the one thing about the Copilot licensing.

You can do the Teams Premium and that's only minimal. It's like a third of that cost.

SANTI: It's like $10 that you add on.

TERRY: Yes, it's something like that. It gives you a few of the features, just to recap, but it is AI recap.

SANTI: It is AI recap.

TERRY: It's going to have a lot more features coming in the near future.

SANTI: I hear.

TERRY: Yes, I shushed when we were talking. The QS app is something that Microsoft is in late beta, early adopter, so it's not launched to a lot of people yet. I've seen bits and pieces of it and it truly, everybody has said, "Oh, you need a small contact center, even if you only have five or 10 people, because you don't get any visibility in Teams." That's true today.

SANTI: Yes, it's coming.

TERRY: Here in, I don't know, three, four months, before the end of the year probably.

SANTI: I think so, yes.

TERRY: It'll be able to-- I think they're going to include it in the Teams Premium. If they do, if you've got five people or 10 people and you just want visibility, you want to be able to whisper, barge, monitor. It's all going to be there.

SANTI: $10 per month for per user, yes.

TERRY: For $10 a month, yes.

SANTI: Yes, and by the way, we should absolutely do a podcast as soon as the QS app is out, we'll do it.

TERRY: As soon as it's out, we'll definitely do it.

SANTI: We'll do it. People know Fusion Connect as a communications company. We've been doing this for a few decades now. A lot of times people don't think about Fusion Connect as a Microsoft shop.

TERRY: We are.

SANTI: We are. We're absolutely a cloud solution provider for Microsoft. They can come get these licenses from us. They can actually even, they want to transfer the provider on record. They can do that with us. We can actually give them one bill for not just the calling and the collaboration stuff, but for the licensing stuff as well. That's a big plus. When they do that, one of the value adds is for tier one support for that initial call, they don't have to call Microsoft. We can take care of it for them.

TERRY: They can't call Microsoft otherwise, but even if they get it directly from Microsoft, there's no phone number. You send an email, and you get a response in three to five days. It's because Microsoft is this huge entity and to them, regardless of how big you may be in your personal industry, you're not that big to Microsoft, but to us and to providers, you're a valued customer.

SANTI: Yes, absolutely.

TERRY: Yes, and we can do that. We actually have licensing experts on staff that'll sit down with you and go through your licensing. They'll help you evaluate when your contact's up, help make recommendations. "Hey, you've got an E3 with these four add-ons, it's cheaper to do an E5," and you get all the add-ons. Build it.

SANTI: Help you true up or true down.

TERRY: True up or true down, do it annually. It's really--

SANTI: Yes, it's a good service.

TERRY: It's a good service. We've got a podcast that's either just finished or is coming up where we talk to our licensing, one of our licensing specialists, Mary Claire.

SANTI: She's a rock star.

TERRY: She is, she's a rock star.

SANTI: She's an absolute rock star.

TERRY: Yes, we do a full podcast about licensing. Make sure if--

SANTI: Tune in, subscribe.

TERRY: Yes, subscribe.

SANTI: Subscribe, then you're not going to miss them.

TERRY: That's important is to know that we as a partner are able to do that for you. We're able to single, to unify your bill. We're going to get you the best results. You're going to be able to call us for support. We can support your phone calls from end to end. A lot of people don't realize that is on Teams, because we're an Operator Connect provider, we literally can take your call from where you place it on your computer all the way to where it terminates. Microsoft works with us and will validate the call throughout the extent of it. Whereas if somebody is doing direct routing or they've got the little snap-in tools that go in Teams that's not really the Teams dollar, those as soon as it's handed off beyond that vendor's network, it's invisible to them. Microsoft won't evaluate it because they didn't certify with them.

SANTI: That's right. In fact, the fact that we are an Operator Connect operator, we actually have a shared SLA with Microsoft.

TERRY: Yes, we do.

SANTI: There is no finger pointing. We will both, meaning Fusion Connect, Microsoft, work together to solve customers' issues. Honestly, it's such a great all-around approach and solution. I love talking about it, to be honest with you.

TERRY: Oh, yes.

SANTI: Listen, one of the things just to close, that people need to think about is Copilot is not something you want to just turn on. There is some strategy, some little bit of light work that needs to take place. One of the things that we can help with--

TERRY: We'll help you with that.

SANTI: There you go. It's like a Copilot readiness. We can help you figure that out. I just want to make sure people knew that because we get so excited with the calling and the collaboration because that's like the blood of our company and of our customers. You got to be able to communicate and collaborate. Then we can support so many other things around that, and this is one of them, Copilot being one of them.

TERRY: You have to do that readiness assessment, and we do it with Microsoft. Microsoft actually performs it and then we evaluate it and work with you to make recommendations. I've sat down, I can't tell you with how many CIOs and CTOs, including ours, before we deployed Copilot, I sat down with our CIO and reviewed with him the security policies that Copilot requires and the fact-- well, not that it requires, but that should be put in place.

SANTI: Recommended.

TERRY: Also, fear, uncertainty, and doubt, FUD, everybody calls it. It's that fear and uncertainty of what does Copilot get to see? Is it going to look at everything on my network? As long as you're implementing it with the proper security you've done file tagging for your files to make sure you have confidentiality set and personal files, and that you've done security groups. There are steps in there, but as long as you do those, you can have Copilot see as much or as little as you want it to build off of. You can anchor it down to just a folder on a SharePoint and only give it access to that. That made him and it's made the other CIOs and CTOs I've talked to much more comfortable knowing that they control what Copilot sees.

SANTI: That's correct.

TERRY: It's not just out there crawling through their network.

SANTI: I tell people, Copilot will see what you allow the user to see. Whatever the user has access to, Copilot will be able to see. As long as you have your group policies in place and everything else, yes, it's going to see what the user is able to see anyway. It's not going to go beyond that. Anyway, listen, I hate coming to an end because I just love talking about this stuff.

TERRY: I know.

SANTI: We have to close this podcast. Terry, we got to bring it to a close. Let's bring it to a close.

TERRY: All right.

SANTI: Listen, folks, Teams and Copilot, marriage made in heaven. [laughs]

TERRY: Peanut butter and jelly.

SANTI: Peanut butter and jelly. It is fantastic. If you haven't tried it, you should. If you're towing the water, try the Teams premium approach because it's monthly and it's only $10. Then if you're like, "Wow," I'm seeing where this is going and you want to try it, then you can look at the full Copilot M365 license. If you want to learn more about what we can do for you can go to fusionconnect.com and look at all the Microsoft-related services. They're all on there. Everything from enabling Teams to make phone calls. That's crazy when you think about it.

TERRY: I know.

SANTI: Make and receive phone calls to even adding Copilot to the mix. It's all on there. Feel free to reach out. Feel free to look out for Terry and myself on LinkedIn. We're always willing to connect there. Until next time, folks, remember this, stay curious, stay connected.

TERRY: Thanks, everyone.

CLOSING VOICEOVER: Thanks for diving into the tech world with us today. Don't forget to subscribe and hit the bell icon to never miss an episode of Tech UNMUTED. Stay curious, stay connected.

Episode Credits:

Produced by: Fusion Connect