Unless you’ve been living under a rock you have undoubtedly heard of Microsoft 365 Copilot and have been waiting on bated breath to get your hands on it.
Then you learned that it was going to cost you $30 per user per month. Okay, that’s hard to swallow for some orgs, but not everyone in your organization needs a license? Right? So, at $1 a day, you might be able to justify it.
Well, last week we got our wish and Microsoft 365 Copilot became generally available… However, it turns out you’ll need to purchase at least 300 seats. That’s potentially cost-prohibitive for some organizations. I wouldn’t give up hope yet though, let the noise die down, let Microsoft wrap its arms around the resource requirements and I imagine we’ll see the cost and minimum seat requirements come down. Plus, Microsoft has already announced Microsoft 365 Copilot for small and medium businesses. There’s hope, just be patient.
But what if you are impatient like me?? I hear you, and the truth of the matter is, that you probably aren’t going to license everyone in your organization for Microsoft 365 Copilot anyway? So, what do you do for those employees that don’t have Microsoft 365 Copilot?
You are in luck! Thanks to Azure OpenAI you can start creating powerful Generative AI solutions today in Microsoft 365 without any custom development for a fraction of the price of a Microsoft 365 Copilot license. Below are 5 solutions that immediately come to mind.
Create a ChatGPT bot using Power Virtual Agents
Using Power Virtual Agents you can set up a bot in minutes that communicates with ChatGPT in Azure OpenAI to create a ChatGPT bot for your users that is safe, and secure.
Of course, if you have a developer handy you can create your own custom bots that also leverage Azure OpenAI.
Create a ChatGPT bot using Power Virtual Agents to answer questions from your organization’s documents
But what if you want the ChatGPT bot to respond to your specific company information? No problem! You can use Azure OpenAI on your data and prompt your bot to respond based on your organization’s data.
Analyze documents as they are uploaded to a SharePoint Document Library
One of the simplest things you can do with Azure OpenAI today is to create a Power Automate Workflow that uses Azure OpenAI to take some action on documents as they get uploaded to a Document Library. Using either the HTTP Action or AI Builder Actions you can use Azure OpenAI to do analyze your documents to:
- Update a field in the Document Library with the Summary, key takeaways, or sentiment.
- Alert you to PII or other sensitive information contained in the document.
- Extract critical meta-data and populate other fields in the library.
- Translate the content to other languages.
- And so much more…
Watch for critical support emails
This was a fun demo I wrote, but it could have some real-world use cases. You can create a Power Automate flow that watches a Support Inbox, and when an email is received use can use Azure OpenAI to analyse the email and act based on the content. A potential flow might be:
- Analyze the sentiment of the email to see if the sender is angry or upset.
- Use Azure OpenAI to generate an Adaptive Card with details about the email extracted by Azure OpenAI including, name, email, summary of the complaint, and a link to the email.
- Post the Adaptive Card in Teams so that the appropriate people are notified and can take action immediately.
Use a bot to create and assign tasks
The M365 Chat Copilot is one of the most valuable features of Microsoft Copilot, but one thing it will not do is act for you. It’s designed to return information only. Yes, you can extend this functionality using a searched-based Teams Message Extension, but again, what do we do for those people who don’t have Copilot?
Another easy-to-implement solution that harnesses the power of Azure OpenAI is to create a topic for your Power Virtual Agent for creating tasks. Let’s say you get an email that you need to take action on, or someone sends you a message in Teams asking you to do something? Within minutes you can create the following workflow in Power Virtual Agents:
- Tell the bot to create a task and paste in the text of the message/email that was sent to you
- Use Power Automate and Azure OpenAI to extract the details of the task including: Title, Description, Due Date, Urgency
- Create a Planner or ToDo task using the extracted details
- Ta Da – That’s really all there is to it.
Now you can easily create tasks without having to switch applications or lose your train of thought… wait, what were we talking about again?
Getting Started
To get started with Azure OpenAI, make sure you’ve signed up for an Azure account. If you don’t already have an account you can get $200 in Azure credits to help get you started. After you have your Azure account, sign up for Azure OpenAI.
After you have Azure OpenAI be sure to go to the Azure AI Studio and play around. It’s super easy to get started creating Deployments and getting code samples directly from Azure AI Studio.
But what if you really love those cool Microsoft 365 Copilots in Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and Outlook? Do you just have to give up on the dream of Office integrations? Not at all! Grab your friendly developer and take a look at creating an Office Add-In that uses Azure OpenAI. Using Office Add-Ins you can add ribbon buttons and task panes to your Office Web clients that utilize Azure OpenAI to bring the power of Generative AI to Office.
What are you waiting for?
The possibilities are endless when you embrace Generative AI in Microsoft 365. Don’t wait for Microsoft 365 Copilot to take advantage of the technological advances available to you today!
I’d love to hear from you! What cool solutions have you built in Microsoft 365 using Generative AI?
What an exciting time for a geek to be alive. 😊