Copilot: What you do &
don't know:
The productivity revolution

Hi guys, welcome to episode four of Copilot or the Copilot the enforced way series that we've got built at the moment. This one really is talking about the productivity revolution. What does Copilot really mean for businesses, what it was previously and what it is now. I think it's safe to say kind of Copilot changes for everyone and everyone has their own opinion on what AI has to offer for their business or industry they're in.

Why co-op why Copilot transforms everyday work and why MSPs must secure it and I think it's a conversation on a topic that we've been trying to have or we've been having for the past 6 to 12 months now but this year really is the big drive for 2026 I think AI is at the forefront of people's minds how do we go about managing and protecting data Microsoft as part of Microsoft Ignite released some really cool features around Copilot and securing it further with the likes of data loss prevention policies But this is an opportunity for us to really kind of do a bit of a deep dive into its revolution.

Where has it come from? Where is it going now? And I'd love to get some insight from you guys, drop a message to inforcer, and let's have some opinions, some conversations around where AI really is going. So, without further ado, let's talk about what it's like a week in and a week without Copilot. How does it actually fit with us at this point and during this day? So, what it would be for me outside of Copilot is endless meetings or scad notes.

Unless I've got someone in writing minutes of the meeting for me. Whatever I jot down, when I remember to jot down, it's scattered. It's all over the place. Inbox overload. Really good and common scenario that most people see delayed responses. We've got so much information coming in. It's taking us a long time to go through it.

If you work in construction industry, you're receiving hundreds of emails a day from all sorts of different competitors, conversations, areas of industry standards, different people coming in from gas, boilers, all sorts of people that just mean that we are in a position where constantly receiving tons of emails and it's becoming an overload. Lost action items and follow-ups is probably the biggest bug bear that most people think. And repetitive formatting. And both of those actions are things that are common mistakes we end up making because we've got too much going on.

And with Copilot, what does that change and how does that change that format? Well, the answers automatic meeting summaries. You know, we've got whether you're using the Copilot license or you're using the team's premium license, the ability to summarize your events and your information, understand what's being put through, how it all works at present is really crucial for us to be able to deliver the best quality of our job that we can give. So having those drafted summaries, what's coming on really helps to make things seamless for us.

The other one's drafted emails in seconds. You know, we can go to Copilot and say, "Please draft me an email in response to this message. Please provide the following bullet points. It's going to go ahead and create that with our prompts that we've requested. You know, we can't we're no longer in a position where we're sending a Google request of how many you know, what's the latest news on BBC. It's you know, providing the latest news on BBC with the following information.

It's getting to the point where we're providing more of a conversational context or context of conversations with Copilot or with any AI for that matter. But drafting emails in seconds helps massively. And I always add the same point and I say it to everyone. You can get it to do the bulk of the email that's being drafted, but you need to personalize it. And that's the most important part around Copilot management. And when we're using Copilot or AI generally to kind of streamline services, we have to personalize the content that's in there because sometimes it's inaccurate, sometimes it's too structured and we need it a bit more unstructured depending on who we're talking to.

Other areas of improvement, slides built from notes. The ability to take all the notes from a team summary and then stick it straight into a PowerPoint and say, "Create me a bunch of slides is priceless." There's loads of AI apps out there at the moment. They're creating sort of content that allows us to kind of generate this information. But this is really useful really helps us to really understand how things are being pro created protected and you utilized and where we've got this Copilot or Work IQ built into Microsoft graph which is a topic we'll discuss at a later date that integration allows us to have layered context across all of the Microsoft 365 products that we use and then the last point time reclaim for strategic work I think it's a no-brainer you know when we're talking about reduc reducing our workload every day, streamlining the services that we're delivering day in and day out.

This really helps us to reduce the time it's taking us to do the administrative tasks for our job and focus on being a bit more efficient, proactive, and a bit more confident in what we're delivering every day. We could focus on the areas that we really enjoy, removing that admin overhead on ourselves. And there's some comments there. Same meeting, same inbox, just the one key difference. Someone is finally reading your notes for you. And that's true.

Copilot has the ability to read that information, provide context around it, utilizing Work IQ, and really build out that model of information for you. This isn't the future of work. It's the update we've already we already have. And I think that statement is probably something I'm going to use moving forward. And it's accurate across the board. It really is a case of we're now enhancing our capabilities, leveraging and utilizing AI in this sort of format.

So the shift from reactive to augmented work, most people start to get to the point where they think where are we going? What's the take in this? Some people are even going as far as to say AI is going to take over my entire job in the future. And the reality is that's not strictly true. You know, we are shifting from a reactive to an augmented work. That's that is literally the whole reason why PE platforms like inforcer exist to this day is we're looking for those automation processes to make things easier for us.

And what does that workflow look like? So we've got the ability previously of searching and asking. No more hunting through folders. Just ask Copilot where the information lives. That's transformative in the way we work as individuals and how MSPs, other businesses also work is we want to be able to se seamlessly work out where our data is. That doesn't stop us particularly in the MSP space from protecting data with SharePoint permissioning and SharePoint management. That's requirements when we talk about data protection and data integrity.

The other area is writing and prompting. We now need to go down the route of describing what we're after and then Copilot will draft it. Whether it's using our voice or our style, it starts to learn our own model and starts to give us that information and feedback information that's really relevant and personable to the way we act and we interact with others around us. So we have to provide a description when we're talking about prompting and prompt engineering.

It's no longer a case of a single line of text to say provide me the latest news. We have to kind of go much further into our conversation as if we're talking to someone who's then going to go back and go through all of our information and provide us with an outcome. The other one's creating curating. So focus on refinement. When we talk about prompt engineering, prompt delivery, we have to refine what we're asking Copilot to do because Copilot will handle the heavy lifting of the initial creation, but we have to make sure what we're asking it is pretty specific.

It's identified correctly and this reduces that overhead of con overhead of noise the hallucinations that I've been talking about in previous episodes. This really starts to kind of drive that concern but query an area that we need to think about. And then just a nice fun fact that you'll see at the bottom research shows that 57% of time is spent searching for and formatting information. When we talk about how marketing industries work or financial industries work, 57% of time is spent searching for and formatting information, that's a huge amount of time spent looking for information updating.

When I'm building out this PowerPoint presentation, the use of Copilot, the ability to kind of pull some of the information from our previous work we've done here at inforcer has reduced my time significantly. This whole presentation you're looking at now, 14 slides worth took maybe an hour and a half to complete and create with some additional images I found updated some words. We utilize AI to really help engage our conversations and drive that process, that feeling of success that we want, the efficiency we look at when we talk about it or the work or the business that we even work in day-to-day.

So you'll notice on the left I put a Copilot in products. You'll see that we've got operating system, developer, business applications. Every single one of those has got its own function and connection. Copilot is integrated into all of this. The ability for it to have some level of access in all of these platforms is absolutely critical. And you can see a real good diagram of where it has those connections and creations. So, Copilot in action across your apps, how does that look?

What does it actually offer? And where can we benefit from utilizing this product? So, Copilot isn't configured to a single application. It's woven throughout the entire Microsoft ecosystem that's based on Microsoft graph and now the Work IQ that sits on top for contacts from collaborative meetings data to data analysis. Every touch point becomes an opportunity for enhanced productivity but as anything with great power comes the need for greater governance. Not quite a Spider-Man patch, but it is very much a very true statement of what we need to do as Copilot is gaining more traction, having more access, being a bit more kind of refined, purpose driven, we have to govern it, we have to protect it, we have to add layers of protection across the board wherever possible and these are things we have to be wary of.

So just looking at the apps at the moment, where can we benefit using Copilot meeting summaries and actions for Microsoft Teams, intelligent email drafting and prioritization, letting it do the work on what's important for your mailbox, content generation and refinement in Word. We got an updated policy, let's just say accept acceptable use policy that needs to be reviewed. It's a great opportunity for it to do some refinement. Maybe we've spent the last six months, seven months preparing to do these updates.

We've collected a whole bunch of information. We could go into Copilot and say, "Look at these following documents. Are there any updates to my acceptable use policy that I should consider?" Look, we've made some changes. This is what we recommend. This is how things change. Excel is probably the biggest insight or the biggest opportunity for Copilot. So, data insights and formula assistance. It really can go to town with that information and provide a bigger context on that delivery.

And finally, PowerPoint automated slide creation and design, which I mentioned earlier. Taking a bulk of information or what you want to talk about and say, "Please provide a PowerPoint presentation for me to do that." And then you're just bulking out with designs and features. You get to do the fun part of the configuration and delivery by removing the workload of the documentation or the wording that we have to write in. Productivity and protection as a result equals real transformation.

And that's another statement I'll be using a lot when I talk about Copilot enhancements, Copilot dri driven success. We have to make sure that what we put in place is transformative for the businesses that we work in. Whether we're an MSP supporting customers or we're actually a customer of an MSP. We have to have it so it is transformative to our business. It has to deliver success ROI and measurements that we can monitor and adhere to.

So, Microsoft Teams, a bit more of a deep dive into these specifically.

Teams never misses another meeting insight. When we use Copilot in Teams, we've got the ability to really understand its purpose. And you'll see on the left, we've got summary, topics, actions, and key questions. It can break these things down. You can make it go one step further. If you build Copilot agents connected to these things and just say, "Provide me further insights based on key information I'm looking for." It really starts to drive a conversation for us.

And I want to just highlight the governance consideration and it I'll be saying this across all of these suites. We have the ability to run data loss prevention policy now to protect sensitive data we should be configuring that if you've got financial data GDPR data if you're in the UK Fedora any sort of the platforms whoever you're talking to HIPPA PI needs to be protected across the board. It's absolutely crucial to the success of what we deliver.

We have to make sure that we are protecting sensitive information and Microsoft release from Ignite allows us to now enhance that to Copilot which is something we didn't have beforehand. So some things just to be mindful of be wary of. The other area is Outlook email that writes itself pretty much within reason. As you could probably tell I've deliberately not amended this slide for specific reasons well except for the governance layer. This has been generated by Copilot minus the governance layer piece at the bottom which has enforced DLP policies and sensitivity labels before AI draft sensitive messaging ensuring compliance remains intact even as speed increases as we start to become more efficient and this is a statement I will look to try and use as well.

We have to make sure that when we are talking to our customers, we're implementing Copilot, we're doing Copilot readiness assessments, we implement the best practices that we can get away with the company. So sensitivity labeling, data loss prevention policies really should be at the forefront of our conversations on purview data governance protection. Off the back of that, it allows Outlook to be a lot more refined, a lot more contextual when it starts to deliver information and write those emails for us.

Some someday I can imagine it even generating responses on our behalf without us even needing to know what's going on providing that context and information and I can imagine that happening more and more. Next one is Word. Hopefully pretty obvious to you. We can ask a whole bunch of things, write a personal story that relates to this document topic. We can start to get it to really build a really good context of what we're looking for.

It's building out and bulking out information we've not been able to do before. It's crucial when we talk about becoming more efficient and that statement I've said earlier 57% of time when we talk about information gathering and configuration is spent formatting documentation and finding documentation. So Copilot chat find me this document saving 57% of your own time doing this workload. Next one is obviously Excel speaks for itself. Again everything has a governance process that we need to be mindful of.

We have to talk about and we have to be aware of data governance across the platforms we use. Copilot is so pivotal in the way that we're going to be working over the next 6 to 12 months and beyond that we need to be ahead of the game in protecting that data as we go. PowerPoint another simple metric that does the exact same thing from briefing to boardroom in minutes. The ability to kind of get it to generate this information and slide decks based on information we've collected priceless.

So productivity meets protection. Where do we go with governance and protection? What do what layers do we need to put in place that makes us be more up to date with where we need to go?

We've explored the five applications each with transformative productivity benefits. But transformation without governance really does equal chaos. The true power emerges when productivity and compliance can work together. And this really is the conversation and the drive throughout this entire series. I'm always going to nail put a nail in the head of individuals where I talk to you guys about all of this delivery. AI is powerful. Governed AI becomes completely unstoppable. The ability for it to really scale rapidly.

The world's your oyster when it the world literally is your oyster when it comes to this. The ability to really look through and see where we can go. It is unstoppable. Once we've got the governance in place, we've identified the configuration of the processes we're going to take. This really takes us to the new level, another level of success, another level where we can go moving forward. So the next slide is MSP specific. And I like always providing a slide that talks about where can we create revenue professional services.

So selling productivity as a service, how can we sell to our customers and identify the MSP opportunity? Where is the MSP opportunity? And those four points you see in the middle are exactly the opportunity we have for our customers to this day.

So for a managed service provider, Copilot represents more than just a new Microsoft feature. It's an entirely new service line. Governance as a service, compliance as a service, AI as a service. These are all things we have to manage moving forward. Part of the Defend, Govern & Prove series I've been doing is identifying that you do your standard configuration which is your defense but you have to govern that information moving forward. Govern the protection monitor what's going on.

The principle is exactly the same on data governance and AI governance. When I said governing AI becomes unstoppable. It absolutely does. If we get it done right and we sell it to our customers correctly, we really can take it as far as we need to generate revenue for us as an MSP. But more importantly, the ability to really start to scale that for our customers, demonstrate that they will become efficient. So we can start with the readiness assessment that's available in inforcer today.

Start those conversations, engage in the would you be interested in AI services? This is where it could help your business tenant optimization, tidying up the environment. Day one value with inforcer and absolutely what we should be doing prior to doing any deployments is we have to optimize the tenants. To clean up permissions, implement sensitivity labeling, configure data loss prevention policies, and establish a baseline security. They are the fundamentals on any Microsoft 365 tenant, whether it's one individual user that's runs their own business or it's 15,000 users in a single business.

It gaps happen because we haven't done the right security baseline. We haven't configured things securely. Doesn't matter about user management or group management or configurations on a productivity level. If we haven't got the standards of security in place first. The next one's roll out and training phase deployment with user training. Prompt engineering workshops really does define how productive Copilot or AI as general is utilized within environments. Leveraging a prompt engineering workshop will really help everyone to understand and adopt a Copilot better or AI generally.

And the last one's continuous monitoring, ongoing governance verification, usage analytics, and ROI reporting. You have all of that available in the Copilot readiness assessment within inforcer. And as inforcer continues to grow its own features, products, and SKUs, we're going to have more information that's more refined around Copilot. And I'd encourage you to keep on top of the feedback and the road map that's going on in there. So where does that benchmark, where does that really sit?

What's the advantage really that inforcer can give you guys and that is tenant alignment that's that baseline security aligning people to your best practices deploying sensitivity labeling and data loss prevention policies on mass cleaning up the permissions can be done with some visibility running those assessments sometimes when we talk about providing a service like a user support service agreement security as a service agreement it's an ongoing service we offer someone anytime we offer a service it's something that can become ongoing and this is very much the same when we talk about governance as a service compliance as a service AI as a service whichever terminology you want to use they're all under the same platform essentially which is Purview we've got this ability to continually govern means we can continually sell but we have to demonstrate that we're being proactive in that response and again most of those demonstrations of product proactiveness start with a report.

So we can run that readiness assessment report monthly and send that to our customer.

Guess what? We're providing ourselves with ongoing revenue and we're taking that box from the moment we start leveraging the products around us. Particularly the leveraging inforcer which as far as I can tell offers quite a few road maps and avenues for ROI for ourselves. So this is a real clunky slide. It has everything that you really need to govern environments better. Start with sensitivity labeling day one value we have and we can configure basic labels that can be applied to HR finance folders.

They only need business premium to start that journey for manual configuration and they would need an uplift if you want to do automation. Data loss prevention prevent AI from inadvertently exposing protected data. You can implement this today and apply it to all of your customers within a matter of minutes utilizing inforcer. The biggest most important one that you see there is conditions to access the environment. Conditional access policies control who can use Copilot features, which devices and under what circumstances require device compliance 101.

It's absolutely crucial when we talk about managing and protecting data. The biggest set of breaches come from gaps that we haven't put in place on the conditional access layer. Have we made sure that every gap is in place? Are we blocking unsupported OS types like Linux for example if it's not used within the platform and in the business permission hygiene top of the list clean up overshared content and responsible prompt engineering teaching users how to use Copilot successfully utilizing a prompt engineering workshop is going to maximize the value they're going to get and maximize the value you're going to offer them and give them and then the last point I really will highlight and nail every time is continuous monitoring we have to when we offer a service ongoing, an ongoing service model, we have to make sure we can demonstrate how that's going.

So, drift detection on changes to conditional access policies, yes, that's included in governance. Assessment readiness assessments and reporting, yes, included in governance. And then those data loss prevention, sensitivity labels, conditional access, configuration policies, all of those are just the defense part, the configuration, the front end of configuration, the enforcement, the governance we end up doing afterwards is the reporting, the monitoring, and then the proving of that value is incorporated in that governance piece. So wrapping up, the real promise of Copilot, what is it really going to offer us?

It's got us, it's going to give us the ability to identify and become more efficient in quite a few areas.

And you will see from the chart on the left there, Copilot for Microsoft 365 AI will improve productivity and revolutionize the way we work. And it absolutely will. Efficiency improvements already demonstrated and they're already pulling in data left, right, and center with customers using Copilot. You can see the efficiencies already here. Hopefully, that's really helped. It's a wrap-up. I'm going to finish here, guys. But coming next, when I when AI doesn't know its place, I think this is going to be a good topic to discuss on where things aren't being done right.

What the capabilities are, what's outpacing it to this day, and when should we actually be using it and when should we not be. So, thank you very much for joining. All the best. Yes.