An Honest Review of Microsoft Copilot

Microsoft Copilot is revolutionizing productivity as an AI-powered tool designed to enhance user experiences across the Microsoft 365 suite. This cutting-edge technology harnesses large language models (LLMs) to deliver real-time, intelligent assistance, making it one of the best productivity tools available today. Whether you’re looking to streamline your email communication in Outlook, automate tasks in Power Automate, or create applications in Power Apps, Microsoft Copilot has you covered. In this blog post, I’ll share my firsthand experiences with Microsoft Copilot, exploring its functionalities, advantages, and the impact it has on enhancing workflows for low-code developers and everyday users alike. Discover how Microsoft Copilot can transform your approach to productivity and whether it truly lives up to the hype!

Microsoft is calling this the most powerful productivity tool on the planet. That is Microsoft Copilot. Copilot is an AI powered productivity tool that uses large language models. Microsoft is currently rolling it out across its suite. But I’m going to guess you already know this.

You want to know if Copilot’s actually worth your time to use?

My Experience with Copilot

As a low code dev and a power platform user myself, I have currently been playing around with a ton of the different Copilot functionalities across the suite in Microsoft. I’m currently using them to boost my work. The first feature that really blew me away was when I used the Copilot Add-on in Outlook to generate email replies. Copilot automatically created these for me and they sounded completely natural and honestly, they were better than what I could have written myself. The best part is it did it in seconds.

If that doesn’t get you excited, I don’t know what will. The possibilities of what this can do for you and how much time and energy it can save you is endless. Copilot is not only being engineered for the people who use the system, but also the people who design it.

Microsoft has now begun rolling out the ability to use Copilot to generate code in the Power Platform. I’ve already used this to create a Canvas App, an Automated Cloud Flow, and a Scheduled Cloud Flow. This is one of the things I was most excited about because this is currently something that I do every day. This only means that businesses can develop their systems easier. 

I’m fortunate to have experience using Copilot, reading different blogs, and watching a ton of videos or live events. I have learned that the biggest impact on Copilot being a successful tool for you is your prompt.

I have learned that your prompt, or what you actually write out for Copilot plays a huge role in Copilot’s effectiveness.

How to Talk to Copilot

What makes a good Copilot Prompt?

A good prompt has three main things:

• Persona – the person the Copilot is speaking to or the person the Copilot is speaking as
• Context – the scenario or use case the Copilot is being asked in
• Objective – the desire of what you would like the output of the copilot to be

A bad prompt could be something like:

“Copilot, give me five interview questions.”

The problems with this prompt is that it has no persona or context and a very vague objective as well. What you’re going to get from Copilot is not going to be very good.

A good example of a prompt is if you wrote:

“As a hiring manager for a manufacturing company, that is interviewing a new quality control inspector, provide me a list of five insightful questions to ask that will provide open ended answers.”

Copilot is a tool and understanding how to talk to it is going to be how you can use your tool effectively.

An Honest Review of Microsoft Copilot

My general consensus of Copilot is it’s pretty sweet! But in order to elaborate, I need to split the audience into two groups because my review is dependent on which group you fall into. 

The first group of people is going to be people that are using Copilot to write an email, maybe create a Word document for them, or even potentially summarize an account in Microsoft Dynamics. To this person I say…

Copilot is a ten out of ten!

When asking Copilot to create with natural language, I have had absolutely zero problems. Consequently, this is because it’s an extension of OpenAI’s chat GBT. With Copilot currently in preview, there are some capabilities out there for you to currently use today. Microsoft has communicated these features and has begun to announce when they’re going to be rolling more of them out in the coming months.

This truly is a powerful tool and is changing how we are doing work. I personally use the new Bing Copilot every day to find information and resources for answers to questions that I may have. Opposed to traditionally just typing my question into Google and finding a certain resource. I can just type it into Bing Chat and it’s going to give me the answer without having to search. 

To my Low-Code Developers

The second group of people are people who are wanting to utilize the code development capabilities of Copilot. We need to remember that Copilot is in preview and this is seriously only a few months old. Even though my excitement is an absolute ten, I’m going to have to actually rate it…

about a four in its current state.

You can use it to do some simple updates like update a button’s color on a Canvas app or add an action to a flow. But these updates are fairly straightforward and using Copilot to do them isn’t saving you a ton of time. Also, if you don’t specifically call out the components or talk to Copilot in the right way, it’s not going to understand what you’re trying to tell it. I touch more on this in detail in my post about How to Create a Canvas App with Copilot. Often it’s just faster to make a specific update yourself.

However, I was able to create a complete Canvas app from a written prompt in seconds. I think this is the biggest strength of Copilot currently. For audience number two, it created a Canvas app with several galleries, screens, buttons and more to create a completed app. This did about 90% of the legwork. All you would then have to do is maybe update fonts or colors so that the app is customized to you. 

In Conclusion

Copilot is going to change the CE world as we know it. It’s going to change it ways we can even currently imagine. I couldn’t be more excited about the opportunities this presents to boost my work, personally, and organizations who utilize Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Dynamics.

Lastly, it is a single experience that works across your whole life, whether you are at work, at home, or on the go. Copilot is powered by large language models (LLMs) and integrates your data with the Microsoft Graph and Microsoft 365 apps and services. It works alongside popular Microsoft 365 apps such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, and more. The AI tool provides real-time intelligent assistance, enabling users to enhance their creativity, productivity, and skills. Using the power of AI and natural language conversations, users can find better answers to their questions faster.

If you’re interested in learning more about Copilot, be sure to check out this post that will cover Everything You Need to Know, in Under 4 Minutes. Happy Developing!