What if Copilot Pro was not that pro?

The Project Brief, Saturday, January 27th, 3 min read.

Good Saturday.

Last week I left you with the promise of exploring the capabilities of Copilot Pro, the ChatGPT-connected AI released by Microsoft, promising a revolution in work simplification.

Unfortunately, the exploration of this latest version, which went online after the release of Copilote, the free version, and Copilot 365, the corporate version reserved for companies with at least 300 users, left us a bit disappointed.

I'm going to explain why I'm waiting a little bit before diving into the world of Copilot, because some of the information is interesting and deserves a closer look.

First, it's important to recognize the inherent potential of Copilot Pro. It promises to revolutionize the way we approach tasks, offering advanced AI capabilities that streamline workflows and increase productivity.

It is certainly a good start and many users will find their count with priority access to GPT-4 and GPT-4 Turbo during peak hours for accelerated performance to generate answers, content and AI images.

In addition, with a Microsoft 365 Family subscription, Copilot Pro allows you to use Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint and OneNote.

Copilot 365’s ability to interact with these documents directly makes it a more versatile and practical choice.

All the potential of AI lies in this feature: to have access to company data, enabling existing or customized documents to be fetched and used in context to save time.

For example, if you are working in Word and want to retrieve an existing document from your database and use it as a template, Copilot 365 Business allows you to do this through a search window, but this option does not (yet) exist in Copilot Pro used with Microsoft 365 Family.

The same situation is observed when working with PowerPoint, where the search window is present in the Copilot 365 Business version, but not in Copilot Pro, which is used with the Microsoft 365 Family version.

So where does that leave us?

In my opinion, until Copilot Pro resolves the critical issue of access to server documents, the return on investment may not be justified, since the whole point of using Copilot is to save time by using documents that already exist and can be edited with the help of AI.

Also, there is this other thing to keep in mind :

But I probably sound critical and unfair when I talk about this Copilot project, which probably mobilized and pressured hundreds of people for months on a tight schedule.

What they have achieved is brilliant and effective, and I reiterate my enthusiasm for the arrival of AI in the Microsoft 365 Suite.

It's already an extraordinary improvement in the way we work, and I hope that in the coming months we'll see a democratization of key features that directly use AI to save us time and money.

In the meantime, it's probably wise to wait for a more comprehensive solution. One that is perfectly tailored to the needs of users.

Head over to my Twitter profile and check out my two threads from this week if you want to learn more about:

-7 tips to prompt like a pro (With a cool cheatsheet for you if you: like, follow, etc ;)

-What to do if you have the opportunity to become a mentor in your field of expertise.

That's it for this week, folks!

Thanks for reading and don't forget to stay sharp.

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