Copilot Inflection Point
"I have some news to share..."
We've all heard that line - and when it comes from one of your trusted teammates, indicating that they are leaving for another job, felt the mixed emotions of celebrating their career journey while leaving your team down a talented performer. Backfilling is never a fun task - the whole team must work harder while you are down a person, and it is never possible to know in advance whether the person you bring on will be as good as the person they are stepping in for. Sadly it may take weeks or months to locate and onboard a new member, and just as long to determine if they are a good fit. Hiring is tough!
And yet, in the next few months, many of those same teams may decide, after evaluating their options - that using Copilot to support their team can not only keep things on track, but even better, actually improve the service they are delivering. How is this possible?
If we look back in time - we have been working with clients, and our own internal deployment of Copilot for over a year - and we continue to see, month over month - week over week - more staff becoming adept at using both Copilot Chat as well as Copilot within the Microsoft 365 Apps. This use of a tool is commendable - but also obscures that we are at a Copilot "inflection point" - major changes will be coming to organizations that use Copilot over the next few months that speak directly to the common challenge illustrated in the backfill example above.
Copilot when it launched was largely seen, correctly, as a boon to personal productivity. An assistant to help you with generating content, organizing meetings and reducing make-work. If you used Copilot, you could see great time-savings throughout the day and week. Yet nothing forced folks to use Copilot. Many used Copilot in every Teams meeting, or others simply within Word or Outlook. Some folks used Copilot Chat in addition to Copilot inside of their Microsoft 365 apps, but others did not.
When Copilot Agents were introduced, allowing personal knowledge repositories such as SharePoint sites to be wired up into Copilot - the abilities of Copilot became much broader. Suddenly your inventory system, or your sales system, was surfaced inside of Copilot chat - making previously difficult questions easy to answer at your fingertips. Instead of consulting an expert you could simply ask "Where's this package?" or "What service should I pitch to this customer next?"
Three big changes have now happened - which in total move Copilot from a personal productivity tool to something used to augment your total team. First, Microsoft has released two new types of Copilot Agents that act as either a researcher or an analyst. These agents go far beyond the everyday use of Microsoft 365 Copilot - and can provide deep reasoning skills in minutes - allowing every employee to access "expertise on demand".
Second - Microsoft brought the tools for organizations to start to construct autonomous Copilot Agents out of preview through to general availability. These agents can be configured to hang off of specific time schedules to perform tasks on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. They can also simply wait for a request to come to them - either from a human or from another agent.
And this brings us to the third and latest announcement: the new "Computer Use Agents" that can interact with websites and desktop apps. Folks performing data entry, or processing invoices, or even market research - all these sorts of applications emerge. Unlike legacy "Robotic Process Automation" - when changes occur to the underlying infrastructure, CUA is flexible - responding to changes in real time and much less brittle. This flexibility means agents built on a desktop can be used on completely different virtual machine (e.g. Windows 365 or AVD) that is only turned on for the duration of the task and then turned off, making it a great cost-savings and business automation technique. With desktop interaction - almost any task can be automated into an agent!
As the number of agents explodes - almost anything that is digital can be interacted with via an Agent. With Agents calling other autonomous Agents for support - there may soon be teams of agents performing organizational tasks - managed by a single person but mostly performing ad-hoc work around the clock with little interaction.
And this bring us full circle to the original challenge: backfills. Think of all the steps you ask a person to perform before they depart the organization. They need to ensure they've documented their common tasks and business processes for the incoming hire. And then you need to read through the documentation commonly - because you rarely have the luxury of bringing onboard a new hire while the departing employee is still there. Which means you need to understand the process well enough to perform it itself.
What if, in an employee's final week, you took the documented business processes and built a Copilot Agent to cover some of the more common scenarios? You could even run through it with your departing expert to see if it could solve the easy problems and escalate the most complex back to you. Pure research or analyst activities could simply be siphoned off to one of the dedicated agents - and any data entry or navigating of 3rd party websites could be done via CUA. I know personally many of the tasks teams perform are akin to "go to this website, click over here, download this excel file, then cut and paste this column into this other excel sheet and then publish that on this SharePoint site". All something that can be performed by an Agent.
Just as in the past, when Copilot came to PowerPoint - the challenge wasn't whether people would be completely replaced. Instead, Copilot does the heavy lifting of filling in most of the slides based on your overview - and you can focus on truly creative portion of the work - crafting the narrative to fit the client in question. Now, instead of just helping with a deck, Copilot Chat + Copilot Agents are going to start to transform entire areas of the business, one agent at a time.
With Copilot, the next time someone has some "news to share" - you'll have less mixed emotions - the stress of backfilling and "doing more with less" won't have quite the sting.