Unlocking Productivity: Copilot, ChatGPT, and AI Agents in Action

In Week 4 of my “Summer of Copilot” series, we saw Microsoft’s AI assistants popping up everywhere – in your daily apps and even your intranet. This week’s highlights included: Copilot Chat becoming your always-available AI helper, real productivity boosts from AI in action, a comparison of Copilot vs. ChatGPT for business, and the rise of SharePoint AI agents turning your intranet into an interactive Q&A hub.

We also pointed you to free Copilot training resources to help you and your team get hands-on with these tools.

(P.S. Next week we’ll cover Copilot Studio and the Copilot Control System, for those eager to customize and govern these AI tools.)

#SummerOfCopilot Week 4

• Monday – Copilot Chat: Your Everyday AI Assistant
• Tuesday  – Copilot in Action: Real Productivity Boosts
• Wednesday – Copilot vs. ChatGPT: What’s the Difference?
• Thursday - SharePoint AI Agents Debut
• Friday - Using SharePoint Agents: Early Wins
• Bonus – Complimentary AI Training

Let’s get started.

Copilot Chat Everywhere – Your AI Assistant in the Flow of Work

Imagine having a smart assistant you can summon in any app, anytime. With Copilot Chat, that’s exactly what you get. Hit the Copilot key (on supported PCs) or open the Copilot side panel, and just ask in natural language. Need an email drafted or a document translated? No need to switch tools – Copilot understands the context of what you’re working on (your organization, open documents, recent emails) and provides help right in place. For example, if you’re editing a Word file, you can ask, “Summarize this document for a client-ready email,” and Copilot will draft it on the spot. In Outlook, you could have it summarize a long email thread before you craft a reply. Microsoft calls Copilot Chat “the new front end” of their apps – a consistent AI helper across Word, Excel, Teams, and more.

Not all Copilots are created equal, though. A quick breakdown: Copilot Chat (previously Business Chat) is the built-in AI assistant available in Teams, Outlook, or the web, and it’s included at no extra cost with many Microsoft 365 plans. It primarily uses web data unless you have the full Copilot license. Microsoft 365 Copilot, on the other hand, is the premium, deeply integrated AI in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc., that can pull in your work files, emails, and more . That one is an add-on ($30/user/month currently) and is optimized for enterprise data and workflows. Think of Copilot Chat as the quick, general AI helper, while M365 Copilot is the powerhouse tuned into your organization’s content.

Our experience: Copilot Chat is quickly becoming part of the daily routine. It’s surprisingly empowering to have an AI that “gets” complex instructions and produces useful output (thanks to GPT-4 under the hood). There’s a bit of learning curve in phrasing requests, but the convenience is addictive. We’ve started asking Copilot for things we wouldn’t bother a colleague with – like brainstorming five tagline ideas, or converting bullet points into a polished paragraph – and it delivers. In short, it helps you work smarter without breaking your flow.

Real Productivity Wins with AI

The question on every leader’s mind: Does this really save time? In Week 4, we shared concrete examples and the results are compelling. Here are a few ways Copilot made a difference:

• 💬 Taming Email Overload: Copilot can summarize long email threads into a few key bullet points. No more wading through 30 messages to catch up. It can even draft a reply for you. Something that might take you 15–20 minutes of reading and writing now takes about 2 minutes with Copilot. Multiply that across all the lengthy emails you handle, and the time savings add up fast.
• 📄 Speed-Reading Reports: Ever get handed a 30-page report and need the gist? Just ask Copilot for a summary. We tried this with a research paper – Copilot produced a clear synopsis with key takeaways. It even handled a PDF we provided (yes, it can pull from PDFs and text files now). It’s like having a rapid data analyst on call.
• ✍️ First Drafts, No Writer’s Block: Staring at a blank page is daunting. Copilot can generate a first draft or an outline from a simple prompt. We gave it bullet points for a project update; it expanded them into a structured draft which we then refined. We only had to polish the last 20%. It also serves as an on-demand editor – you can ask it to rewrite or tone-check your text. This doesn’t replace your voice or oversight, but it eliminates the heavy lifting of starting from scratch.
• 🤝 Instant Answers in Meetings: In a meeting and need a fact? Instead of saying “I’ll get back to you,” you can quietly ask Copilot. For example, “What did we propose to Client X last quarter?” – if that info lives in your files or emails, Copilot will fetch it in seconds. It’s like having a researcher in the meeting who can pull up data without disrupting the discussion. Your team makes decisions faster with relevant info on hand.

These are real-world productivity boosts. Early users (including educators in pilot programs) reported similar experiences – Copilot freed up time and even increased people’s curiosity to ask more “what if” questions, using it as a thought partner. Importantly, it’s not doing your job for you; it’s handling the grunt work – summarizing, drafting, retrieving info – so you can focus on the big ideas and decisions. Less mental fatigue from routine tasks is a win for everyone.

Copilot vs. ChatGPT (and Others): Built for Business

Many of you have tried ChatGPT or other AI tools. So, why use Copilot Chat for work? The big reason: Copilot is designed for the enterprise context – your internal data, security, and actual work tasks.

• Context is King: Copilot can draw on your organization’s data and context (with permission). If you have a document open or emails in your inbox, Copilot can use that to give a tailored answer or draft. Generic AI chatbots can’t securely access your internal files by default. For instance, Copilot could draft a PowerPoint slide based on a Word doc you have open – ChatGPT alone wouldn’t know what’s in that doc.
• Data Stays Secure: Because Copilot runs within Microsoft 365, it respects your company’s security and compliance rules. If a file is confidential, Copilot won’t leak it. Your data isn’t used to train the AI model, and it stays within your tenant’s boundary. With something like ChatGPT, if an employee pastes internal info into it, that data leaves your control. Copilot was built to avoid that scenario. Plus, IT has admin tools (the Copilot Control System) to monitor and govern usage. That means you can adopt AI without risking compliance.
• Deeper Integration: Copilot doesn’t just talk, it takes action in your apps. In Outlook it can send an email it drafted; in Excel it can insert formulas or create a chart; in Teams it can post updates. Other AI assistants might give you text to copy-paste, but Copilot actually helps execute the task in the app. It’s more like a proactive team member than a detached Q&A bot.
• Choosing the Right Tool: We admit, ChatGPT and the like still have their place. They might handle a random trivia question or an unrelated coding task better, since they have a wide open training scope. In fact, Copilot will sometimes politely decline a question if it doesn’t have the info (whereas ChatGPT might guess from its general knowledge). Our advice: for work-related queries or content, especially anything involving your internal files or plans, Copilot is the go-to. It’s already in your workflow and understands your world. For off-the-clock queries, a public AI is fine. But we’ve found that during the workday, we rarely need to step outside Copilot’s ecosystem because it covers our needs so well.

Star of the Week: SharePoint Intranet Agents

The most talked-about innovation this week was SharePoint Agents. If your company has intranet sites or knowledge bases on SharePoint, get ready: these AI agents can make all that content instantly accessible via chat. Essentially, each SharePoint site can have a chatbot that answers questions based on the site’s content. This is a big leap for internal knowledge management discovery.

Think about it: instead of digging through the HR site for the “Onboarding Policy” or searching the Sales site for last quarter’s case studies, you just ask in natural language. The SharePoint agent finds the answer in the pages or documents and gives it to you in seconds. It’s like every site gets a virtual concierge. For example, we set up an agent on a project site and asked, “What risks have been identified so far on Project X?” It scanned the risk log on that site and replied with the top 3 risks and mitigation plans – something that could take a human several minutes of digging. In another test, a new hire asked the HR site’s agent, “How do I submit an expense report?” – the agent pulled up the exact instructions from the policy page. That’s a game-changer: your team can get info without hunting or waiting on an email response.

Microsoft is rolling this out such that every SharePoint site has an AI Q&A bot (and you can scope custom agents as needed). You can also ask these intranet agents directly from the main Copilot Chat interface. If you’re eager, you can already build a custom agent with Copilot Studio and point it at a site as a workaround. We’re excited because this brings the convenience of ChatGPT to our private company knowledge.

Early lessons: The quality of answers from a SharePoint agent is only as good as the content on the site. Garbage in, garbage out. If the site is outdated or disorganized, the agent might give you a mediocre answer. But that’s a useful prompt to improve your content. And importantly, these agents respect permissions – they won’t show data from a site or file you don’t have access to. So an employee in Department A can’t spy on Department B’s confidential pages via the agent. IT and content owners can deploy these with confidence in access control.

The reaction from our team and clients has been very positive. It’s as if the intranet finally talks back and helps you. We foresee phrases like “Just ask the SharePoint bot” becoming common. Consider piloting this on a frequently used site (like HR policies or IT help). It could drastically cut down the time employees spend searching or the repetitive questions they ask internally. After years of investing in portals and search, this might be the breakthrough to actually get value from that knowledge.

Complimentary Copilot Training – Level Up Your Team

To help you capitalize on these tools, we’ve compiled complimentary Microsoft Copilot training resources. Whether you want to get the basics or dive into advanced capabilities, these courses (mostly on Microsoft Learn) have you covered:

• “Work Smarter with AI” – Learn how to use Copilot across everyday apps to research and create content more efficiently. Link: aka.synozur.com/CP101
• “Get Started with Microsoft 365 Copilot” – See Copilot in action in Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, and Teams, and learn tips to streamline your work. Link: aka.synozur.com/CP102
• “Create Agents in Copilot Studio” – A beginner’s guide to building your own custom AI chatbots (like internal assistants) using Microsoft’s low-code Copilot Studio. Link: aka.synozur.com/CP103
• …and more: Courses on using Copilot in Power Platform (for app automation), GitHub Copilot for code, a 30-day AI productivity challenge, and even a Microsoft Copilot video academy are all available. Check out the full list on our resource page: www.synozur.com/ai-training

Encourage your teams to take advantage of these complimentary trainings. The better everyone understands these AI tools, the more value you’ll get in return—through saved time, improved output, and innovative uses you might not even have considered.

In summary, Week 4 showed that AI copilots are not science fiction; they’re here now making a tangible impact. From personal productivity boosts with Copilot Chat to organizational knowledge leaps with SharePoint agents, there are immediate benefits to explore.

As a leader, identifying where these tools fit in your strategy (and upskilling your people to use them) will be key. Next week, we’ll look at creating custom copilots and governing AI usage (Copilot Studio and the Control System). Stay tuned – the journey continues in our Summer of Copilot!

(For more details, see the accompanying blog post on the Synozur site Copilot Goes Ubiquitous.)

#Copilot #AI #MonthOfCopilot #SummerOfCopilot #SharePoint #Productivity #ChatGPT