Unlocking Better Performance with Graph-Grounded Chat in Copilot

In the first few months after its commercial release, Microsoft Copilot received over five billion chat queries and 5 billion image requests. These statistics highlight how widespread Microsoft’s new AI-powered tool is and that more businesses are integrating it into their daily operations.

The Microsoft Copilot Graph-Grounded Chat feature is at the heart of it all. Microsoft’s AI assistant enables businesses and individuals to effortlessly perform repetitive tasks such as pulling information from emails or finding (and analysing) old documents.

Microsoft Copilot with Graph-Grounded Chat – The Basics

Copilot is currently available as an add-on for Microsoft 365 Business and Enterprise plans and is included in the Microsoft Education Plan. The feature provides assistance to its users within Word, Excel or other apps, but on its own, it cannot combine data from several Microsoft 365 apps.

That’s where the graph-grounded chat, formerly known as Business Chat and Microsoft 365 chat, comes in. The tool offers Microsoft 365 users an easy way to sync their organisational data and generate content with different apps in 365.

Anyone interested in testing Copilot before purchasing it as an add-on for their Microsoft 365 plans can do so free of charge at copilot.microsoft.com or Bing.com/Chat.

The Main Applications of Microsoft Copilot Graph-Grounded Chat

The main difference between the Microsoft Copilot Graph-Grounded Chat and Bing Chat is that the graph-grounded chat integrates with all apps within the Microsoft 365 bundle. The AI assistant can also draw information from the web, LLMs, user’s or organisation’s contacts, emails, calendars, or document archives.

Graph-Grounded Chat can help businesses improve communication with customers, summarise email threads, and generate meeting summaries.Other key features include:

Creating email thread summaries – The chat in Copilot eliminates the need to browse through dozens of messages when replying to a customer due to its ability to extract essential information from an email thread and summarise it in a few lines. It also offers contextual suggestions for email replies relevant to the contents of an email.

Improving team collaboration – The AI assistant can summarise a meeting and extract the key points in seconds, allowing managers to focus on the follow-up actions. The graph-grounded chat can be helpful during brainstorming sessions because it can generate new ideas when given the right prompt.

Crafting and editing documents – Integrating Copilot and its chat with Microsoft 365 apps can help companies analyse data more efficiently, create sales proposals faster or design impactful business presentations.

These features clearly show that this tool can fundamentally improve a company’s performance, but its effectiveness depends on finding the best way to implement it into a business’s daily operations.

Using Microsoft Copilot Graph-Grounded Chat to Maximise a Company’s Performance

All company employees with permission to use Copilot can utilise its chat feature to perform daily tasks. To start using the graph-ground chat in desktop or mobile Teams apps, an employee must go through these steps:

Step 1 – Find the Apps icon in the ribbon on the left side of the Teams window.
Step 2 – Type ‘Copilot’ into the search bar in the Apps tab.
Step 3 – Find M365 Chat and click the Add button to add Copilot as chat to the Teams chat list.
Step 4 – Go to the Chat tab in the Teams’ ribbon and click on it.
Step 5 – Locate the M365 chat option in the Chat tab.
Step 6 – Write a natural language prompt like ‘How many meetings do I have next week?’ and wait for the AI assistant to generate a response.

The final step is the most challenging because mastering the art of writing AI prompts requires time and practice. However, once an organisation and its employees master prompt writing, they can utilise this skill to improve their productivity and perform their daily tasks more efficiently.

The tool can enhance a company’s performance by simplifying collaboration, making it easier for employees to catch up on emails or meetings they’ve missed and in various other ways.

Entering a simple prompt like ‘Create a summary of the email thread with customer X’ into graph-grounded chat can help an employee identify the key points relevant to the particular customer and provide the customer with informed answers to any questions they may have.

It’s important to note that the AI assistant delivers the best results when it receives concise prompts that explain the context, instruct it which sources to use, and explain the expectations.

Exploring Ways to Streamline Company’s Operations with Microsoft Copilot Graph-Grounded Chat

Predicting the scope of the impact the Microsoft Copilot Graph-Grounded Chat will have on the future of business is difficult less than a year after its rollout. The greatest challenge that companies that opt to include the Copilot add-on to their Microsoft 365 Business and Enterprise plans are facing is that all content and answers generated by the chat feature require a human reviewer.

Nonetheless, this powerful AI tool can improve a company’s performance by allowing it to streamline repetitive tasks and use its human resources more effectively.