What Are the Different Versions of Microsoft Copilot?

Productivity matters. Most employees spend hours drafting documents, browsing through emails, or preparing for meetings every week, and often struggle to find time for other, more critical tasks.

Copilot, Microsoft’s AI companion, gives individuals and businesses an opportunity to boost their productivity by performing pedestrian tasks for them. The tool is available to all Windows and Microsoft 365 users, although its capabilities depend on the AI assistant’s variant.

Hence, the range of tasks you can perform with Copilot depends on the version of the tool you’re using. We’ll walk you through the different variants of Microsoft Copilot to help you understand how to integrate them into your business’s daily operations.

What is Microsoft Copilot?

In its simplest form, Microsoft Copilot is an AI assistant similar to ChatGPT. It performs a range of tasks, from generating images to drafting documents based on user input, the so-called prompts.

The capabilities of Copilot’s free version are limited as this variant of the tool doesn’t integrate with any of the Microsoft productivity apps.

Power users such as coders, writers, or designers can get Copilot Pro add-on with the Microsoft 365 Family and Personal plans if they want to integrate the AI companion with Word, PowerPoint, Outlook and other 365 apps.

The only downside is that Copilot Pro is web-grounded, meaning that it can only use online sources to generate answers and complete tasks. The tool doesn’t integrate with Microsoft Graph, so companies cannot rely on it to produce content or provide answers to different questions based on their archives and internal communications.

Copilot for Microsoft 365 is a version of this tool aimed at businesses. Still, this isn’t the only Copilot variant businesses can utilise to improve their productivity, safety or quality of their services.

A Guide Through Microsoft Copilot Variants

Copilots are growing in popularity due to their impressive capabilities. Variants of this tool are designed for specific tasks, which enables a business to pick those that can have the most impact on its performance.

Although most of these AI companions are available as add-ons for 365 Business and Enterprise plans, it’s still worth checking if a Copilot you’re interested in is available with the plan your company is using.

Copilot for Microsoft 365

The most recognisable Copilot integrates with Microsoft apps like Word, Excel, and Teams. It integrates with a user’s ‘Graph’ – all of an organisation’s documents, meeting notes and other files that the user can access – to help generate accurate responses.

The AI companion can summarise a meeting, create a Word document or prepare a PowerPoint presentation. This Copilot comes with graph-grounded chat that works across all 365 apps, enabling a company’s employees to create email thread summaries and Word documents from the same place.

It’s also worth noting that this AI assistant is often bundled with other Copilots.

Copilot for Sales

Besides Microsoft Graph integration, Copilot for Sales supports integrations with Salesforce Sales Cloud and Dynamics 365 Sales. Configuring the tool is also an option for companies that use other CRM platforms.

Copilot can help an organisation’s sales representatives prepare for a meeting with a client by pulling vital information from the CRM, Teams or Outlook and creating a summary of the essential topics they should discuss with that client.

The AI assistant provides sales tips and answers to a customer’s questions during the calls in Teams, serving as a company’s sales team’s backup during important meetings. Copilot for Sales is available as an add-on to Microsoft 365 Business and Enterprise licence holders.

Copilot for Service

Organisations seeking to modernise their call centres can benefit from integrating this Copilot variant into their operations. The product includes the Copilot for Microsoft 365 and expands its capabilities through integration with contact centre systems and CRMs. Currently, Copilot for Service supports integrations with Zendesk, Salesforce and ServiceNow applications.

Companies can utilise it to facilitate the onboarding process or help their customer service agents answer questions and resolve cases faster. The AI assistant is fully customisable, and businesses can easily configure it or expand its features in Copilot Studio.

READ: Guide to Microsoft Copilot for Service

Copilot for Azure

Although it is currently not included in any of the subscription plans, Azure users can test this Copilot by joining the preview. The tool can perform a broad spectrum of tasks ranging from virtual machine employment to creating Azure CLI scripts.

The AI companion relies on LLMs, information about an organisation’s Azure environment and the Azure control plane to make managing Azure resources easier. Besides helping users understand the Azure environment better, Copilot simplifies the process of building the infrastructure, secures storage accounts and offers ways to improve Azure-SQL database-driven applications.

READ: Your Guide to Microsoft Copilot for Azure

Copilot for Finance

This Copilot is designed to facilitate the collection process and data reconciliation. Microsoft announced the arrival of Copilot for Finance in late February 2024, but it is still in the preview stage, which is currently the only way to test it.

Copilot works with Microsoft 365 apps like Excel and Outlook, but it also supports integrations with Dynamic 365 Finance software and SAP’s ERP systems. It gathers data about a client from Outlook and other sources to extract the most essential information and suggest the best course of action.

Copilot for Security

Incident summarisation, reverse script engineering and impact analysis are among the key features of the Copilot for Security. The AI companion works as a standalone application or an integrated feature of Microsoft Intune, Microsoft Defender XDR and Microsoft Sentinel security solutions.

In addition, Microsoft’s plugins and those from third-party security products can be used to expand Copilot’s capacities by providing additional context. The tool relies on a sophisticated process to generate answers to prompts it receives either directly if used as a standalone solution or through plugins and Microsoft’s security solutions.

Copilot Studio

Copilot Studio unlocks a sea of possibilities for businesses that are already using Copilot for Microsoft 365. The tool enables users to customise the AI assistant according to their needs.

Automating the onboarding process, building plugins, creating scenarios for different situations, or using connectors to refine data are only a handful of the countless options Copilot Studio offers. This graphical development environment enables organisations to create new Copilots and GPTs, automate processes or write dialogues the AI chatbot displays when asked a specific question.

Copilot Studio is available to all Copilot users regardless of the Microsoft 365 subscription plan they’re using.

Improving Business Operations with Copilot

According to its CEO, Microsoft is a Copilot company dedicated to developing AI companions and making them available to businesses and individual users.

Most Microsoft Companions are aimed at enterprise users who struggle to handle vast workloads as they automate reparative processes. Implementation and training employees to use copilots efficiently remain the biggest challenges companies must overcome to harness the full power of these AI assistants.

Still, deciding to incorporate Copilot variants into the daily operations of your company’s sales, finance or HR departments can strengthen their collaboration, make each team member more productive and increase the organisation’s revenue streams.