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MindShare: Copilot is Your Copilot for the Web

By Jacob Brown, Solutions Consultant at Sycor

Are your employees putting company information into ChatGPT? There’s a better option that you may already pay for.

Edge. Bing. For many people, these words may invoke rage. Hindered by years of Internet Explorer and Bing search engine inferiority, most corporate workers swear by Google Chrome and the Google search engine. 

When was the last time that you gave Bing/Edge a try? If you check them out right now, the first thing you’ll notice is Microsoft Copilot. Copilot is, in a nutshell, ChatGPT constrained in a business-friendly cage. Your prompts to Copilot are first run through Microsoft software, then sent to a large language model similar to ChatGPT. The response is filtered again by Microsoft, before finally spitting out a response. Copilot is currently everywhere in Edge and Bing.

Anything you type into Copilot is secure. When it comes to ChatGPT, not so much. If there is one reason to have your employees give Bing/Edge a try, it’s for this security. 

If there are two reasons, the second is the pervasiveness of AI in Bing/Edge today. There is no better way to get your users exposed to AI than to get them using both. Click the Copilot button at the top right of Edge and the Copilot sidebar will follow you through the web, with secure access to whatever is on your current page. Ask it to summarize something on your screen. Ask it to turn this summary into an email to your boss. Ask it to make it into a table. The Copilot sidebar is certainly the biggest resolution in web browsers since… [insert me straining to think of the last innovation in web browsers.]

Despite the recent Teams outage (Hey, at least it was on a Friday afternoon!), your company probably uses Microsoft’s business apps. The fact that I can make that statement is why Microsoft just hit a $3 trillion (!) market cap, becoming the world’s most valuable company. Getting onto Edge, Bing and Copilot could unlock new synergies within that ecosystem for your team. In fact, getting all your business processes into one major software program is what consultants like me would call a best practice. 

At Sycor in Robinson Township, our team helps Pittsburgh companies with often dozens of software systems strung together, move entirely to the Microsoft Cloud. Many company leaders are surprised to learn that everything from purchasing to manufacturing to warehousing can be managed in Microsoft Dynamics 365. It seems that Microsoft announces a new application of Copilot in business processes every week. It’s the reason why I keep saying if you want to be “AI-ready,” join the Microsoft Cloud. Yes, even Edge and Bing.