How does Copilot enhance the user experience in Teams?
With its AI capabilities, Microsoft Copilot provides several enhancements to Microsoft Teams functionality, including meeting summaries and action item follow-up.
Copilot for Microsoft 365 presents several productivity possibilities to users of the Microsoft 365 application suite, especially Microsoft Teams. Given its price of $30 per user, per month, business and IT leaders must understand the potential benefits of Copilot - and how best to implement it -- before investing in the AI-powered tool.
An in-meeting chatbot that lets attendees ask questions or catch up on a meeting if joining late.
Automated creation of meeting agendas from chats within Microsoft Teams.
Automated capture and assignment of meeting action items.
In addition to improving the meeting experience, Copilot delivers GenAI features to Teams chat and calling. For instance, Copilot features in Teams summarize chats, compose messages and query chat channels to uncover highlights, decisions and action items. For organizations using Teams Phone, Copilot creates automated recaps of calls.
However, Copilot is not limited to Microsoft Teams. A Copilot for Microsoft 365 license also brings Copilot summarization, querying and content creation features to the entire ecosystem of Microsoft 365 apps.
Microsoft Copilot augments Microsoft Teams meetings with AI notetaking.
How can Copilot in Teams enhance the UX?
Copilot acts as a virtual AI assistant within Microsoft Teams. It lets users quickly find important information buried within Teams chats. It can also automatically take meeting notes and capture action items.
From a UX perspective, Copilot in Teams improves the overall usability of Teams by letting users focus on the information that's most relevant to them at any given point in time.
Within meetings, for example, attendees can keep their attention on the conversation without the distraction of capturing notes and potentially missing key discussion points. Users can also quickly query and summarize long chat threads in Teams without having to read every message.
How Copilot delivers ROI
As noted, Copilot can improve productivity by eliminating notetaking and finding important content buried in chats and meeting transcripts. In some cases, the use of Copilot can even eliminate the need for some meetings or shorten meeting times by ensuring key decisions are pulled out of chats and made available to attendees before a meeting.
Many discussions of Copilot ROI focus on these potential time savings as the key ROI metric, assuming time saved equates to greater employee productivity, thus reducing costs and potentially improving revenue generation.
But saving time doesn't always equate to bottom-line business improvements. Employees who spend less time in meetings might decide to use that time to shop, catch up on news or some other activity not related to work.
Companies should try to identify specific business processes and activities that can benefit from the use of Copilot, such as the following:
Revenue gained by reducing sales cycles and closing a higher rate of opportunities using improved responsiveness to opportunities.
Cost savings through head count reduction or slower head count expansion.
Streamlining time spent on repeatable processes such as product updates, marketing and sales campaign creation, and Agile workflows such as sprints.
Reduced turnover from less-stressed employees who feel more empowered and engaged at work.
Conducting this ROI calculation requires a bit of effort, but it increases the likelihood that companies can point to tangible business benefits from their Copilot investment.
How to ensure users take advantage of Copilot
User training is the best way to ensure a successful Copilot experience.
User training is the best way to ensure a successful Copilot experience. Users must know what Copilot can and can't do, and how to properly structure prompts to get the biggest benefit from Copilot's capabilities.
In several of my research interviews, I've heard stories of early users expecting Copilot to create content that it's not yet capable of creating. Often these experiences, based on unrealistic expectations, lead users to conclude there's no value in Copilot and they don't make any additional effort to use it.
However, organizations that take the time to educate users on how to create prompts are likely to discover the most value in using Copilot.
Irwin Lazar is President and Principal Analyst at Metrigy, where he leads coverage on the digital workplace. His research focus includes unified communications, VoIP, video conferencing and team collaboration.
