Copilot in OneDrive: A Copilot for your files

co-pilot is going to be com into one drive for those users licensed with co-pilot for Microsoft 365 in April this follows on from one drive big one drive 3.0 set of announcements last fall and it's the start of us seeing the AI integration that was promised then so let's take a look at what's coming when what the features and limitations of this first release will be and what they might mean to us in the wider context of the ongoing development of the co-pilot product line but before we dive in a quick introduction my name is Nick dorsy I'm the owner of bright ideas agency a digital transformation consulting company focused on the needs of small and medium-sized businesses I share information here to help you navigate the artificial intelligence age with a particular focus on Microsoft 365 and co-pilot if you enjoy what you see here then it would be great if you'd give the video a like to help it get in front of more people and please subscribe to the channel if you want to keep up to speed on topics such as this if you're like me then you probably have most of your files stored in one drive but just because they're stored there doesn't mean you are accessing the one drive app or perhaps better described as the one drive UI that exists on the web every day I open files from my office apps or from my synced one drive folder on my windows PCS and the default save location for all my files is one drive but in all honesty I only really open one drive on the web for specific Edge use cases I know though that there are increasing numbers of people particularly those who didn't grow up on the windows-based file and folder Paradigm for whom this web-based file access is just a normal part of their workflow drop me a comment down below to tell me how you use one drive I'm interested to see just how many one drive users really do use the one drive web app regularly the AI experiences we're talking about here are exclusively in the one drive web interface or one drive in teams so even though there has been talk of giving Windows a more integrated user experience for one drive that is more like the web I wouldn't hold my breath for co-pilot for one drive to make an appearance in your Windows File Explorer anytime soon which in my opinion is a shame in the one drive app on the web or the one drive experience in teams you're going to start to see a handful of new AI powered capabilities if you're co-pilot for Microsoft 365 licensed user first you'll be able to chat with co-pilot about your content much as you can with Microsoft 365 chat right now the example given focuses on pulling sales numbers out of files in the chat and then contining to ask questions about those responses one question here that isn't answered by the demo videos or by the announcement blog post is what the scope of search for contextual information is my assumption is that it's going to be the semantic index wide scope that we see in Microsoft 365 chat giving it access to resources outside of one drive such as emails or indexed items from third party sources if you've enabled graph connectors however that isn't clear here and if that's not the case the scope is purely files in one drive this feature could be problematic as ensuring users understand those distinctions is going to be tough next we see an example that I think is going to be a very valuable feature the user selects a bunch of files and uses them as context data driving the natural language request in copilot we can already do this with Microsoft 365 chat but the interface to select files is not as clear as this and the use case suggested of selecting a bunch of similar files to work through makes a lot of sense however it's unclear what the capacity limits on this would be as I don't know if youve tried to hire lately but the idea you just get four resumés rather than 40 or 400 seems a little far-fetched and for the use case like this unless it can work with a realistic scale it's not going to be super useful another automated AI based processing is probably going to be more applicable however even if it cannot scale I could see this as really useful for other types of work for example if you have multiple files related to a similar project or customer this type of interface makes it far easier to ensure you're not missing anything in your context that you might miss inadvertently using the interface that we have elsewhere I wonder if this capability will give us the ability to select folders as well as individual files we'll have to wait to see one of the things highlighted in the announcement is that co-piloting one drive can work with a wider range of files this is great but what's somewhat confusing is this list of file extensions is somewhat different than those that are listed as being indexed by the co-pilot semantic index so it's unclear what is going on here is the indexing going to change so more files are going to be available to co-pilot generally or is something else going on in one drive unfortunately I can find no reference to explain this inconsistency so if you know something I don't please drop a comment below co-pilot in one drive is also stated as being available in the file viewer in Microsoft teams one drive and SharePoint though it's not immediately clear whether other aspects of this experience will come to SharePoint at the same time and frankly if you've already been using Edge with co-pilot or Windows co-pilot a very similar experience is already available to what's shown here although one little Easter egg that leads to a th questions is that the interface has shown also suggests you can open and reference different files in the context of viewing the one that's open we'll need to wait to work out what possibilities this adds as right now this is not something you can do in for example word when asking questions of a document with co-pilot last and available starting this month will be the ability to have co-pilot at a file summary when you share a file I can't say I have much experience of sharing files out of the blue with someone where they haven't already received context of why it's being shared from perhaps a meeting or an email but I guess some people are looking for this I imagine if the sender but not the receiver has a co-pilot license then perhaps this is a beneficial value ad are you wanting to get more from AI as a business user a business owner or someone with responsibilities somewhere in between are you confused about what products you need or how to implement them safely or just why these AI tools work the way they do it makes sense this is a confusing time with lots of change and a completely new paradigm of work coming to the four but I can help start with my ond demand video Course fly into the age of co-pilots available on my website and for an introductory period it's completely free learn the basics of the impact of AI on small and medium-sized businesses and how to move forward safely if you need more depth consider my book who's in the co-pilot seat a guide book for small and mediumsized Business Leaders on the implementation of AI and if you need support that's more customized to your needs I offer a range of coaching training and project services from booking me for an hour of AI focused business coaching to long-term adoption projects links for all these options are down below the fact that this set of features get announced as a new co-pilot in one drive in my opinion says more about how Microsoft organizes its product development than about these features themselves a more accurate telling of what's going on here in my opinion is that Microsoft is turning on a Microsoft 365 chat interface inside the one drive UI with a couple of extra bells and whistles driven by the unique properties of that view as well as a couple of features turned off this in itself in my opinion is a far more exciting telling of this development as it's my view that one of the foundational limitations of co-pilot in ABS word or PowerPoint is that when you open the co-pilot interface panel you don't get a full-featured Microsoft 365 chat experience that allows you to connect with any data inside Microsoft 365 you get an experience strictly limited by the context Microsoft thinks you should have imagine if when you had a presentation open in PowerPoint you could for example prompt co-pilot to add a slide based on what Megan said about project risks in our last project stakeholder meeting this in my experience is how ideation and work iteration operates in most workplaces and right now it's completely outside the bounds of co-pilot's capabilities if co-pilot in one drive is going to start us down a path of more generally connected co-pilot experiences across the app ecosystem then that would be a major benefit for every user and completely remap the potential of co-pilot to assist with a lot of high value work processes it's also interesting to see in these demos what appears to be missing for example despite this being an experience sold around files none of the co-pilot responses we saw give you the ability to initiate the creation of a file going back to the first video demos of what co-pilot would deliver from 12 months ago we see the suggestion of taking co-pilot responses and moving them to apps seamlessly but this is still something that is generally lacking I've actually seen this capability pop up for me exactly once When using Microsoft 365 chat so it's in there somewhere but just not generally turned on it seems why would you create a table of skills and experiences of people from their resumés as shown in these demos for example if not to put that information in an email or a spreadsheet or even Microsoft list this basic capability has existed in co-pilot the old being chat for a long time and would be a massive upgrade across co-pilot for Microsoft 365 co-pilot for Microsoft 365 is an incredibly exciting set of products I use every day I definitely gain back much more than the $30 cost of subscribing every month in added productivity through using these tools and I believe that this is probably equally the case for pretty much any knowledge worker but in instead of having one clear approachable message around co-pilot and its development Microsoft continues to Push Messaging around a random collection of co-pilots where it is very difficult to track what exactly is an idea what is an announced upcoming feature and what should now be turned on in the product end users administrators and business decision makers need a consistent set of information in order to make decisions and do their work and I think in the excitement of various product teams across Microsoft wanting to shout about the new features in their pet product the reality that no one outside of Microsoft is thinking about these products in these highly separated ways is just being missed I would hate to see confused communication having negative impact on people's appetites for a great product but I fear the complexity of trying to keep track of all this is taking a all overall co-pilot for one drive is exciting but also it creates a lot of questions and does it need its own excited announcement outside of the context of just another co-pilot for Microsoft 365 feature update absolutely not what do you think let me know down in the comments thanks for watching through to the end until the next video bye-bye

Channel: Bright Ideas Agency

Views: 2,631

Keywords: microsoft 365, microsoft copilot, microsoft 365 copilot, microsoft ai, generative ai, copilot for work, microsoft teams, microsoft copilot tutorial, onedrive, microsoft onedrive, copilot in onedrive, copilot for onedrive, onedrive copilot, copilot onedrive, m365, copilot for microsoft 365, m365 copilot, microsoft 365 chat, business chat, copilot in teams, copilot for sharepoint

Id: yypJudCFd3A

Length: 12min 2sec (722 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 07 2024