Impact of Copilots In The Workspace: A Point of View From Industry Experts

A few months ago, I wrote about Engage 2023 – Coforge’s client event in Orlando, FL that focused on educating the audience on the power of Generative AI. One of my key takeaways was that the power of AI is in ‘Human+’, i.e. technology augmenting human capabilities to produce better outcomes.

Cut to January 2024, we concluded an internal Client Services Group Workshop in Princeton, NJ. Among various internal sessions around planning, budgeting, and target-setting for the upcoming fiscal year, there were sessions by key strategic partners that showcased new features and functionality from their roadmap.

Among all these sessions, there was one that stood out for me. It was by Nicole Toch and Mike Ziroli of Microsoft. They introduced us to the work that their company was doing in the domain of copilots. There is a suite of copilots already in existence to help you with all sorts of daily tasks like searching the internet, creating a PowerPoint presentation, writing code and even exercising your creative skills.

This concept struck home a couple of weekends ago.

I was chatting with a first-year analyst at a commercial real estate (CRE) finance firm in New York. She said it had been six months since she joined and had barely any interaction with her immediate supervisor. What she knew about her job, she learned from a senior analyst.

She was responsible for underwriting CRE loans, which meant that she was reviewing loan application packages and extracting relevant data that was then entered into an underwriting model in Excel.

To myself, I thought, GenAI could extract the relevant data fields from the loan packages and load them into an Excel model. What does this young lady need to do to continue to add value to her job? I immediately advised her to go to YouTube and look up some videos on Excel copilots. But it also got me thinking.

What if she had her own copilot to help her navigate the extremely complex area of CRE financing?

This then got me thinking about what happens when this technology becomes ubiquitous.

How will it impact the workspace?

• • Leveling the playing field
    
    More than 20 years ago, I was fresh out of business school and working in a corporate finance job. A couple of my colleagues were Excel wizards. Their ability to create and navigate across financial models using just keyboard shortcuts coupled with their ability to create macros, made them far quicker than me.
    
    An M365 Copilot would have taken away that Excel skill advantage. I was amazed to see that using just natural language prompts, you could analyze and ‘interrogate’ enormous amounts of data, create ‘what-if’ scenarios, add conditional formatting, and package up your analysis into a presentation or email for someone else to review.
    
    The old Excel gurus will now have to find new skills to show off. The new gurus will be the ones who understand the data and domain and engineer the best prompts.
    
    
  • Productivity boosters
    
    

    Have you sometimes wished there were two of you or ever wished for more hours in a day?
    
    Well, your wish has come true.

    Microsoft’s Copilots for Outlook and Teams are steps in that direction.

    If you are double-booked for a meeting, you can have your copilot attend one and provide you with a summary of the meeting, and action items and even let you know if your name came up in the meeting.

    If you want to drill down into a specific item, you can ask clarifying questions and your copilot will provide responses from the context of the meeting. You can use copilot in a live meeting to summarize the proceedings, understand where participants stand on an issue, and identify unresolved issues.

    The Outlook Copilot can scan your inbox, identify priority items, summarize email threads, and draft responses including data from other sources like Excel. You will literally have no more excuses for being tardy with email.
    

• • Crunch learning cycles
    
    

Imagine you are a new joiner at a firm. In addition to a human mentor, you are assigned a copilot to help you navigate the firm’s processes, systems, and knowledge management repository.

Being able to access help from ‘someone’ 24/7 whose sole purpose is to assist you, would be such a kickstart to your learning experience. You have no reason to feel shy or worry that you are taking up too much time away from your mentor’s day job.

Ideally, your entire firm’s knowledge bank is just a question away. It’s one way to mitigate the risk of a disinterested supervisor. But there is still an element of ‘feel’ that can only be learned from experience and others.

• • Boon or Bane?
    
    

While they did not go into details, Nicole and Mike showed us a range of possibilities when it comes to copilots. Since I don’t write code or create reports, my views on the utility of the GitHub Copilot and PowerBI Copilot are limited.

I do see a tremendous productivity impact as users spend less time worrying about the ‘how’ and focus more on the ‘what’ and the ‘why’.

But what does that mean for the employee and the company of the future? Does it mean that employees will work less hours but do more impactful work? Or will the humans in us just try to slack off more? Will companies need smaller workforces? How will companies identify and train new talent? Will work be less error-prone? Will customer experience go up or down? Is there an inflection point after which you may no longer need further contact with other human co-workers? Ok, that last one was a bit dystopian. But there are more questions than answers at this stage.

In an interview with a16z’s Bob Swan, Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott likens the advent of copilots to ‘the start of an industrial revolution for knowledge work’.

Just as new machinery, new sources of energy, and the factory model drove rapid productivity growth and competitive advantage for Great Britain around the 18^th century, firms that quickly embrace the use of copilots today will reap massive productivity benefits very rapidly.

So, what’s next for you? Read up on how copilots are adding value to organizations here at Microsoft Copilot, begin the adoption process and experiment with these capabilities in a sandbox environment, or talk to us about organizing a workshop to help you unlock the possibilities of Microsoft GenAI and Copilots at your organization.

About Coforge

Coforge is a global digital services and solutions provider, that leverages emerging technologies and deep domain expertise to deliver real-world business impact for its clients. A focus on very select industries, a detailed understanding of the underlying processes of those industries, and partnerships with leading platforms provide us with a distinct perspective. Coforge leads with its product engineering approach and leverages Cloud, Data, Integration, and Automation technologies to transform client businesses into intelligent, high-growth enterprises. Coforge’s proprietary platforms power critical business processes across its core verticals. The firm has a presence in 21 countries with 26 delivery centers across nine countries.

For more information on Coforge, please visit www.coforge.com