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Since announcing last month Microsoft’s generative AI-powered 365 Copilot — which was described as changing “work as we know it,” the company has been integrating the technology into its other applications.
Today, Microsoft announced that it has added Copilot to Vivathe employee engagement and experience platform that launched in February 2021 and was part of a bet on the future of remote working. Now the company is capitalizing on the power of generative AI in Viva: According to a blog post, Copilot in Viva is “built on top of the Microsoft 365 Copilot system, to give leaders a whole new way to understand and engage their workforce.”
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Microsoft 365 Copilot combines OpenAI’s GPT-4 with Microsoft Graph data (from your calendar, emails, chats, documents, meetings) and Microsoft 365 apps, including Teams, Word, Outlook, and Excel. The company said Copilot in Microsoft Viva will be rolling out to customers later this year.
Microsoft Copilot in Viva streamlines communication with staff
New Microsoft research released today, the Work Trend Index Special Report, found that high employee engagement is associated with stronger financial performance and that employee engagement is an important component of overall performance. According to the research, companies with highly engaged employees focus on clarity through intentional employee communication and goal setting, and use data to build a powerful “feedback flywheel” to continuously improve over time .
That’s where AI comes in: According to a company blog post, the new Copilot features for Viva focus on streamlining staff communications and creating better organizational alignment.
For example, Copilot in Viva Goals can build OKR recommendations based on existing Word documents, summarize the status of OKRs, identify roadblocks, and suggest next steps. Viva Engage with Copilot can help post ideas for corporate intranet pages, and Copilot in Viva Glint, which analyzes employee feedback and will be added to the platform in July, can help summarize thousands of employee survey comments.
About 20 million people actively use Viva every month – the platform’s tools are used within Microsoft Teams and other web-based and mobile experiences.
“We think it’s important to build Copilot into the workflow,” said Kirk Koenigsbauer, CVP and COO of the Experiences and Devices group at Microsoft. “You want the experience to be there [in the application].”
Bringing the ‘commercial rigor’ that organizations want
Microsoft 365 Copilot runs through the company Open AI deployment built on Azure, which Koenigsbauer says provides the “commercial rigor” organizations want: the compliance, management, and security capabilities.
“That’s essential for these organizations because they don’t want their data on the public internet,” he said. “We promise that the data people use as prompts in these Copilot experiences will never enter the large language model and will not be used to train the large language model at all. It doesn’t hang around as customer data and doesn’t leak outside the organization. This is a really big problem.”
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