EP 411: Copilot Pages - Is this the future of collaborative work?

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Sometimes we think of Generative AI as an individual thing, right? How can you increase your own productivity? How can you get your. Your job done faster, better, and, you know, more efficiently? But I think the conversation around that is starting to change a little bit. And what has just been announced here at Microsoft Ignite in Chicago, I think is adding to that conversation that Generative AI and Microsoft Copilot isn't necessarily a personal product. I think this is a team sport. And what we're going to be talking about today is really how you can use different Microsoft Copilot products, specifically Copilot pages, to make AI yeah. More of a. More of a multiplayer sport. All right, I'm excited to talk about that and a lot more today on Everyday AI. What's going on, y'?

All?

My name is Jordan Wilson. I'm the host of Everyday AI and we're a daily live stream podcast and free daily newsletter helping everyday people not just learn what's happening in the world of AI, but how we can all actually leverage it to grow our companies and to grow our careers. If that sounds like you, you are definitely in the right place if you're on the podcast. Thank you for joining. Make sure to check out your show notes, as always, where we're going to have a lot of information that you need to know as well as our website at your everydayai.com where we will be recapping today's conversation in our daily newsletter livestream. Audience, thank you for joining. You can tell, maybe you can hear what you're. We're in a different spot, not in the normal studio. We are live here at Microsoft Ignite. So if you want to know the daily news, you're not going to get it here on this podcast. That's going to be in the newsletter. But enough chit chat. I am excited today to talk about Copilot pages and if it's actually the future of collaborative work, don't worry, it's not me that you have to listen to the whole time. I actually have someone very smart from Microsoft to help us all better understand this.

So.

So please help me in welcoming Derek Snyder, the senior Director of Microsoft 365 Apps at Microsoft. So, Derek, thank you so much for joining the Everyday AI Show.

Real pleasure. Thank you for having me.

All right, I'm excited for this one. Can you just tell our audience a little Bit about what you do in your role at Microsoft.

Yeah, so my team is responsible for product marketing of the Microsoft 365 apps. You might know them better as the Office apps. So Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, some of the apps that people use every single day. And lately my team has been spending a lot of time thinking about how to reinvent those apps for the era of AI, and specifically bringing Copilot into each and every one of them.

Yeah, and speaking of Copilot, it's been Copilot everywhere. It's been AI everywhere, agents everywhere at this year's Microsoft Ignite. Can you tell us a little bit what is new in Copilot pages? Because there were like I don't know, 90 some updates that were just announced this week. So what's new in Copilot Pages?

Yeah, so I will just say, you know, Copilot Pages is brand new altogether. We announced it in September, but in AI years, that's like many, many decades ago. But what we, what we found I think and was a key kind of insights we had at the beginning was people were more and more using LLM, hopefully Copilot, but ChatGPT, other LLMs and then they were taking whatever that content that was being produced and moving it into other places that they put it in the Word Docs or they're putting it in Notepad or whatever. I mean, just to have a scratch pad on the side. Because often what AI produces is useful but still needs to be iterated on and kind of move forward. And more importantly, it does need to be shared with colleagues, especially if you're using it to work on something. So for instance, you're brainstorming on what we're gonna call our breakout session, for instance, this year at Ignite. That's totally, as you said, a team sport. And so we had this insight that people really do tend to move things into a scratch pad and we thought there was an opportunity to do that actually in the product. So when you're using Copilot today, you're asking questions of Copilot. You can click create a page or edit in page and it will actually populate all the output of Copilot in a side by side page. So you have your Copilot on the left, you have your page on the right, and it dumps all of the output and includes the original prompt. And what's really cool is that anybody that actually gets access to that page, because they can be shared, can click that prompt and then it deep links back to the original query that you had at the beginning. So it creates this really beautiful loop, actually where you're using AI, your colleagues can actually retrace your steps and the kind of questions that you started with and then contribute as well. Because the page itself is like any other interactive canvas. Think about it as same as a Word document where people can contribute in, they can comment, they can, they can put lots of rich formatting, pictures, interactive diagrams, et cetera. But really reinvented for the modern age.

Yeah, and Derek, I'm glad you brought up that, yeah, like Copilot Pages is actually brand, brand new. Right. Let alone what was just announced, you know, 24 hours ago at Ignite here. So, yeah, with the wave two announcements in September, you know, that's when I think, you know, a lot of us, at least, that don't work at Microsoft, kind of caught wind of what the future of work in Microsoft Copilot could look like. But maybe just like. Yeah. Before we dive into some of the specifics, let's zoom out even more and talk about. Because I'm sure for a lot of our audience, I've heard a lot that people are interested, but they haven't really kind of dove all the way in to Copilot Pages yet. So when should people be using Copilot Pages versus should they start something in Microsoft Word? Should they be using Loop? Right. There's so many places where, where a content journey can begin, where it can be finished. When should they be using pages versus when should they be using something else in 365?

Yeah, I mean, ideally, and ultimately the answer is going to be you should use AI and specifically Copilot in any of the experiences that you want. So we have built a general Copilot set of capabilities that are available inside of all the apps. So, for instance, if you open Microsoft Word and you asked it to create meeting notes and then you referenced meetings, because those meetings are available as grounding for any Microsoft Word Copilot query. It would do that. You could ask BizChat to actually do the exact same thing and it would produce output that then you could dump into a Copilot page. So there's an example of you being able to do exactly the same thing in two different experiences. So really is choose your own adventure, I would say. Currently, I tend to use Copilot Pages more for the ideation and iteration that ultimately leads to sort of that next step. For instance, when I'm brainstorming with my team around various avenues that we want to pursue, perhaps we're working on A product launch, we are able to pull together information into a Copilot page, and we're able to use that as a bigger container for all the other potential documents and files that we want. So, for instance, in a Copilot page, not only can you move in all the content from Copilot, so if you're asking questions about your business data and it's pulling answers, you know, like, tell me all the things that we discussed in the last five meetings about Ignite. Biz Chat would be able to answer that, and I'd be able to move that over. Perhaps we're thinking about our next ignite. Hey, what were the big themes from last year? Biz Chat would be great at actually pulling that up. I can start moving that into a Copilot page. But what's really cool about a Copilot page is I can also start embedding other documents and files. So I can embed all the PowerPoint files that we actually used. Here's all of the major breakout session decks that we actually had at the event from last year. Now they're embedded inside of the Copilot page. And so it becomes this one sort of artifact that everybody can work from. Think of it as like a scrapbook, if you will, that's live and it's dynamic and it's always available for people to be able to reference. And because. And if your audience is familiar with the work we've done on loop, it's actually built on the loupe technology, which means that anything that I put into that Copilot page can then be shared, but not as a link the way you would with other files, but actually as this live we call component. So I can literally create content inside of Copilot pages. I can copy it as a component, and then when I paste it into Outlook or to teams or any of their canvases that actually support it, and it will actually show up as a live dynamic artifact. And so you can imagine a situation where, hey, we're still working on some ideas for the launch plan. We're going to go ahead and send an email, though, to the entire team with the component that has all of our ideas. And we're going to say, you know what, we'll be adding to these overnight, so you don't have to wait. You can share things that are work in progress. That, to me, feels very different than producing a Word document, where I think you actually have a beginning and an end. Sure.

What I mean, yeah, there's like a finality to a. To a Word document.

Almost you're producing it. Yes. With something in mind. Okay, okay.

So, you know, one thing that you mentioned there a couple of minutes ago is almost this, you know, kind of dual pane workflow, because I think when people, you know, have traditionally worked with, you know, large language models like ChatGPT, you know, those that, you know, came a little bit before Copilot launched, it's almost like, yeah, you just chat with chat GPT or something like that, but then that content just lives there and then it's hard to find. And you know, if you do want to collaborate, you have to copy and paste everything and put it into a collaboration tool to actually work with your colleagues on that. Do you see? Right when we talk about, you know, the, the future of work. And I know that's, you know, probably a very cliched, you know, statement by now, but it, is it almost working in this like dual pain environment where you have your own thing going on in Copilot or Biz Chat, and then once it's finalized, quote unquote, it goes into this working canvas with your teammates. Is that just kind of how we're all going to be working in the future? Are you still running in circles trying to figure out how to actually grow your business with AI? Maybe your company has been tinkering with large language models for a year or more, but can't really get traction to find ROI on gen AI. Hey, this is Jordan Wilson, host of this very podcast. Companies like Adobe, Microsoft and Nvidia have partnered with us because they trust our expertise in educating the masses around generative AI to get ahead. And some of the most innovative companies in the country hire us to help with their AI strategy and to train hundreds of their employees on how to use Gen AI. So whether you're looking for ChatGPT training for thousands or just need help building your front end AI strategy, you, you can partner with us too. Just like some of the biggest companies in the world do. Go to your everydayai.com partner to get in contact with our team or you can just click on the partner section of our website. We'll help you stop running in those AI circles and help get your team ahead and build a straight path to ROI on gen.

Yeah, I, I certainly think that is. No one has the right answers yet, by the way. I think that the, the final paradigms are going to reveal themselves through how people actually start to find value in these things. But yeah, I think that actually is a path that we're heading down with Copilot pages. I think Our general strategy is to make AI accessible as broadly as possible. So if you want to use Microsoft Word or PowerPoint or Excel, you're going to be able to have a copilot that's going to show up in the sidecar, but the hero is still the document, the spreadsheet, et cetera. I think in the case of copilot pages, it is much more of a shared experience where you're collaborating side by side. As you say, split screen. On the left you have copilot and you're using that and you're getting insights, you're finding things out, you're working with the AI, and on the right, you're depositing those things for safekeeping and you're continuing to collaborate with your team. And I think I find myself personally going back and forth much more versus when I use it in the other applications. I might start with a prompt like, say, inside of PowerPoint, I'm grounding out a word dot. Create me a beautiful spreadsheet based on this Word document. You know, design it specifically for IT administrators. It's great at doing those kind of things, but it, it completes the task and then I am able to sort of move forward. Whereas where the copilot pages, I think you'll continue to sort of iterate and it'll become much more of a canvas that'll become this living document for people.

Yeah, I think canvas is a great way to explain it. Right. Because it is, you know, kind of a work of art, you know, a work in progress that multiple people can be collaborating on. Can you talk about that? You know, I kind of opened up today's show by saying, I think a lot of people have this viewpoint of AI that it's your own thing. Right. It's almost like this is what I do with. With my AI is. Is. Is my business. And then once I'm done, once it's finished, then I take it to others. How does copilot pages change that and make AI more collaborative?

Yeah, I mean, I think I just again, to zoom out. I think we're actually going to operate in both modes. So I think initially, as we, as you pointed out, we launched Copilot and it was a assistant for you, and we continue to offer that. So when you join a meeting late, you can ask Copilot all the questions that you don't want anybody to know that you're asking, like who is this guy that's talking and what is the subject of this meeting? And things like that. That will remain the case. We will always Have a private copilot for you. But more and more we are building through agents as well as through things like copilot pages, the ability to introduce AI into the group. And it's a very, very clear delineation like that. We are not mixing those UX metaphors. You know, the user experience is going to remain quite distinct. So, for instance, in that same meeting, if you click the notes button, which is a button that is available to everyone because there should really only be one set of meeting notes, it's okay if you have personal, but like, there should be an agreed upon. Like, this actually is what happened.

This is what happened.

Yeah, yeah. This is a shared collection. In that case, we have a meeting agent that will actually operate over top of those notes. And so everybody can watch is the meeting agent. Actually we call it a facilitator, starts to actually populate notes that everybody can see. But it's very obvious that copilot is in that experience and it's providing this value. And so in this case, the agent, in the same way, copilot pages are for you personal by default. And so when I create a copilot page based on the questions that I'm asking, those are all personal. It's not until I actually mention somebody on that page that then you get a prompt to say, do you want to share with this person? Do you want to notify them that they've been, you know, this page has been shared with them. That's when it flips into a multiplayer experience. So I think we try to blur the lines in terms of you being able to do the same types of things in the same user experience. But we want to make it as clear as possible when the AI is providing value for everyone versus just for you individually. Yeah.

So I like, I remember watching the Wave two announcement, right. When at least I first heard about copilot pages, and it seemed like almost foreign to me, yet at the same time felt very much like a home that I wanted to be a part of. Right. Because you could see, you know, in the demo video, it looks so shiny and so seamless and. And so quick. But you can really see how different individuals can take advantage of copilot and then bring, you know, the best of their kind of augmented version of themselves. Right. Because everyone probably, or presumably is whatever they're contributing to this canvas, they're probably using their own brain, but also their own copilot.

Right.

So, you know, I'm wondering, you know, kind of when you talk about this first, first iteration of copilot pages because it is very new. You know, what does success look like for your team in terms of, you know, is it changing how everyone works? Is it, you know, getting good metrics back? You know, I'm always curious, you know, from the people who build it, right? What does success for Copilot pages even look like?

Yeah, well, I mean, of course, like when we launch any product, we want people to use and find value in the product. And the value comes in multiple ways. You know, initially, I think we realized that AI generally provides lots of productivity gains for people. They save time. It takes in many cases, the drudgery out of work, just the coordination tax and things like that. AI can do a lot. And copilot can specifically help with all of the, you know, sort of the time savings pieces. But of course, people also want to see business impact. They want to, you know, increase their revenue, they want to reduce their costs. Where I think that Copilot pages potentially can add a lot of value is to start to be in the midst of a lot of your business processes. And so I talked about it earlier, like the whole budget process is a very, very time consuming process right now. And it goes across multiple documents and meetings and things like that. And now what you have with copilot is the ability to reason across all of that. And so you imagine you have a number of budget meetings, you have a number of documents, you have a number of files, you can now ask very general questions, or you can actually task copilot to create a schedule that you need to work back from and, and then have all of that templatized inside of a copilot page. So everybody's now able to contribute. Here are the things, here are my budget asks, here is how it actually falls short or not of the budget number that we have. And this is where some of the news from this week, which we haven't gotten to yet, it can dynamically create charts and graphs. And so it's very easy even within that same pane of glass to be able to understand visually things like how we're actually tracking against budget. So, so we're finding ourselves, I think, in this new way of working, potentially having people have to spend less time popping between different apps and spending more time really in the flow of work.

All right, that's a good point, because we haven't gone into the details yet. You know, we are here at Microsoft Ignite, so we gotta talk about what's actually new. So I might be missing a couple of things, but let's talk about it because we have the rich artifacts, we have the multi page grounded on page content mobile. Right. I probably missed a thing or two. But what do all of these new announcements and new functionalities to Copilot pages, how does this change how people can use the product and what they can accomplish?

Yeah, I mean, so for the connoisseurs that have been using this so far in the couple months that it's been available, you know, one of the things that we heard from customers is that they don't want to have to create a new page for every single session. You know, so if I'm, you know, using biz chat, answering a bunch of questions later in the day, I have a new business chat conversation, I want to potentially be able to take that output and put it all on the same page or not create a totally new page. In the past we tied the Biz chat sort of query with a page. It was kind of a one to one match. Now you can actually make that decision on your own. So you can put lots of prompts and lots of responses on the same page. You can make a new page every time. So that's the multi page support. It's one of those small things that becomes very important as you use this in the real world. The second big thing was really around creating the support for rich artifacts. So people today, we have found, are putting more and more visuals inside of Copilot pages, but they don't want them to be static. So if you want to add charts and graphs, say you're copying from Excel, or better yet, you're asking BizChat to actually pull the latest data on revenue and growth. You want that to come out in a way where the data is actually preserved. You don't want a picture of the graph. You want to be able to have an actual graph that's interactive, that has all the data behind it, so that when somebody else, because it's a multiplayer experience, is using that same page and sees that beautiful graph, they can then take out certain things they don't want to see. They can add things to it, they can ask it to be updated. Keeping again these artifacts, as we're calling them, live and dynamic again contributes to this tradition that we came from, which is we want these to be living documents. They have to continue to be up to date, they have to be dynamic, we have to be able to add things to them over time. And this is just another piece of that. And at the same time, they're not just going to be text, they're going to be really great visually appealing assets that you'll have.

Yeah. And hey, if you're listening to this and it's blowing your mind, you're not alone. Derek's doing a great job of expanding, explaining everything and how it works. But we will, in our newsletter, be sharing some, you know, screenshots, probably some videos to some tutorials, because it is, I think, a kind of a radical shift in how you can both work individually and with your teammates. But Derek, I have another question. You know, we've been hearing a lot on this word grounded, right. Both here at Ignite, which I think is good because we need to be talking about grounded models or grounded approaches. But it seems like now Copilot pages can be grounded in the information on that page. Can you explain what that means and what that does for trust and transparency?

Yes. So grounding when we talk about it is the ability for copilot or any other AI agent that we offer as Microsoft, the ones I'm talking about that we produce that are out of the box, if you will, the ability for that copilot or agent to have a shared understanding of all of your work context. Now, what is your work context? That would be the people that you work with. So it understands the org chart, it knows who your manager is, it knows who your colleagues are, it knows who works for you. This is really important because if I, in a company of 300,000 people say, give me the latest from Zoe, it needs to know, yes, it's the Zoe that works for you, not the hundred other Zoe's that are at the company as an example. So that's really important context. Another big area is really all of your meetings. Now we record and transcribe many of our meetings so those become like any other document. They are a record of decisions and all of the context again around topics and areas of focus. So that's an important thing. But then of course also your files, your files from OneDrive, which are personal to you, so they're only going to be respected in terms of permissions for you to see. But also the files that are shared on SharePoint. And again, in large companies there is a massive repository of information. I mean, anytime you want to know whether or not Martin Luther King Day is a holiday or like that exists on some SharePoint site somewhere. So it's really helpful to be able to access that by just asking a simple question. So we have all of this stuff that is contributing to what we call the Microsoft graph. And so when I talk about Copilot being grounded, it's really having that context. So let me put this into an example. So yesterday I actually have a breakout session tomorrow here at the conference. And so yesterday I asked Copilot and I said, create a script for BRK 285. That's all I put. Now what does Copilot need to know? It needs to know that BRK285 is the name of my breakout session. Like that's the code. It needs to know that that breakout session is part of this conference called Ignite. It needs to know that there is, in this case I am the speaker, but there's also a co speaker. And so it needs to be able to see the titles and descriptions and all this stuff that is a perfect use case for grounding because it was able to respond not only with all that information, it was able to produce a script that was actually very well aligned because it saw the session title and description. It knew of all the meetings that I had as a pre briefing where they're like, Derek, this is what we think you should discuss and everything else. It had all that context of all the things people were suggesting to me and then it had a whole corpus of other slides and files that it could pull on. So when the title and description that it had access to said you should talk about Microsoft Planner, it then was able to also find all of the documents we have about Microsoft Planner, what's new in Microsoft Planner, what demo scripts are available and it was able to compose all that into one output. And guess what? I then put it into a page and I shared it with my co presenter and we were able to iterate from there.

Yeah, I think what you just described there probably really resonated with people because that's a common pain point.

Right.

Especially you know, if you haven't used, you know, Copilot across, you know, Microsoft 365 copilot, or if maybe you're just working more in a quote unquote offline, you know, AI environment like ChatGPT with static files. Right. Because you have to spend so much time explaining that context. Whereas, you know, with something like Copilot pages being grounded, you save so much time and get so much better results. That's right. So Derek, we've talked about a lot in today's conversation. I could talk to you for hours, but we got to keep this a little concise. Right? Because I know you're a busy guy. But as we wrap up today's show, as we're talking about Copilot pages and how we can really change the future of collaborative kind of human to human AI work, as you said. You know what's maybe the most important takeaway that you have out there for business leaders, decision makers who are seeing all these announcements and seeing all these exciting innovations? What's your takeaway message for them to actually get the most out of it?

Well, I'll just say the world has changed, right? So in the last several years, we've moved into a world where we don't know for sure our colleagues are all going to be in the same physical space as us. We certainly don't know that they're on the same time zone or in the same geographic area. And so what does that meant? A real acceleration, I think, in the amount of asynchronous work that we do. And so asynchronous work is trend one, trend two, I would say, is the rise of AI and being able to use copilot, hopefully as a real collaborator to get things done. So what do I think these two things mean for each other? I think that the work that happens now is going to be much less structured in the future and it's going to be much more collaborative and it's going to be much more time shifted. And I think that the real opportunity for business leaders is to recognize that and see that as a feature, not a bug. I think there is an opportunity for us to now start thinking for the first time in terms of outcomes we want to achieve, rather than all the inputs that need to go into that. So classic example is, okay, I need to go into PowerPoint to create a sales deck because we have this customer meeting. Well, the outcome is I want to win the business. And I would encourage leaders to spend time experimenting with Copilot and other AI solutions as well to find out, wow, could I work with it towards that outcome? I want to win the business. Could it construct a plan for me? Could it give me best practices? If you're using copilot, could it be leveraging all of the existing knowledge that already exists in my organization and all the things I've done in the past to actually accelerate me towards that goal? And I think that's a really, really important shift. And if we can leverage it, I think it will accelerate our transition towards more intent centric work, which I think is the future.

I think that was such a great way to wrap today's show, talking about a shift in your mindset, because that's important, to take advantage of the shift in the way that you can accomplish it, right? With all of the new features and functionalities inside Copilot pages that we just talked about. So, Derek, thank you so much for joining the Everyday AI Show. We really appreciate your time.

This was a lot of fun. Thanks, Jordan.

All right, y'. All, that was a ton. Is anyone else's brain exploding with ideas and energy or is it just me? All right, if you missed anything or if you're like, wait, what was that? We've got it. Don't worry. Yeah, maybe you have your co pilot attending this, this live stream or this podcast, but if you don't, we we're going to recap it all for you. So make sure you go to your everyday. Sign up for the free daily newsletter. We're going to be sharing a lot more helpful resources on everything that Derek was able to share with us as well as we have so much more information and other interviews and episodes that really just took place at Microsoft Ignite here in Chicago. So thank you for tuning in and hope to see you back tomorrow and every day for more Everyday AI. Thanks, y'. All.

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