Microsoft's Copilot AI was designed from the start to be your on-device companion, boosting productivity and making your PC and software as easy to use as possible. While Copilot's AI has undoubtedly delivered some time-saving tools that are genuinely worth testing out, not everyone takes advantage.

In the corporate world, where these tools might deliver an edge over the competition, your boss wants to know if, how, and when you're using them. Your boss also wants to see if you're keeping up with the competition, both internally and externally.

That corporate dream just became a reality thanks to a new feature rolling out for Microsoft's Copilot Dashboard in Viva Insights (via ITPro). With this addition, which Microsoft has named Benchmarks, Copilot can now make more sense of relevant data to track AI adoption rates at your company.

Not only can Benchmarks help compare Copilot usage internally at a company, but it can also compare externally against companies it deems to be similar to yours. It sounds like a data privacy nightmare, and you're not necessarily wrong. But Microsoft has made some promises in that regard that I cover below.

Copilot's new Benchmarks feature has begun its initial rollout period through the Microsoft Copilot Dashboard in Viva Insights to private preview customers. Microsoft says it's expecting a full rollout of Benchmarks to all customers "later this month."

Benchmarks in Copilot Dashboard is watching you use (or not use) AI

The new Benchmarks feature, at least initially, is designed to pull employee data regarding Copilot AI adoption rates and compare it to other employees within or outside your organization.

The internal benchmarks system pulls percentages of active Copilot users, adoption rates by app, and users who continue to return to Copilot's AI tools. Once harvested, Benchmarks charts the results, making for easy comparisons to employee types, job roles, and geographical regions within your organization.

Microsoft says the "cohort result" pulled via internal benchmarks is given a weighted average based on "matching roles across the tenant."

The external benchmarks system goes a few steps further. It pulls the data from your organization, then compares it to data pulled from either the top 10% or the top 25% of "companies like yours." It can also compare to the top 10% or the top 25% of all benchmarks pulled by the new program.

Microsoft states that "companies like yours" may include those "that share the same industry, size tier, and/or headquarters region as your own country." The external benchmarks data pools use "at least 20 companies" and are "derived from approximations," which undoubtedly helps reduce the privacy risks.

Further, Microsoft says that its external benchmarks "are calculated using randomized mathematical models" to boost privacy. The company is keeping a close eye on the quality of its external benchmarks, and it says it will "evaluate adding additional benchmarks" as it gathers user feedback.

Employees remain reticent about using AI

The current AI boom is having more than a few side effects on corporate employees.

While the heads of AI firms continue to tout AI's effectiveness and its potential to completely wipe out white-collar workforces around the world — which has executives and shareholders licking their lips in anticipation — actual employees remain cautious.

A recent MIT study from its NANDA initiative revealed that only about 5% of AI pilot programs actually make it beyond the initial stages. As the study suggests, the other 95% of AI pilot programs come up against the enterprise sector and its inability to adapt to new AI tools compared to other sectors.

This isn't the first time that Microsoft has added analytics tools to Viva. Microsoft 365 Copilot Analytics is already available to produce "readiness and adoption" reports from data gathered across your organization.

The new Benchmarks tool seems to be designed to make it easier to compare the data internally and externally. If you were worried about your boss knowing that you avoid Copilot at all costs, it's probably time to say hello to the AI companion.

What is Copilot Dashboard and Viva Insights?

Microsoft introduced Viva in 2021 as a platform designed to ameliorate the employee experience. It's heavily tied into Microsoft 365 and Teams.

One lane of Viva's four-pronged approach is Insights. I'll let Microsoft explain its original vision for Insights:

This vision for Insights has clearly grown in scope, and the new Benchmarks tools will surely cause panic in some offices as executives and managers see AI adoption rates falling behind the competition.

Microsoft held an event titled "The Future of Work with AI" today. During the presentation, the company introduced Copilot, a tool that uses AI to generate content across apps, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Teams. Copilot is also available in Viva and a new experience called Business Chat.

You can watch Microsoft's AI event to catch up, but we've also broken down the highlights. Microsoft shared a blog post recapping today's announcements as well.

Copilot in Word

Copilot in Word can summarize documents and suggest edits as you write. The tool also has the ability to generate a draft of a document based on information from an organization. Copilot in Word supports picking between tones, such as professional or casual, and can help improve documents in other ways.

Copilot in Excel

Using Copilot in Excel should make it easier to make complex spreadsheets. The tool allows you to ask questions in natural language and will then suggest formulas to use. Copilot in Excel can find correlations in data, generate models based on questions, and find trends. It can also create visual aids, such as charts.                                    

Copilot in PowerPoint

PowerPoint's Copilot features focus on creating presentations. You can have the tool gather information from a Word document to create slides, including speaker notes and sources. You can also compress preexisting presentations to be much shorter with the tool.

Like Excel, PowerPoint will let you use natural language to enter commands, such as timing animations and reformatting text.

Copilot in Outlook

Copilot in Outlook will use AI to read through emails. It can then write replies for you, which should save some time. Like Word documents, text generated by Copilot in Outlook can be edited, so it's more helping you with a draft than creating something set in stone.

You'll also be able to create messages from notes that prompt the AI. The tone can be adjusted to fit specific emails as well.

Copilot in Teams

If you're late to a Teams meeting, Copilot will be able to help you out by creating a summary of what's been said so far. The tool can answer specific questions regarding a meeting as well.

Copilot will also be able to generate meeting agendas based on chat history, suggest who should follow up about specific items, and recommend a time to schedule check-ins.

Business Chat

Business Chat is a new experience that extends across different apps and data sources. It uses Microsoft Graph and AI to gather information from documents, presentations, emails, notes, calendars, and more.

Here are some commands shared by Microsoft as examples:

• Summarize the chats, emails, and documents about the [customer] escalation that happened last night.
• What is the next milestone on [project]. Were there any risks identified? Help me brainstorm a list of some potential mitigations.
• Write a new planning overview in the style of [filename A] that contains the planning timeline from [filename B] and incorporates the project list in the email from [person].

Copilot in Viva

Copilot will integrate with Microsoft Viva in several areas, including Viva Engage. The tool will highlight trending topics from workplaces to help leaders better interact with colleagues. It will share suggestions for posts and will have the ability to add images and adjust the tone of text as well.

Copilot within Viva Engage will also suggest responses to help conversations continue and provide prompts to spark communication.

What you need to know

• Microsoft Viva Goals is now generally available.
• Viva Goals is a management solution that integrates with Microsoft Viva.
• People can use Viva Goals to track objectives and key results.

Microsoft Viva Goals is now generally available. It's a management solution that supports the Objectives and Key Results (OKR) framework that's popular at several large companies. In other words, it's a tool for tracking goals and progress.

Viva Goals integrates with Microsoft Viva, allowing organizations to follow the progress of people and teams within a single hub. It's built in a way that makes it easy to attach daily tasks to long-term goals. 

Microsoft outlined how Viva Goals works in its Tech Community post announcing general availability:

• Creating clarity: With one centralized source of truth for goal setting, monitoring progress, and assessing success across your organization, you create clarity for your team, connect daily work to outcomes and align at all levels 
• Focusing teams on impact, not output: Shift focus from effort and activity to impact and outcomes, share progress across your organization with customizable dashboards that turn data into insights, and stay agile
  at scale   
• Bringing goals into the flow of everyday work: Keep goals top-of-mind by bringing data and actions into the spaces your team is already using, like Microsoft Teams, ADO, and the most popular data and project management tools.

People can share progress to keep others up to date as well. Viva Goals supports shareable links for various items.

There are two SKUs that include Viva Goals: Microsoft Viva Goals SKU and Microsoft Viva SKU. To use the Viva Goals application in Teams, one of the following licenses is required: Microsoft 365 F1, F3, E3, A3, E5, A5; Office 365 F3, E1, A1, E3, A3, E5, A5; Microsoft 365 Business Basic, Business Standard, Business Premium; or Microsoft SharePoint K, Plan 1, or Plan 2 license. 

What you need to know

• Microsoft just announced Viva Sales, a new seller experience application that integrates with CRM systems.
• Viva Sales gathers information from Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams to help keep track of interactions with customers.
• It then uses AI to provide insights and suggest steps that help employees progress toward a sale.

Microsoft announced Viva Sales today, a CRM companion that uses artificial intelligence to help sales. The new tool integrates with Microsoft 365, Microsoft Teams, and customer relationship management technology (CRM) to help keep track of communication and interaction. This data can then be used to provide insights and suggested steps.

The key to Viva Sales is that it gathers information that people already have stored, limiting the need to manually reenter data.

“The future of selling isn’t a new system. It’s bringing the information sellers need at the right time, with the right context, into the tools they know, so their work experience can be streamlined,” said Judson Althoff, Executive Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer at Microsoft. “Empowering sellers to spend more time with their customers has been our goal — and we’ve done that by reimagining the selling experience with Viva Sales.”

Viva Sales builds on Microsoft Viva, which the company announced last year. It gathers information from Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams and uses AI to suggest steps employees can take to progress a sale.

Microsoft highlighted three elements of the Viva Sales experience in its announcement post:

• Viva Sales provides tools for sellers to do their jobs, while providing the insights that sales leadership needs.
• Powered by data and AI, Viva Sales recommends next steps to progress a customer through the sales funnel, prioritizes work and next steps, and enables sellers to access full history and customer interaction materials.
• Viva Sales also provides AI-driven recommendations to enable sellers to enhance their customer engagement — optimizing follow-through with next best steps, actionable reminders, and recommendations to accelerate and close more sales. 

What you need to know

• Microsoft rolled out a wide range of features to Teams, Yammer, and Windows 365 in February 2022.
• You can now pin or hide your own video within Microsoft Teams meetings and sync Microsoft Viva to popular learning management systems.
• Microsoft also rolled out new features that make it easier to set up Cloud PCs through Windows 365.

As we reach the end of February it's time to catch up on the latest features for Microsoft 365. Each month, Microsoft rounds up new features for Teams and other popular services, with February 2022 being no exception. This month, Microsoft released new options for Team meetings, improvements to the setup process for Windows 365 Cloud PCs, and added new capabilities for Viva. A recent post breaks down the features in more depth, though we'll run through the highlights here.

Usually, Microsoft Teams shows your own video during a meeting. This can be distracting, and the communication platform now has an option to hide your video feed. Teams also supports pinning your own video to a meeting stage to make sure you're always visible on your device.

Microsoft Viva can now sync with learning management systems (LMS) such as SAP SuccessFactors, Cornerstone OnDemand, and Saba Cloud. This expands the usefulness of Viva as employees can keep track of assignments from popular services and courses.

In order to help people find more communities and people of interest, Yammer can now make suggestions. The service also supports auto-renewal for posts, reactions, and files, which should take some stress off of community admins.

Provisioning Windows 365 Cloud PCs is now easier as well. Microsoft released a preview of Windows 365 Enterprise support for using Azure Active Directory Join this month. The company also added localized support for a much longer list of languages. We covered the changes to Windows 365 Cloud PCs earlier this month.