Microsoft Inspire hit the accelerator on the Copilot hype train.
Microsoft’s new AI-powered productivity tool is being billed as a game changer in how we work day-to-day, and with its extensive feature set growing more impressive with each fresh announcement, cynicism over that claim is becoming increasingly hard to justify.
At Inspire, Microsoft revealed that Copilot was introducing generative AI to phone calls for Teams Phone. With this new capability, users could make and receive calls from their Teams app on any device and get real-time summarization and insights.
There were also new reveals about Teams chat. Users could quickly synthesise critical information from their chat threads, enabling them to ask specific questions to catch up on the conversation so far, manage key discussion points, and summarise data relevant to their workflows.
While the business users will be the beneficiaries of these compelling features, such groundbreaking solutions naturally excites Microsoft’s partners who will be selling the technology, and it was clear that much of Inspire’s content and angle was speaking directly to these partners.
However, it can be hard to sell a product without customers knowing when they might have it in their hands.
“This is the funny thing. The stock price bumped, everybody’s hyped, the whole Inspire conference was, ‘Partners get ready to sell this stuff,’ but there’s still no GA date,” Tom Arbuthnot, Microsoft Teams Expert and Co-founder of Empowering.Cloud, told UC Today during August’s Teams News Update.
“But it’s interesting to see Microsoft focus so heavily on partners during the July show because they’re getting them ready to do the prep work and sell work,” Arbuthnot continued, “so you’ve got to think it’s going to be at least this calendar year so we get something for the partners to move on.
“But no public announcements around dates, and even externally, all the people on the (Copilot) early access programme have been sworn to secrecy in sharing stuff, so there’s very limited information outside of Microsoft at the moment.
“We’ve got the next big show from Microsoft in November, the Ignite customer-facing show, so you’ve got to imagine there’ll be some announcements around then.”
Although, as Arbuthnot noted, there is little publicly available information about the official rollout for Copilot, there are likely several reasons behind the lack of a concrete GA date. There will presumably be caution around ensuring they take their time to iron out even the most minuscule of creases.
However, as Josh Blalock, Microsoft MVP & Chief Video Evangelist at Jabra, suggested to UC Today, another factor could be exploring the regulatory details around Copilot.
“There are still a lot of unknowns, a lot of uncertainty, and a lot of concern about data because of — not just Microsoft but AI in general — how fast it’s hit the market,” Blalock explained. “Everything else is trying to catch up from a regulatory standpoint, so Microsoft might be waiting to see if a few key things work their way through the systems before they hit the button on that GA date.”
Satish Upadhyaya, MVP, Microsoft 365 UC Architect, added that Microsoft would want to ensure that its data centres will be fully ready for Copilot’s general availability and for its “services to work seamlessly in all different geographies”.
“While I was speaking with the Microsoft rep, they mentioned that every week there are two data centres that are getting updated for serving these Copilot and AI capabilities as well,” Upadhyaya clarified.
Kevin Kieller, Co-Founder and Lead AnalystCo-Founder and Lead Analyst, at enableUC, also suggested that businesses must thoroughly prepare in advance of Copilot’s arrival. Hence, its limbo state isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Kieller cited one critical reason to prepare — the potential for over-sharing information.
“When you do a query and when Copilot goes out, it is going to grab all the documents that have been shared with you, and so there are some tools that Microsoft has made available to identify where maybe somebody has shared it with groups they didn’t intend to,” Kieller said. “It’s not creating more security or compliance holes. It’s just that because Copilot is so good at finding things, it’s going to find everything and maybe things that somebody overshared.”
“So maybe there is some pre-work that I think they can emphasise to partners to work with organisations until (Copilot becomes generally available).”
As Upadhyaya noted, Microsoft heavily pushed its AI partner programme at Inspire, “specifically concentrated towards Copilot, Bing Chat Enterprise, emphasising more of the partners to start readiness with their customer base as well”.
Ultimately, however, these developments do leave Microsoft partners somewhat in the lurch — not only in selling Copilot effectively but also preparing their customer bases on a concrete timeline for the solution’s arrival into their work lives. Preparation is key, but having a clear roadmap for what that preparation is culminating in is essential.
“That was the big push, wasn’t it?” Arbuthnot said. “‘Get your customers ready; make sure the governance and compliance conversations are had.’ Also, Microsoft knows it takes enterprises a long while just to get their head around this kind of change, so having the partners warm up the customers so they’re ready to buy when it’s available is important for Microsoft.”
“On the other hand, the partners have got to make money, and there’s only so much preparation you can do. So, I think it’ll be interesting to see how the partners equip themselves to do big prep projects and how customers react to that as well.”
Prep work isn’t just about the product itself, but its premium cost — and the budgeting required to introduce Copilot into a company’s tech stack, especially for SMBs. Groundbreaking productivity tools come with a hefty price tag, and $30 per user per month is certainly that. That is, as Upadhyaya pointed out, on top of the Teams Premium or 365 Enterprise subscriptions that businesses already use.
Blalock wryly observed that partners have to “get their strategies together about how they convince the accounting teams of their customers to swallow the $30 per user” cost.
That could prove as challenging for partners as the practical preparation for Copilot.
