The Oklahoma Bar Journal May 2024

L aw P ractice T ips

Navigating the Latest Microsoft 365 Innovations By Julie Bays

“I T’S TIME TO UPGRADE.” Upgrades are great when related to hotel rooms, home improvements and airline seating. Technology upgrades (and updates) used to be a slight annoyance that frequently added new useful features and tools, but upgrading a technology tool today is often approached with trepida tion. What feature that I use daily will either disappear or be moved somewhere difficult to locate? What third-party software add-on or peripheral will cease to work or require an upgrade of its own once the upgrade is finished? For lawyers with busy work loads, another challenge with upgrades is finding the time to learn about the usefulness of any upgraded features. Microsoft certainly keeps upgrad ing and changing things. Many lawyers use the Microsoft 365 suite every day, so it is useful to keep up with the many updates and changes in features that have occurred in the past year or so. Microsoft is now promoting their artificial intelligence tool, Copilot, which can be added as part of the Microsoft 365 for business suite to their customers, so let’s begin with that.

the options: more creative, more balanced or more precise. You can run a regular web search or toggle Copilot Chat. Copilot Chat works best with Microsoft Edge or the Bing mobile app. The business version, often referred to as Copilot Chat Enterprise, is designed with commercial data protection in mind. This version is tailored for business users and operates under stricter privacy and security pro tocols to ensure that the data used within a corporate environment remains confidential and is not used for training AI models. In contrast, the individual ver sion of Copilot Chat may use the data from interactions to improve and train the AI models. In the consumer version, data from the chats can be utilized to enhance the AI’s understanding and responses, subject to Microsoft’s privacy poli cies and guidelines. This distinction is crucial for law firms and indi viduals to understand, especially regarding the handling and privacy of their data during interactions with AI tools like Bing Chat Copilot.

AI-powered tools. They operate in different contexts and serve differ ent purposes. Unfortunately, they are both named Copilot, so it can be confusing. Microsoft 365 Copilot Microsoft 365 Copilot is an AI assistant integrated within the Microsoft 365 suite, including applications like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams. It offers personalized assistance by accessing and analyzing data within the Microsoft 365 eco system, facilitating tasks like generating documents, analyz ing data, creating presentations, managing emails and enhancing collaboration. More importantly, Microsoft 365 Copilot works with your data and does not access the web or use any information outside of your applications. It incorporates into your applications. Copilot Chat The new Bing, which is now also called Copilot, is a chatbot incorpo rated into the Bing search engine. You must be logged in to a personal Microsoft account. The chatbot is also available in the Edge browser and the Edge mobile browser. The new Copilot screen invites you to “Ask me anything,” and you can select a conversation style from

USING MICROSOFT 365 COPILOT

Word In Microsoft Word, Copilot enhances the writing process by

WHAT IS COPILOT?

Microsoft 365 Copilot and Bing Copilot Chat are distinct

80 | MAY 2024

THE OKLAHOMA BAR JOURNAL