Preparing Your Enterprise for Microsoft Copilot
Successful AI in the enterprise requires preparation.
When you build a house, the quality of the finished product is determined long before the walls go up. Having a solid foundation isn't optional... it's what everything else depends on. The same principle applies to building a modern Copilot-powered enterprise.
Building inspectors keep you on the right track with the house, but Microsoft isn't going to evaluate your information architecture before selling you some Copilot licenses. Whether your M365 environment is prepared for a successful AI rollout is entirely up to you.
We're at a somewhat tricky point on the timeline where the tech is getting really good and there is a LOT of well-placed hype around the idea of getting things like Copilot into the hands of your workforce – but not yet at the point where the preparation that's necessary to make those deployments succeed is common knowledge.
Back in the MOSS days, it was always fun to watch organizations realize how much of their sensitive data was just a search away. Suddenly, it wasn't nearly as hard to make the case for thorough planning and thoughtful permissions & structure.
We're back there again, but it's not nearly as straightforward this time.
With enterprise search, issues with search terms and results were usually easy to understand. With AI, however, Copilot draws from mountains of information spread across every nook and cranny of your enterprise. The quality of its responses depends entirely on the information available to the user.
That means your organization might be dealing with issues such as:
- Insufficient permissions to authoritative content
- Excessive permissions to non-authoritative content
- Multiple instances of a file instead of proper versioning
- Missing or inconsistent metadata
- Stale authoritative content being outweighed by more recent work
- And countless other information management challenges
Copilot can only advise your users based on the world through their eyes and when it gets it wrong, they tend to chalk it up to "AI hallucinations" or Copilot itself simply being ineffective. In reality, sometimes the problem is simply the quality of the information environment it's drawn from.
If you want to maximize your Copilot investment and give your employees the best opportunity to benefit from AI, don't skip the foundation.
Every permission that you validate, every document you clean up, and every governance improvement you make strengthens the foundation beneath your AI strategy. The orgs that realize the greatest value from Copilot will be the ones that did the work to prepare for it.
Start today with one site that's important in your organization. Go through its permissions to look for any surprises and clean up duplicates & bad content.
Then repeat.