Microsoft Copilot

What is Copilot?

Copilot is the AI Assistant provided by Microsoft and it comes in two different levels.

Copilot Chat

Copilot chat can be accessed by everyone with a William & Mary Office 365 subscription, students must be 18 years old or older, by visiting copilot.microsoft.com and logging in with your W&M account. Features include:

Chat with text, voice, and image capabilities
Summarization of documents and web pages
Image creation in Designer (formerly Bing Image Creator)
Web grounding
Use of plugins and Copilot GPTs
Commercial data protection

Copilot for Microsoft Office 365

Copilot for Microsoft Office 365 is licensed individually and only available for faculty and staff (fees apply), based on how Microsoft has delivered the service to higher education. It includes everything in Copilot chat, plus:

Copilot in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and OneNote for productivity.
Copilot in Microsoft Teams
Enterprise-grade data protection
Customization and extensibility through Microsoft Copilot Studio (limited)

Copilot for Microsoft Office 365 is integrated into Microsoft 365 in two ways. It works alongside you, embedded in the Microsoft 365 apps you use every day — Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams and more — to unleash creativity, unlock productivity and uplevel skills. It would help you draft an email, documents or slide show and it could coach you as you do the work yourself.

With Copilot, you’re always in control. You decide what to keep, modify or discard. Now, you can be more creative in Word, more analytical in Excel, more expressive in PowerPoint, more productive in Outlook and more collaborative in Teams.

what you can do with CoPilot for Microsoft 365
What's possible with Copilot for Microsoft 365
Copilot in Word	Copilot in Word transforms your writing with efficiency and creativity – create, summarize, comprehend, refine, and elevate your documents. Now you can use enhanced capabilities like visualizing and transforming text into a table. Some other capabilities also include adding onto existing prompts, drafting a document by referencing up to 3 documents and discovering information about your document.
Copilot in PowerPoint	Copilot in PowerPoint helps you turn your ideas into stunning presentations. As your storytelling partner, Copilot can transform existing written documents into decks complete with speaker notes and sources or start a new presentation from a simple prompt or outline. Condense lengthy presentations at the click of a button and use natural language commands to adjust layouts, reformat text, and perfectly time animations.
Copilot in Excel	Copilot in Excel works alongside you to help analyze and explore your data. Copilot can help you explore and understand your data better. It helps analyze and visualize your data. Highlight, filter, and sort your data.
Copilot in Outlook	Copilot in Outlook helps you stay on top of your inbox and create impactful communication in a fraction of the time. Now you can ask Copilot to summarize an email thread to quickly jump to the source of the summarized content, suggested action items, replies, and follow-up meetings. You can also choose options for length and tone when drafting an email.
Copilot in Teams	Recap conversations, organize key discussion points, and summarize key actions. Get answers to specific questions, catch up on anything you’ve missed. Create meeting agendas based on chat history. Identifying individuals for follow-ups, and scheduling the next check-in.
Copilot in Loop	Copilot in Loop helps you unlock the power of shared thinking - co-create, get up-to-speed, and stay in sync with your teammates. Now you can iterate with Copilot collaboratively as a team, co-creating prompts, generating tables to help organize team projects, catch up where your teammates left off, summarize page content, and generate a recap for a teammate you're handing work off to.
Copilot Whiteboard	Copilot in Whiteboard helps you kickstart and accelerate your ideation process to generate, categorize, and summarize your ideas.
Copilot OneNote	Copilot in OneNote helps you revolutionize the way you plan, and organize – staying better prepared and proactively taking action from notes. Now you can gain deeper insights on your notes by asking comprehensive questions, generating summaries of your content, ask Copilot to generate content for you, and help make your writing clearer.

See Copilot in action

How to write a good prompt

If you want to learn more about how to use Copilot effectively, check out the Copilot prompting toolkit, which provides you with tips, tricks and best practices for writing with Copilot. You'll also find examples of prompts for different scenarios and domains, such as education, business, marketing, health, finance and more.

Access the toolkit

How to get started

Beginning March 2024, W&M will be in a pilot phase for employees. If you are interested in purchasing licenses, contact your department head to start planning for funding and use. After getting approval, email support@wm.edu to proceed with your purchase. We purchase these licenses from a reseller, so provisioning is not immediate, like some other IT services.