Since its introduction nine months ago, Microsoft 365 Copilot has shown benefits for businesses globally. Companies have noted practical improvements such as faster customer service, reduced error rates, and increased employee productivity after incorporating this AI tool into their daily operations. Industry leaders across retail, manufacturing, automotive, and healthcare are measurably excited about immediate and long-term effects of Copilot.
While specific benefits differ between companies, all flow from the core power of Copilot: helping individuals and teams achieve more with less time and effort. Whether it’s Copilot for Sales, Copilot for Service, Copilot for Finance, GitHub Copilot, or Copilot to help with office productivity and search, all Copilot functionalities make routine tasks and processes both faster and easier. Copilots help organizations gain new insights on data, reshape business workflows, personalize communications, solve complex problems, enable entirely new products and services, and free people for higher value, higher impact work.
A recent generative AI Hackathon hosted by Microsoft and IBM Consulting showcased some of the possibilities of Copilot and AI. The prototype solutions at this event highlighted their potential to boost efficiency and innovation, accelerate operational transformation, and build a sustained competitive advantage for users.
Much of the early success of Copilot is thanks to the Microsoft open platform, ecosystem, and key partners like IBM. Through our continuously improving global support system, we assist organizations of all sizes responsibly develop and expand reliable and distinctive AI strategies and capabilities across various industries worldwide.
IBM launches new Copilot capabilities for AI-powered transformations
IBM Copilot Runway from IBM Consulting is a recently developed offering designed to help enterprises create, customize, deploy, and manage copilots, including Microsoft 365 Copilot. This offering is designed to streamline and enhance business processes by allowing customers to integrate the generative AI abilities of these copilots into their organizations. IBM built a customized framework that helps organizations deploy copilots at scale, functioning as an accelerator by helping build and deploy copilots with high flexibility, and offering prebuilt custom copilots that offer ready-made solutions to reduce implementation time and effort.
Within IBM Consulting, a dedicated group of consultants with Copilot expertise and credentials is focused on helping customers adopt and deploy these AI capabilities. Additionally, IBM Consulting is scaling its Copilot capabilities and capacity across its network of Global Innovation Centers on each continent.
As AI and copilots transform the way more enterprises do business, IBM Consulting is also working with clients to build custom copilots that fit their specific needs and reduce the time and effort required to launch them. The team is initially focusing on the priority areas of customer and field service, employee experience, and procurement and finance, in specific sectors such as financial services, retail and consumer packaged goods, government, and supply chain.
Hackathon: Exploring new directions and heights
While the early impact has been impactful, the Copilot journey is just the beginning. Every day, Microsoft, our partners, customers, and users are developing new apps, solutions, accelerators, and best practices. To show how Copilot can fuel transformative solutions, the goal of our recent Hackathon was to have participating teams leverage Copilot to transform roles and functions within their businesses and push the boundaries of AI.
With clients from North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific, 250 teams from Microsoft’s global network of partners collaborated virtually to create use cases and prototypes using Copilot. With help from Bluetab, Neudesic, and Microsoft, IBM Consulting provided teams with access to resources and expertise throughout the Hackathon.
One of the winning projects came from Commonwealth Bank of Australia, a Microsoft Solutions Partner for Modern Work. This project aims to transform the way bankers coordinate and engage internally to extend loans to corporate customers. The solution uses AI to create an embedded digital assistant to find relevant documentation and information. As a result, the turnaround time for completing documentation and processing for extending loans can be reduced, said Ivan Suen, Executive Director of Capital Structuring for Commonwealth Bank of Australia.
“Our training with, and mentorship from, IBM Consulting and Microsoft helped the team use Copilot and automation-based APIs to create generative actions so our solution can identify information gaps, create checklists with notifications, and ultimately extract and export information to digitize the loan process with intelligence,” Suen said. “Best of all, the AI-enabled solution can save our teams nearly 4,000 hours per year across our lending execution and document-sharing process.”
Another winning project came from Toyota Motor Europe, a Microsoft Solutions Partner for Modern Work. The team developed IntelliRent, an innovative car rental service that uses an intelligent bot for conversational booking. Using AI-powered data combined with the power of in-house and external applications, IntelliRent creates a personalized rental experience via direct customer engagement at any time of the day. Laura Andreea Tarachiu, IT Manager for Customer Relationship Management and Marketing Cloud at Toyota Motor Europe, said the team developed the solution to reduce customer service barriers and personalize the car rental process.
“Toyota Motor Europe teamed up with IBM for the Copilot hackathon to develop an AI-enabled digital assistant to allow new and returning customers to intelligently interact with a car rental agency for their vehicle needs,” Tarachiu said, “including providing timely promotions, real-time reservations, and localized support.”
Another winning project was inspired by Iron Man’s artificial intelligence, J.A.R.V.I.S. Generative Azure Responsive Visual Interface System (G.A.R.V.I.S) revolutionizes the idea of virtual assistants. It integrates AI with augmented reality, enabling visual and auditory interaction. Creator William Wang used Copilot extensively to write code, reformat logic, write documentation, and for debugging. The tool, he says, proved “invaluable” in enhancing productivity and ensuring project completion.
Learn more about using the power of Copilot
For companies and industries to unlock the full potential of Microsoft Copilot, it is crucial that we continue to share and learn real-world experiences and best practices. Microsoft and IBM have created an on-demand webinar that presents insights and tips for creating successful Copilot prototypes and highlights MVPs from the recent AI hackathon.
Next steps
Sign up for this informative session to learn how Copilot can transform your business—and the smartest ways to get there.
Be sure to register for Microsoft Ignite in November, where you can learn more about Copilot Runway and the Microsoft and IBM partnership.
You can also find additional tools and resources designed to further your career and business goals using Microsoft Copilot on the Copilot Learning Hub.
