Tips & Tricks for Integrating Copilot Safely into Your Business

Understanding the Architecture of Microsoft Copilot

Copilot for Microsoft 365 is an AI-powered assistant integrated into every M365 app you use, such as Outlook and Excel. It uses the capabilities of OpenAI’s Large Language Model (LLM) to improve your efficiency with various tasks within the Microsoft ecosystem.

Here are six key elements that make up the Copilot architecture:

LLM Integration: Copilot uses OpenAI’s pre-trained LLMs to perform tasks like text summarisation, content creation, and information research. In its privacy policy, Microsoft stated that it doesn’t use organisations’ data to train Copilot.

Microsoft Graph Integration: Copilot channels your data (emails, calendar, meetings, contacts, chats, documents, and anything relevant to you and your access permissions) through the Microsoft Graph to personalise your experience.

Semantic Indexing: This next-generation search technology helps Copilot efficiently find relevant information within your content based on the context, not just keywords.

Optional Web Access: Copilot can, by default, access information from the web to help enrich its responses. However, users and administrators can toggle Copilot’s web access feature depending on project requirements.

Security and Compliance: Microsoft has implemented high-level encryptions, training boundaries, tenant isolation, and more to ensure the safety and security of all data supplied to their new AI tool. Copilot respects your permissions, keeps sensitive data safe, and ticks all the boxes for compliance.

Microsoft Responsible AI Framework: Microsoft has implemented what it calls a Responsible AI Framework in Copilot to ensure fairness, reliability, privacy, and transparency. The framework also looks for harmful content, like malicious prompts or unauthorised access attempts.

Risks You Need to Manage

With the amount of information that Copilot can potentially access, there are a number of elements and settings that organisations need to manage themselves to mitigate any potential cyber security risks.

Organise Your Team

Integrating Copilot safely into your business begins with getting a holistic view of all workspaces within your organisation. This will not only help you identify active/inactive teams, teams with guest members, and public teams but also serve as the cornerstone for preventing data leaks and oversharing.

Have A System for Granting and Revoking Permissions

Once you have a clear understanding of your organisation’s workspaces, you can begin implementing effective management strategies for granting and revoking access to certain business data.

For instance, the HR manager and IT department can create teams and manage permissions involving sensitive business information, thereby preventing accidental disclosure with public teams.

Enforce and Regularly Audit Sensitivity Labels

Microsoft depends on sensitivity labels to enforce DLP policies, apply encryption, and broadly prevent data leaks.

One of the best tips for integrating Copilot safely into your business is to ensure that everyone consistently applies the correct sensitivity labels to files. Conduct regular audits of your business data, security, and privacy practices to ensure they comply with industry standards and regulations.

Educate Your Team

With the amount of data that Copilot can potentially access, it’s crucial that employees understand the importance of data security and privacy. Provide training on how to use Copilot safely and securely and elaborate on the need to verify the AI’s outputs before using them.

Know When to Use Work/Web Functions

To use Microsoft 365 Copilot safely and efficiently, you have to feed it the right information — an AI is only as smart as its sources.

Copilot has a toggle that lets you decide if you want the AI to process data from the web or strictly from your business files. Use the “Work” function if you only want to use data you already have in M365. Or use the “Web” function if you don’t mind Copilot seeking relevant sources online — be sure to verify the validity and authority of all external sources.

Update Your Trust Policy

Copilot can easily create sensitive data in large quantities. Therefore, it’s up to your organisation to implement and enforce a Trust Policy that helps safeguard your data.

Define how much access is safe and the files anyone can see. A great place to start is to implement zero-trust policies and ensure that your workforce can only access files directly related to their job.

Get Copilot-Ready

Copilot’s powerful feature set makes it a great addition to any workforce. But setting up Copilot securely can feel daunting.

AAG’s comprehensive support helps you get the most out of Copilot. An initial consultation and readiness assessment ensures that the new services can be accessed securely, while customised training helps your team understand Copilot features and its applications in their workflows. We’ll even run regular updates based on your usage to keep your Copilot services optimised.