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My journey with Copilot: the last six months

Picture of Adam Merry Adam Merry : 3/10/25 11:33 AM

Copilot AI
My journey with Copilot: the last six months

From 'it's ok', to 'wow'.

 

Why am I writing a blog about Copilot?

 

Hi! This is another blog about Co-pilot! Wait, please don’t close browser!

This is a piece about Copilot, but I am not writing this as a fluffy marketing piece, but the how and why of the tool. Don’t worry, I'm not going to tell you about how good AI is and how it will change your life (well maybe I will), but at least this will be helpful.

So, over the last six months, I've had Copilot. For the 1st - 4-5 months of using it, my thoughts were, cool, meeting notes, at least I don’t have to do those anymore (to be fair I could justify Copilot on that alone). However now, I have a massively different opinion today….. Wow, this is awesome.

The reason for me sitting down and writing this is because, if I work for and run an IT business and had no idea of the power of this tool, what hope does anyone else have? Look I might be wrong and be behind the curve on this, but from the conversations I have been having over the last few weeks, I don’t think I am.

From the chats I have had, there have been two key take aways:

  1. Most people I talk to at the start of the chat say, yeah, "It's ok". After a brief run through, I usually get: "ohhh I get it, wow, everyone in the team needs to use this."

Then a day, or two, or seven later:

  1. "How do I do this?" Or I "don’t like that it can’t do that"... when it can.

As I have covered the same points, it highlights the lack of availability of help. So, this is a way to share that information more broadly and efficiently. Hope it helps.

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The journey and initial skepticism

 

Initially, I was hopeful but unsure about Copilot. Is it really as good as its being marketed as?

Setting it up was easy, add a license and it’s there, great. Then what?

Get some meeting note transcriptions, summarise an out of control inbox with 900 unread emails and provide me with 7 take aways… this isn’t it.

Even what I was hearing about taking it to market, sit down, define use cases, get a pilot group, show value of the product then expand. Don’t get me wrong, this will be important for some customers. But from what I have learnt, seen and been shown recently, I think people just need to know how to use it… that’s it. If you look at what it can do and how, I am pretty confident that you will see the value of its outputs and how they will apply to your business almost immediately.

 

 

At its core, it will change how you work

 

The reason I say this is based on data - very unlike me - but I thought it is important to share as it is relevant. Before writing this, I spent some time in SharePoint to look at documents I have created in the last year vs. what I am creating now. Here are the stats:

Documents created:

  • Total: 210 over 52 weeks
    • 1/02/2024 - 28/02/2025
  • Without Copilot: 143 over 48 weeks
    • 1/02/2024 - 31/01/2025
  • With Copilot: 8 over a week when I started learning
    • 27/01/2024 - 31/01/2025
  • With Copilot: 58 over this month
    • 1/02/2025 - 28/02/2025
  • With Copilot last week: 30 of the 58 were last week
    • 24/02/2025 - 28/02/2025

For those of you who don’t like bullet points and prefer pictures, I'll share this (yes, Copilot and Excel, not bad for a guy who 100% doesn’t know pivot or more than =sum(d12+f12)).

 

The purpose of sharing this graph is not to show you that I have created 4,000 completed and finished documents in a week and how good I am, but to illustrate that the way I work has changed, quickly and by a margin.

The reason I have changed with receipts, is because of Copilot. The way it functions and the insights I've gained allow me to contribute more in areas where I typically wouldn't add much value. Additionally, it enables a subject matter expert to review and approve the work instead of creating it entirely from the ground up.

As an example, I haven’t really written a blog before, I wasn’t sure of the correct approach or format and what I should include to hit the mark. So, to give me a start, I created the following which built out the plan. Note: for this I have created 7 separate documents - numbered below.

 

Inception

  1. Co Pilot Journey - The Data
    1. Which you can see used above
  2. Created a prompt (saved a copy as a doc) and used that to create the plan
    1. I might not normally do this but did here in case I need to share it in the future based on this blog.

Plan

  1. Blog Post Series Plan: Embracing Copilot, which included:
    1. Blog Post Framework
      1. Blog Guide
      2. Blogs
        • My Journey with Copilot
        • Introduction to Using Copilot
        • Basics of Using Copilot
        • The Impact of Copilot: Why Should You Care?
          • Inc sections for each - Objective, Content breakdown, key points.

Extracts

  1. Blog Post Framework
  2. Blog Guide
  3. My Journey with Copilot

Execute

  1. Draft Blog - My Journey with Copilot
    1. Hopefully won’t be a draft when you’re reading

 

Sure, this might seem like a lot, but I've laid it all out to really get the most out of Copilot for what I require. In the next blogs, I'll dive into why this is such a game-changer. If you consider the hardest part of all the above was getting the data off SharePoint on document creation. The main creation point was the "Plan”, I then expanded on it, which  total took 15 minutes,

Beforehand, this would have stopped me and I would have shelved it for 6 months (if I did it at all) and done almost anything else. I worked with Copilot and created the format for this blog pretty quickly.

I will admit that I also asked Copilot to create the 1st draft for me that I have rewritten from scratch as its too professional to have most people believe I wrote it, but having the ability to start somewhere is a huge advantage. It gives time to formalise thoughts, see those thoughts get built upon when expanding and provide confidence in an approach.

I'm not sure about you or staff in your business, but this can be one of the largest barriers to getting work started or completed and in a timely manner. This is especially common in business today, where needs, roles and outputs can be dynamic and outside out 'standard'. Oh, and this is a basic benefit of Copilot.

 

 

What's next

 

So, for this blog series, I will aim to cover the timed highlight in the blog plan above.

  1. My Journey with Copilot (this blog)
  2. Introduction to Using Copilot
  3. Basics of Using Copilot
  4. The Impact of Copilot: Why Should You Care?

I wanted to start here because if you have played with Copilot or are thinking about it, this is where you might be now. In the next few blogs I will try to address the how which I hope will get you moving and seeing the tremendous value that I have.

 

As a leading managed IT services company, we empower organisations to thrive in the digital landscape by providing tailored, reliable, and secure connectivity.

 

(Image source: https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/03/16/introducing-microsoft-365-copilot-your-copilot-for-work/)