Over the past few months, the world has been captivated by generative AI and applications like the new chat experience in Bing, which can generate original text responses from a simple prompt written in natural language. With the introduction of generative AI across Microsoft business applications—including Microsoft Dynamics 365, Viva Sales, and Power Platform—interactions with AI across business roles and processes will become second nature. With Copilot, Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Power Platform introduce a new way to generate ideas and content drafts, and methods to access and organize information across the business.
Before your business starts using Copilot capabilities in Dynamics 365 and Power Platform, you may have questions about how it works, how it keeps your business data secure, and other important considerations. The answers to common questions below should help your organization get started.
What’s the difference between ChatGPT and Copilot?
ChatGPT is a general-purpose large language model (LLM) trained by OpenAI on a massive dataset of text, designed to engage in human-like conversations and answer a wide range of questions on various topics. Copilot also uses an LLM; however, the enterprise-ready AI technology is prompted and optimized for your business processes, your business data, and your security and privacy requirements. For Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform users, Copilot suggests optional actions and content recommendations in context with the task at hand. A few ways Copilot for natural language generation is unique:
- The AI-generated responses are uniquely contextual and relevant to the task at hand informed by your business data—whether responding to an email from within Dynamics 365, deploying a low-code application that automates a specific manual process, or creating a targeted list of customer segments from your customer relationship management (CRM) system.
- Copilot uses both an LLM, like GPT, and your organization’s business data to produce more accurate, relevant, and personalized results. In short, your business data stays within your tenancy and is used to improve context only for your scenario, and the LLM itself does not learn from your usage. More on how the system works is below.
- Powered by Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service, Copilot is designed from the ground up on a foundation of enterprise-grade security, compliance, and privacy.
Read on for more details about these topics.
How does Copilot in Dynamics 365 and Power Platform work?
With Copilot, Dynamics 365 and Power Platform harness the power of foundation models coupled with proprietary Microsoft technologies applied to your business data:
- Search (using Bing and Microsoft Azure Cognitive Search): Brings domain-specific context to a Copilot prompt, enabling a response to integrate information from content like manuals, documents, or other data within the organization’s tenant. Currently, Microsoft Power Virtual Agent and Dynamics 365 Customer Service use this retrieval-augmented generation approach as pre-processing to calling an LLM.
- Microsoft applications like Dynamics 365, Viva Sales, and Microsoft Power Platform and the business data stored in Microsoft Dataverse.
- Microsoft Graph: Microsoft Graph API brings additional context from customer signals into the prompt, such as information from emails, chats, documents, meetings, and more.
Copilot requests an input prompt from a business user in an app, like Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales or Microsoft Power Apps. Copilot then preprocesses the prompt through an approach called grounding, which improves the specificity of the prompt, so you get answers that are relevant and actionable to your specific task. It does this, in part, by making a call to Microsoft Graph and Dataverse and accessing the enterprise data that you consent and grant permissions to use for the retrieval of your business content and context. We also scope the grounding to documents and data which are visible to the authenticated user through role-based access controls. For instance, an intranet question about benefits would only return an answer based on documents relevant to the employee’s role.
This retrieval of information is referred to as retrieval-augmented generation and allows Copilot to provide exactly the right type of information as input to an LLM, combining this user data with other inputs such as information retrieved from knowledge base articles to improve the prompt. Copilot takes the response from the LLM and post-processes it. This post-processing includes additional grounding calls to Microsoft Graph, responsible AI checks, security, compliance and privacy reviews, and command generation.
Finally, Copilot returns a recommended response to the user, and commands back to the apps where a human-in-the-loop can review and assess. Copilot iteratively processes and orchestrates these sophisticated services to produce results that are relevant to your business, accurate, and secure.
How does Copilot use your proprietary business data? Is it used to train AI models?
Copilot unlocks business value by connecting LLMs to your business data—in a secure, compliant, privacy-preserving way.
Copilot has real-time access to both your content and context in Microsoft Graph and Dataverse. This means it generates answers anchored in your business content—your documents, emails, calendar, chats, meetings, contacts, and other business data—and combines them with your working context—the meeting you’re in now, the email exchanges you’ve had on a topic, the chat conversations you had last week—to deliver accurate, relevant, contextual responses.
We, however, do not use customers’ data to train LLMs. We believe the customers’ data is their data, aligned to Microsoft’s data privacy policy.AI-powered LLMs are trained on a large but limited corpus of data—but prompts, responses, and data accessed through Microsoft Graph and Microsoft services are not used to train Dynamics 365 Copilot and Power Platform Copilot capabilities for use by other customers. Furthermore, the foundation models are not improved through your usage. This means your data is accessible only by authorized users within your organization unless you explicitly consent to other access or use.
Are Copilot responses always factual?
Responses produced with generative AI are not guaranteed to be 100 percent factual. While we continue to improve responses to fact-based inquiries, people should still use their judgement when reviewing outputs. Our copilots leave you in the driver’s seat, while providing useful drafts and summaries to help you achieve more.
Our teams are working to address issues such as misinformation and disinformation, content blocking, data safety and preventing the promotion of harmful or discriminatory content in line with ourAI principles.
We also provide guidance within the user experience to reinforce the responsible use of AI-generated content and actions. To help guide users on how to use Copilot, as well as properly use suggested actions and content, we provide:
Instructive guidance and prompts. When using Copilot, informational elements instruct users how to responsibly use suggested content and actions, including prompts, to review and edit responses as needed prior to usage, as well as to manually check facts, data, and text for accuracy.
Cited sources. Copilot cites public sources when applicable so you’re able to see links to the web content it references.
How does Copilot protect sensitive business information and data?
Microsoft is uniquely positioned to deliver enterprise-ready AI. Powered by Azure OpenAI Service, Copilot features built-in responsible AI and enterprise-grade Azure security.
Built on Microsoft’s comprehensive approach to security, compliance, and privacy. Copilot is integrated into Microsoft services like Dynamics 365, Viva Sales, Microsoft Power Platform, and Microsoft 365, and automatically inherits all your company’s valuable security, compliance, and privacy policies and processes. Two-factor authentication, compliance boundaries, privacy protections, and more make Copilot the AI solution you can trust.
Architected to protect tenant, group, and individual data. We know data leakage is a concern for customers. LLMs are not further trained on, or learn from, your tenant data or your prompts. Within your tenant, our time-tested permissions model provides safeguards and enterprise-grade security as seen in our Azure offerings. And on an individual level, Copilot presents only data you can access using the same technology that we’ve been using for years to secure customer data.
Designed to learn new skills. Copilot’s foundation skills are a game changer for productivity and business processes. The capabilities allow you to create, summarize, analyze, collaborate, and automate using your specific business content and context. But it doesn’t stop there. Copilot recommends actions for the user (for example, “create a time and expense application to enable employees to submit their time and expense reports”). And Copilot is designed to learn new skills. For example, with Viva Sales, Copilot can learn how to connect to CRM systems of record to pull customer data—like interaction and order histories—into communications. As Copilot learns about new domains and processes, it will be able to perform even more sophisticated tasks and queries.
Will Copilot meet requirements for regulatory compliance mandates?
Copilot is offered within the Azure ecosystem and thus our compliance follows that of Azure.In addition, Copilot adheres to our commitment to responsible AI, which is described in our documented principles and summarized below.As regulation in the AI space evolves, Microsoft will continue to adapt and respond to fulfill future regulatory requirements in this space.
Next-generation AI across Microsoft business applications
With next-generation AI, interactions with AI across business roles and processes will become second nature.
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Committed to responsible AI
Microsoft is committed to creating responsible AI by design. Our work is guided by a core set of principles: fairness, reliability and safety, privacy and security, inclusiveness, transparency, and accountability. We are helping our customers use our AI products responsibly, sharing our learnings, and building trust-based partnerships. For these new services, we provide our customers with information about the intended uses, capabilities, and limitations of our AI platform service, so they have the knowledge necessary to make responsible deployment choices.
Take a look at related content
- Introducing Microsoft Dynamics 365 Copilot, the world’s first copilot in both CRM and ERP, that brings next-generation AI to every line of business
- Power Platform is leading a new era of AI-generated low-code app development
- Copilot in Viva Sales available as thousands of customers adopt next-generation AI in Dynamics 365 Copilot and Power Platform
FAQs
What is the relationship between Dynamics 365 and Power Platform? ›
Both Power Apps and Dynamics 365 are built on the Power Platform. Dynamics 365 for Sales, Service and Marketing are all natively built with the sole purpose of working as a dedicated CRM database. More on that later. Whereas Power Apps can be applied to solve a wide range of business process problems.
What is Microsoft Power Platform Dynamics 365? ›Microsoft Power Platform Includes
Monitor and continuously improve chatbot performance using AI- and data-driven insights available in an easy-to-read dashboard.
- Open Start on Windows 11.
- Search for regedit and click the top result to open the Registry.
- Navigate to the following path: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Common\ExperimentConfigs\ExternalFeatureOverrides\word.
Microsoft sells GitHub Copilot, its developer-focused AI pair-programming technology, for US$10 per user per month (or US$100 per user per year) for individuals. GitHub Copilot plugs directly into developer's' editors. And GitHub Copilot for Business is US$19 per user per month.
What is the difference between Dynamics 365 and Power Platform? ›A Dynamics 365 role-based app is a pre-packaged solution that is configured to fit unique business process rules and user requirements. In contrast, a Power App must be built from scratch, or customised from a pre-built template.
What is the difference between Microsoft Dynamics and Power Platform? ›Despite both collections of apps having similar functions, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Center, in its latest update, has a more task and track management focus. In contrast, Microsoft Power Platform is more focused on creating solutions, among other benefits.
What are the 4 components of Power Platform? ›Power platform has 4 primary components - Power BI, Power Apps, Power Automate and Power Virtual Agents. The other components that are often used with Power Platform are - Dataflex Pro (Common Data Services), AI Builder, and UI Flow (part of Automate).
What are the benefits of Power Platform? ›- Simplified User Experience. Microsoft's Power Platform makes the life of the average user much easier. ...
- Improve Customer Service. ...
- One Source of Truth. ...
- Goal Insights and Projections. ...
- Process Automation.
PowerApps apps are edited directly in the PowerApps platform. This means that any changes that you make to your app will be immediately reflected in the app itself. Power Automate, on the other hand, uses a separate tool called Flow to edit and improve workflows.
Is Microsoft 365 Copilot available? ›Last Updated on May 10, 2023
In recent news, Microsoft has released a 365 Copilot Early Access Program which grants a few users exclusive access to the new Office applications. This program is invitation-only and Microsoft has already started rolling out the first set of invites to 600 customers globally.
How does Copilot work? ›
GitHub Copilot is an AI pair programmer that offers autocomplete-style suggestions as you code. You can receive suggestions from GitHub Copilot either by starting to write the code you want to use, or by writing a natural language comment describing what you want the code to do.
How much does Copilot cost? ›Pricing for GitHub Copilot for Individuals
The GitHub Copilot subscription is available on a monthly or yearly cycle. If you choose a monthly billing cycle, you will be billed $10 per calendar month. If you choose a yearly billing cycle, you will be billed $100 per year.
Now Copilot will write unit tests for the wrapper functions. This tests each of your functions in a standalone environment. To avoid duplicate work, I will write a few testing functions rather than test all the GET request functions.
What model does Copilot use? ›The Codex model is additionally trained on gigabytes of source code in a dozen programming languages. Copilot's OpenAI Codex is trained on a selection of the English language, public GitHub repositories, and other publicly available source code.
Can Copilot explain code? ›You can ask it to fix your code, ask it to explain the code to you, and you can actually ask it to write a unit test.” Copilot will now have a full view of your IDE, so it knows what you typed into the editor and where it can be most useful.
What is replacing Dynamics 365? ›Dynamics 365 connectors must be replaced with a Microsoft Dataverse connector. Microsoft Dataverse – This is the newest connector and will become the only connector available for Dataverse usage.
What is the difference between PowerApps and Power Platform? ›The PowerApps is an application development platform that is part of the broader Microsoft Power Platform, whose capabilities are built on and utilize Azure cloud services. Dynamics 365 for Sales, Service, Field Service, Marketing, and Talent are all built natively on the platform.
Is Dynamics 365 a CRM or ERP? ›Streamline your everyday financials and operations with Dynamics 365—an ERP software solution that helps you collaborate effectively, optimize business tasks, and drive growth.
What are the different types in power platforms? ›There are two main types of Power Apps: Canvas apps and Model-driven apps. Previously, Power Apps Portals would have fallen under this category. Microsoft have since released Power Pages, a standalone product that has evolved from the functionality of Power Apps Portals.
Is Power Platform an ERP? ›The Power Platform allows for seamless integration with many common ERP systems thanks to pre-built connectors. These include Dynamics 365 Business Central, Salesforce, SAP, and more!
Is Power Platform a CRM? ›
Power-CRM is a next-generation, cloud-based CRM solution built on the Microsoft Power Apps platform, the same platform Dynamics 365 is built on. Power-CRM was designed by a team of CRM veterans with a single mission – to provide a full-featured CRM solution that is simple, powerful and affordable.
Is Microsoft Power Platform Paas or SaaS? ›Based on Microsoft's official documentation, mentioned that Power Apps is a Software as a Service (SaaS) platform.
Which are the key products under the Power Platform? ›Microsoft Power Platform is a low-code platform for rapidly building customized end-to-end business solutions. It consists of five product areas: Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI, Power Virtual Agents, and Power Pages.
What problems does Power Platform solve? ›- Availability – Accessing apps at any time, anywhere.
- Mobility – Allowing people to work with an app while on the move.
- Consolidation – Gathering data in a more automated way to minimize manual consolidation.
Power Platform integrates low-code solutions with secure and trusted Microsoft cloud services, including Azure, Dynamics 365, and Microsoft 365.
Why choose Microsoft Power Platform? ›Why choose Microsoft Power Platform? Stay agile and build solutions that move your business forward with the only set of low-code tools your teams need. Power Platform is built from the ground up to work together with strong security, management, and compliance—plus room to grow.
What are the 3 types of Power Automate flows? ›Power Automate is a service that you can use to automate repetitive tasks to bring efficiencies to any organizations. You can create cloud flows, desktop flows, or business process flows.
What is a workflow in Power Platform? ›Power Automate workflow, or flows, are based on triggers and actions. A trigger starts the flow, for example, receiving an email from a key project stakeholder. An action is what happens once the flow is triggered. This can include creating a task when an email marked as high-importance is received.
What is the difference between workflow and Power Automate Dynamics 365? ›Dynamics 365 Workflow can be synchronous (real-time) or asynchronous (background). This means that when a change happens in Dynamics that triggers a workflow, the workflow will trigger immediately or seconds after the triggering change. Power Automate is quick, but not as quick as workflow.
Does Copilot still exist? ›GitHub is announcing its Copilot X initiative today, an extension of its work on its popular Copilot code completion tool, which originally launched into preview all the way back in 2021.
Can you use Copilot on a computer? ›
Use Copilot with your Windows device
Note If your controllers are connected to your PC via Bluetooth, you need to plug one into your PC with a USB-C or micro-USB cable to configure changes using the Xbox Accessories app (including the Copilot setting).
- Tabnine. Tabnine (formerly known as Codota) was among the first code completion tools to be introduced to the market. ...
- CaptainStack. Developers and Stackoverflow are akin to human resource managers and Stackoverflow. ...
- GPT-Code-Clippy (GPT-CC) ...
- IntelliCode. ...
- Asm-Dude.
- Kite.
- Increased productivity: With GitHub Copilot, you can generate code much faster than you would be able to write it from scratch. ...
- Code consistency: GitHub Copilot can help ensure that your project's code is consistent, making it easier to maintain and debug.
Copilot is excellent at writing boilerplate code. Boilerplate code is a software development term that refers to repetitive code that can be made much simpler (i.e., can be further optimized).
Why do we use Copilot? ›Copilot helps developers write code faster and with greater accuracy, making it easier to explore new code and technologies. Copilot uses machine learning to provide code suggestions and complete tasks for you while you code.
Which is better mint or copilot? ›Copilot also just looks a whole lot better – from the overall design to the emojis to having zero ads (which you pay for, so it is a tradeoff) – Copilot feels better overall. Mint is the only one of the most popular budgeting software plans in the industry, but it's also completely free.
Who owns Copilot? ›Andrés Ugarte - Founder & CEO - Copilot | LinkedIn.
How long is copilot free? ›GitHub Copilot is an AI-powered tool that provides autocomplete-style suggestions as you code. While it's free for verified students, teachers, and open source project maintainers, non-eligible users can enjoy a 60-day free trial.
Who can use copilot? ›GitHub Copilot is free to use for verified students, teachers, and maintainers of popular open source projects. If you are not a student, teacher, or maintainer of a popular open source project, you can try GitHub Copilot for free with a one-time 30-day trial.
Does copilot work with C? ›GitHub Copilot provides suggestions for numerous languages and a wide variety of frameworks, but works especially well for Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Ruby, Go, C# and C++. The following samples are in Java, but other languages will work similarly.
Do developers write their own unit tests? ›
Yes, developers typically write unit tests. However, they are largely responsible for writing these tests to ensure that the code works – most developer tests are likely to cover happy-path and obvious negative cases.
Can I use Copilot on 2 devices? ›You are only permitted to use ONE CoPilot license on one device at a time as detailed in the EULA (End User Licensing Agreement). If you've purchased multiple licenses, we recommend using a different CoPilot ID for each license.
What language model is Copilot based on? ›Copilot is based on OpenAI Codex, a LLM (Large Language Model) built on GPT-3 and trained on both natural language and code.
Is Copilot a large language model? ›Microsoft 365 Copilot uses large language models with business data and Microsoft 365 apps to boost the Microsoft office productivity suite with an AI-based assistant that helps users work more effectively.
What language is best for Copilot? ›While the product offers suggestions for several languages and a variety of frameworks, it does have its favorites. We suggest you use GitHub Copilot with JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, Ruby, Go, C#, and C++, as it works the most efficiently for these.
Does Copilot have an API? ›The CoPilot API uses JSON web service semantics and provides resources for boarding new merchant accounts and managing existing accounts.
How do I add Copilot to Office 365? ›A brand-new AI companion now supports the Microsoft 365 apps. You can turn it on by selecting the Copilot icon from the app's ribbon menu.
Is Dynamics 365 part of the Power Platform? ›The Microsoft Power Platform is more than the sum of its parts. Connect them together—and to Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, Azure, and hundreds of other apps—and build end-to-end business solutions.
Does Dynamics 365 come with PowerApps? ›Power Apps use rights with Dynamics 365 licenses: Dynamics 365 Enterprise licenses will no longer include general purpose Power Apps capabilities.
Is Power Automate part of Dynamics 365? ›As part of the Dynamics 365 license, Power Automate rights are included for flows in the following scenarios: Read from or write to Azure DevOps. Use a built-in Dataverse trigger or action.
What are the components of Power Platform? ›
- Environment represents the Environment object, which contains apps, flows, and connectors. ...
- PowerApps App represents an app. ...
- Flow represents a cloud flow. ...
- Flow Action Detail represents the set of actions that occur in a cloud flow. ...
- PowerApps Connector represents a standard or custom connector.
Streamline your everyday financials and operations with Dynamics 365—an ERP software solution that helps you collaborate effectively, optimize business tasks, and drive growth.
What is the difference between PowerApps and PowerApps for Office 365? ›Power Apps is available under different plans. PowerApps with Office365 allows you to to connect to make apps with in the context of Office365 and only use Office365 connectors. PowerApps Plan2 allows you to use all features including premium connectors and CDS.
Is PowerApps included in E5? ›PowerApps has four major ways to license the functionality:
1) Included – Office 365 – using PowerApps within the context of Office 365 is included in the service at no additional charge. Qualifying licenses for PowerApps include Business Premium, Business Essentials, F1 Plan, and the E1-E5 Enterprise Plans.
Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement supports two types of integration with SharePoint: client-to-server and server-to-server (server-based).
Is Power Automate free with Dynamics 365? ›They can individually sign up for a Power Automate trial license for 90 days at no cost. You can assign a Power Automate license to them within the Microsoft 365 admin center. The user has been assigned a Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365 plans that includes access to Power Automate.