- Microsoft Viva is getting new Copilot capabilities over the coming months and years ahead. Not just in one of the Viva workloads, like Viva Goals or Viva Engage. And so collaborating with AI through Copilot has a lot of benefits.
- Why is AI and Copilot so powerful in the set of employee experiences that Viva represents today? A lot of people might underestimate the importance of Copilot within these employee experience categories like Viva. For many customers, they're just getting started in enriching and improving employee experience.
- Copilot makes it easier to get to that ready state or the first starting point within a lot of these Viva experiences. Copilot has for a transformative effect, I think it's going to have a really big impact on employee experience.
- Copilot can help you brainstorm and rationalize that suggesting initiatives that focus on outcomes. It can also be used for summarization of things like goals. In the first release it'll be just like generating and suggesting goals, but over time it provides new opportunities.
- Viva Topics makes natural sense for Copilot in a number of ways. Topics uses AI to compute topic pages, to rationalize them, et cetera. Being able to generate summaries with Copilot allows for more complex summarization. There's a lot more ways in which these tools are going to have Copilot.
- Microsoft's Copilot now officially being publicly announced around the Viva broader support. One of the biggest challenges HR is under today is that HR has a lot of other stuff on their plate. As AI makes this work, Copilot will become more collaborative, more efficient, more scaled.
Microsoft Viva is getting new Copilot capabilities over the coming months and years ahead. Not just in one of the Viva workloads, like Viva Goals or Viva Engage, but across each of the Viva workloads over time. This is important because previously when we talked about this, we talked about how it would affect teams and Outlook and how it'll affect the office applications and how this is very powerful tool set because it takes the technical skills that many of us have in building and crafting beautiful PowerPoint presentations and it enables other people to do that.
It takes communication skills and literally literary and writing and communication skills and makes those more accessible to more people in a way that we just never could achieve before. And so collaborating with AI through Copilot has a lot of benefits. Today I wanted to talk about two particular patterns.
One, why is AI and Copilot so powerful in the set of employee experiences that Viva represents today? And two, I wanted to talk about the actual nature of how some of these things will roll out within the Viva workload and why they're really relevant and important to understand today. So let's start with just a high level perspective for number one, which is why do these matter? When we think of employee experience for a lot of organizations, they see it as additive. So what I mean by that is we have this foundational stuff we've invested in.
People need to run effective meetings. They need to communicate with one another in a high velocity collaboration format that makes sense to use Microsoft teams. We have many customers that use SharePoint for file storage, for pages, for intranets.
We have customers today, many that use Outlook, right? All these users use Outlook or the Office applications. And so the Copilot experiences that affect those are going to be clear scenarios that people are going to take advantage of very rapidly in their exploration. However, a lot of people might underestimate the importance of Copilot within these employee experience categories like Viva.
And I think the reason for that is because for many customers, they're just getting started on their Viva journey. They're just getting started in enriching and improving employee experience. And when we think about the employee experience layer, a lot of the challenge with it is a lot of it is new to employees.
So we have new ways of eliciting feedback when it comes to glint and making sense of that feedback, these direct signals from the organization. When we take something like Viva Pulse, we have new challenges of helping educate lowercase L leaders and capital L leaders on how to create these feedback flywheels and to be able to share that information back both confidentially with a large group of people and also give that ability to action that information more effectively to those managers who may not have those skills. Go to learning and you have a whole new discipline area where we're all learning how to recommend and curate and craft effective learning pathways and things like that.
Not just for capital L learning, mandatory learning and LMS systems, but for the lowercase L learning that's so important in an organization today. If we go back to things like Vivint Engage, yes, we're learning, of course, communities, which is an ongoing experience we'll all be working on for many years, but we're also now learning how do we effectively give everyone a voice with storylines? And how do we collate that information and enrich the experience around analytics so people can make better judgment calls on how to write and communicate? If we look at things like Viva Goals, a lot of the gap there is how do I even get started? A lot of organizations struggle with the mapping of those goals, identifying some of those goals, maintaining them over time. There's a number of different challenges there because OKR methodologies well not new for some people is new to a large group of people who now have access to an effective medium in viva goals to manage that kind of work in that way.
And the list goes on and on. Each of the vivo workloads with topics and insights. Each of the Vivo workloads have specific patterns where today there's an uplift, an educational uplift and a supportive uplift that we need to do.
And for point number one, the reason Copilot is so important is because it makes it easier to get to that ready state or the first starting point within a lot of these Viva experiences. Think of it like this. In the example of Viva goals, one of the things that you can use Copilot for is to help take things like a business plan or other type of documentation that you're doing that has goals and objectives.
Key results. To take that and actually have it read through it and then extract those and create and craft sort of the appropriate structures within viva goals of how this might be managed. And while it's not perfect, what it's doing is accelerating that work of you trying to transform a traditional way of working.
Many people even do it on paper and pencil. But taking that and transferring that into a model where it's digitized in something like Viva Goals and that is a big uplift because that challenge is one of the biggest things that kind of slows people down from getting started with these platforms. So Copilot has for a transformative effect, I think it's going to have a really big impact on employee experience and I think we should all be very excited about enriching that employee experience.
That brings us to point number two, which is what are these new experiences and how can they help us? So if we look at these new experiences that we have today, let's kind of continue that discussion around goals with goals. What we can use this tool set for is to improve that starting point, as I mentioned. But it's not just for that.
Think of it like this. You take your strategy, your vision, these business plans and planning documents, you put those things together and they represent a form of OKRs. But it's not just that.
It's suggesting these initial key results or initiatives or helping you brainstorm and rationalize that suggesting initiatives that focus on outcomes, helping you. A lot of the training we do in Viva Goals spoiler, I guess. But a lot of the training that us and many other organizations that do Viva Goals deployment do a lot of it is just teaching people how to write good OKR methodology, right? Like how to write a better key result, how to write a better objective.
And once you kind of teach enough people, then they start to teach each other, right? There's that cross reference ability that you get when you have Copilot who understands OKR methodologies. When you have Copilot that understands these things, it can very easily inspect the writing itself of your results and things like that. Is this clear enough? Is this specific? Is this measurable? And even just the reminders around how to write that alone via Copilot support are very helpful.
So it's not just that it crafts and creates these, but it can kind of challenge you in supportive ways to help improve the quality of that process. And the other reason I think this is exciting is because there's a lot of features that I find people don't know about Viva Goals. So when we work with customers, if you don't know this in goals, you actually have a committed goal and an aspirational goal you can actually create it's like a flag, a boolean, you check it and you make this now committed.
And that's really a useful thing because when you have a lot of goals in your organization, sometimes it's really helpful to say, okay, these are my aspirational ones, but these are essentially my committed goals where we're all guaranteeing we're going to update them, maintain them, et cetera. One of the things that the Copilot strategy brings to the table is it could potentially take little features like that and make those a little bit more visible through the process of crafting and maintaining and tweaking your goals. So in the first release it'll be just like generating and suggesting goals, but over time it provides new opportunities for us to actually learn how the tool works and apply that learning directly into informing your process itself.
And that's something that right now people like ourselves and others have to teach people, right, and kind of remind them. But soon that'll be something that will be kind of a natural flow with something like Copilot. The other big one is that it allows us to build summaries.
So one of the things that I really like, not just in communication, like if I'm writing Internet news post, having an automatic summary in multiple languages, or doing summaries like a news digest across multiple news posts. Those are really useful use cases for GPT Four or like Copilot. But what we can also use it for is we can use it for summarization of things like goals.
So we have all these key results and objectives that are mapped in a dashboard and we're having a meeting talking about check ins and what's going on with these things, having that really simple language that breaks all that down. So I don't need to really understand the goals methodology, the hierarchies like the interface, I can just read the text is a very useful skill. Again, bridging that divide, especially for people who might review this later.
So when you finish your discussions, of course you have your notes, you have your transcripts, of course, from the meetings with automated and Microsoft teams, there's Copilot improvements that help you rationalize the meeting outputs. When you combine that with rationalization through Copilot of your goals and the status of check ins and things like that, you can imagine there's a lot of content there that's very easily understood by other parties that you can share out even if they're not using goals on a regular basis. So I think that's some examples of why goals improvements with Copilot can make a big difference.
Now, I talked about Viva Engage before, but just to kind of reaffirm the message in a short form, it allows us to tailor and refine and improve our message quality. It allows us to produce more messages to champion amplify and connect on messaging much faster and easier. Because it's not just that.
It helps us suggest things to write about and how to structure that. But it also allows us to very easily add images, add questions that other people have had and connect this piece of information, this perspective or opinion we're sharing, connect that to other places and references points, which is a very powerful part of the networking effect that you get with something like Vivaingage and the community model. The other big thing that Vivengage does is employee sentiment and accelerating understanding, right? Because we have more advanced analytics and those analytics with Copilot are even more accessible.
It's one thing for it to say like hey, here's the overall sentiment, it's another to be able to ask it questions and then have it make sense of multiple data signals that again, many people in the corporate communications world, they know how to read these reports. But a lot of people just managing a storyline, a lowercase L leader who has access to these capabilities, they might not know how those things work. So having this natural language way of inspecting and asking questions about it really solves for a lot of gaps in maybe reports and things like that.
And then lastly, trending topics and suggesting comment responses and things like that, those all create more content. It allows for more people to share their voice and do so in a way that gives them a bit more confidence. So, lots to talk about for Viva Engage.
I would really recommend taking a look at our other video on it if you're looking to get a little bit more insight into it. Now, this brings us to Topics, and arguably, I'm going to kind of combine Answers and Topics together because they're very intertwined concepts today, both licensing wise and also in execution. Yes, Answers shows up in the Viva Engage experience today, but it's licensed through Topics.
So Viva Topics makes natural sense for Copilot in a number of ways. Obviously, one of the benefits of Topics is that it's contextualized. So as I'm writing you an email or writing a message, we can use Topics within that to shorten the amount of writing I need to do, right? Very, very powerful tool for that.
Or it can also really help with just making sure at that just in time moment I can go learn more about that subject. So Topics has a lot of value already and uses AI to compute these topic pages, to rationalize them, et cetera. Now, when it does that, one of the many pieces of those topic pages is the summaries.
So being able to generate those summaries with Copilot, one improves the quality of those two, allows for more complex summarization, right? So if you're trying to summarize not just one topic, but a set of topics, or you want to summarize the multiple questions and answers within a topic, those are things that can be really powerful with Copilot experiences. And that's exactly what you're seeing with Viva Topics and Viva answers. Those or answers in Viva, I think it's called.
But those two experiences are really great examples of Copilot. I will suggest that there's a lot more ways in which these tools that I'm already talking about are going to have Copilot in the future. Now the other one, that big one is Glint and Viva Insights.
And from a Copilot perspective, we know that in Glint it allows for summarization and analysis support. If you don't know this, a lot of the ways people use tools like Glint and Viva Insights today is they take the rich feedback, right? So you have all these direct signals from Glint with employee surveys and things of that nature, all these comments, and you take the indirect feedback like your digital behavior data from Viva Insights. You put those together in these power bi reports.
Again, Microsoft has built most of these tool sets for you, and then you just kind of make sense of them. And that takes time and effort. And one of the biggest challenges HR is under today is that HR has a lot of other stuff on their plate, right? And so while they really want to drive employee engagement and they want to make this successful, they'll struggle to take the time to really rationalize that data and provide actionable ways forward and that's what Glint basically helps with, right? It makes it a lot more actionable, a lot easier to move forward with.
And arguably Viva Insights and Viva Pulse, those also bring that to a larger category of people. So people are reflective able to action, whether it's improving meeting effectiveness and how I get feedback around meetings, let's say, or how I stay connected with people. Both those are good examples of like Viva Insights personal premium capabilities.
And then if you go look at the Glint side with Pulse, this idea of creating flywheels and feedback, there, there's a lot of actionability where you're a lowercase L leader, capital L leader in the you do a Pulse survey and then you're getting that information back. And so now how do I action that? Oh, the tool is going to give you some recommendations. In both those instances, Copilot has a lot of potential value.
So in Glint summarization and analysis, support makes sense, but so does it in these other places as well. And I think you're going to see more in the future around Copilot for those. And then if we think of Glint especially, you have so much quantitative and qualitative data that you have to parse thousands of comments often, right? In the large organizations we work with Glint, they literally have this huge deluge of comments and feedback that takes a lot of processing time to manage.
And then even if you have done all that work, you then need to reinspect it because a quarter passes or a year passes and you have a whole new set of data and you want to contrast it with the previous set of data. So being able to use keywords topics, sentiment analysis, being able to ask questions in a natural language way, which Copilot supports in this Glint journey, those are all really powerful and compelling use cases for not just Copilot, but for empowering and making the Glint investment more valuable as well. So those are a few examples.
I'm sure there's more that I could cover. But to get started, I really think that most organizations should look at this as an opportunity. Where Copilot? If you haven't embraced eva and you haven't started rolling it out, copilot is a great opportunity to reevaluate that because the cost of ownership, the cost of investment, both in human hours and effort, those things are decreasing.
As AI makes this work that we're describing more collaborative, more efficient, more scaled, and certainly more natural. With things like natural language querying and discussion. So I hope you're as excited as I am about Copilot now officially being publicly announced around the Viva broader support.
And I think the number one question I always get from people is when is all this stuff coming? And I think if you're not aware of this right now, you can use something like Microsoft loop and copilot it's out. Some of these other workloads are going to be lighting up in weeks and months. So you're going to see some workloads, light up with some copilot experiences, and then more, and then more.
And while we won't really be talking about when's the next copilot, we're going to be talking about when's this particular copilot set of features or when does copilot come to this experience, that matters most to me. So I would really encourage you to give that feedback. I want to know more about this particular copilot experience.
And depending on what those are, if you even ask them in the comments or directly to me, I'm happy to give you a bit of insight on when I believe that is occurring or when it has been disclosed that it is occurring. So anyways, thanks everyone for your time.
