Copilot for Microsoft 365

ITS conducted a capabilities assessment in May - June 2024 to determine the utility of Microsoft 365 copilot. The license costs $400/year per user. We asked users from across campus (faculty and staff in a variety of departments) to test Copilot in each of the Microsoft office applications in which it was available (SharePoint was not included).  

 CONSENSUS: 

• Copilot response time is too slow. ChatGPT provides faster, more reliable and thorough answers.  

• Copilot does not deliver on the promise to surface all data that a user has access to within the university network.  

• Participants appreciated that their data was protected from training the LLM (this is also the default setting in ChatGPT now)

• Copilot often included irrelevant data.

RECOMMENDATION:

ITS did not purchase any Copilot licenses. If a faculty or staff member would like to purchase a copilot license, they need approval from their dean or the person in their department who can approve purchases. Please send an email to techpurchasing@seattleu.edu if you would like to purchase a license for Copilot for Microsoft 365. Include the name of the person who approved the purchase.

NOTES

Microsoft has many AI products called copilot.

M365 Copilot (very expensive, uses M365 data) is different than Microsoft Copilot (free, uses public and query data only). Logging into Microsoft Copilot with your SeattleU account enables Enterprise Data Protection, so data you submit is kept secure and not used to train the model.

However, SU has not approved the free version for use with SU data and information. We would need to do a security review. Also, there are limitations to the free version just like with ChatGPT. So if you were going to really use it, you would likely want the paid version