Co-pilot company integration.

Posted by Traditional_End1696@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 15 comments

Hi everyone,

Our IT team is currently working on integrating Copilot to assist our accounting team. The primary use case will be summarizing Excel spreadsheets and performing calculations.

I would appreciate any advice or recommendations on what we should consider during implementation, particularly regarding permissions, policies, SLAs, and data protection.

Are there any legal risks we should be aware of?

Our main concern is ensuring that our data remains secure. We cannot risk any client information being exposed or used to train AI models. Is there a way to ensure that all data remains strictly within our tenant? While we understand that 100% isolation may not be achievable, we would like to know what steps we can take to maximize security and minimize risk.

Any guidance would be greatly appreciated.

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CeC-P@reddit

It is TERRIBLE at doing anything in spreadsheets. I don't know how sales can live without "hey, find me an email from 2 years ago where I mentioned pandas and concrete. What customer was that?" and getting an answer in 5 seconds instead of 5 hours. Bulk language processing is huge.
Math - oh hell no. Coding, noonononononononono. Spreadsheets - nope. Word doc summaries - garbage. Meeting summaries - passable but encourages not listening. File searches - OMG, time saver of the century. Not worth like $30/mo though.

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thortgot@reddit

$30/month is an hour of effort that you need to save. Even just search is worth that.

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TommyVe@reddit

Please, copilot is a waste of money. We've imolemented it ourselves like half a year ago and are already integrating Claude instead.

I've tried every single LLM there is out there, and never have I felt like bringing lakes for nothing as I did with using copilot. It will straight up gaslight you it can't access your outlook inbox despite fetching info from there the da before.

Please. Don't. I beg.

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thortgot@reddit

Copilot literally has claude's models. With frontier you even get Cowork functionality with knowledge about your M365 data.

You don't need complex prompting to get it working correctly.

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CPAtech@reddit

You can add Anthropic as a subprocessor, but you have to enable it. While its protected by the same EDP as Copilot, it differs in that your data crosses the tenant boundary. So its not quite the same from a security standpoint as Copilot.

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thortgot@reddit

Its the same risk as using Claude directly but without the Microsoft EDP boundary.

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gakule@reddit

Copilot is great for what it is. You must have it set to "web" instead of work if it can't access your inbox.

It's not good in Excel, though, especially summarizing sheets or do formulas.

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Secret_Account07@reddit

We are using it. It’s helpful, not great.

It cleans up communications. Great for simple stuff.
The user needs to be aware of what it can and can’t do. Don’t rely on it for complex coding.
Don’t assume it’s always right.

It’s a tool. It has a use. It’s important to know how that tool works.

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FPSViking@reddit

Is there a way to ensure that all data remains strictly within our tenant?

Yes, don't utilize AI with this data. Get your accountants to do their job. Pay the accountants to do their job. Don't waste money on AI to facilitate something that can greatly increase your risks. Not to mention, in the near future, you'll be paying more for those AI tokens than the accounts salaries combined.

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Zozorak@reddit

Had a conversation with finance guy yesterday where he was asking about it and he 'saw something cool'.

Had to shut him down and go, if we go Ai it'll probably be Claude or copilot, as ms already has our data. But even then it not worth implementing as people aren't even using teams properly.

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progenyofeniac@reddit

I use Excel regularly and have had a copilot license for close to a year, and I don’t use copilot in Excel. EVER. Mind you, it does use Anthropic’s models now so it’s supposed to be better.

The big thing to keep in mind with enabling copilot (assigning a copilot license) for users isn’t really what it can do in the app—just make sure they fully understand the need to filter for hallucinations. The real concern is that it makes it MUCH easier to find all data in the M365 ecosystem to which they have permissions.

Think: HR added a spreadsheet of sensitive info to their SharePoint/OneDrive and opened sharing to “everyone” so that managers on other teams can see it when given the direct link. Copilot will find it if the licensed user asks something relevant to it.

So…I guess have your data governance in order.

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dedjedi@reddit

What are they going to do when AI hallucinates?

https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1sf1ijb/copilot_is_automatically_creating_descriptions_of/

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