Unlocking the Future: Copilot Chat Aims to Improve AI Adoption

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This Week in IT, Microsoft announces Copilot Chat and pay-as-you go agents – Outlook and Teams is getting a unified contacts experience, and Patch Tuesday causes a problem for some Citrix users.

Episode overview

This Week in IT, we look at Microsoft’s new Copilot Chat feature, a unified contact experience for Teams and Outlook, and issues caused by Patch Tuesday updates.

Microsoft Copilot Chat: Microsoft announced a new feature called Copilot Chat, designed for commercial customers with a Microsoft Entra ID and some kind of Microsoft 365 subscription but without a full Copilot license. This feature allows users to chat with Copilot using natural language and provides enterprise-grade security and compliance management.
Encouraging AI Adoption: This new feature aims to encourage AI adoption in enterprises by giving users access to basic tools even without a full Copilot license. It also allows organizations to deploy specialized AI agents on a pay-as-you-go basis.
Web Grounded Chat: Copilot Chat is web grounded, meaning it uses information available on the Internet to answer queries. Users can manually upload documents to provide more context, while the full Copilot license offers access to work-grounded information within Microsoft 365 tenants.
Unified Contact Experience: Microsoft Teams and Outlook will receive a unified contact experience via the People app, enabling synchronization between the two applications. This feature will be rolled out to all tenants by April 2025 and will be available only on the new Teams client only.
Patch Tuesday Issues: The latest Patch Tuesday updates caused problems for some Citrix users, particularly those using the Citrix Session Recording Agent (SRA). Users need to stop the service before applying the update and restart it afterward to avoid issues.

Russell Smith

Editorial Director at Petri IT Knowledgebase. Russell has more than 20 years' experience working in IT. From small business to large government IT infrastructure projects. Russell started his writing career for Windows IT Pro magazine in the early 2000s. Since then, Russell has contributed to a variety of publications, including Petri, CDW's list of publications, and various industry blogs including Netwrix, BeyondTrust, and others. In addition to more than 1000 articles Russell has authored, he has also written a book on Windows security and co-authored another for Microsoft's MOAC series. Russell has also authored several courses for Pluralsight.