Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) and conversational User Experience (UX) are at the forefront of everyone’s minds. There’s practically not a day in the week that you don’t hear something about them from news outlets, social media or at your team meeting in the metaverse. Successfully using these technologies in the enterprise can positively impact the employee experience while maximising productivity, and keeping enterprise data secure.
Microsoft’s introduction of Microsoft 365 Copilot recently made a big splash in this space, bringing together Generative AI with large language models (LLMs) and enterprise data to provide a new way for users to interact with the vendor’s core productivity applications. The idea behind Copilot is that it’s an automated assistant, boosting productivity and always keeping the end user in the pilot’s seat. Users can ask questions in natural language to help with writing Word documents, analysing Excel data, summarising emails and creating PowerPoint presentations, for example. To do this, Copilot uses Microsoft Graph REST API requests to take advantage of company data stored in SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, Teams and Exchange Online.
“AI could bring real advantages to a wide variety of tasks in daily work,” says Kal Kanev, director of the Global AI Practice at DXC. “But we must be responsible when adopting Generative AI tools, understand their shortcomings and ensure we use them safely.”
Crafting a flight plan
Enterprises must thoughtfully prepare how they will introduce Generative AI and UX technology. Evaluating existing business processes and workflows and understanding how people are using their productivity applications will be paramount. It will be critical for key stakeholders to play an important role in determining how to best leverage powerful new capabilities, so that they are not misused, and so that confidential and critical information is not exposed.
Plan for this by:
Defining an enterprise AI policy
Whatever generative AI tool an enterprise uses, it should have corporate policies in place for AI stakeholders; AI compliance and guidance documents, and playbooks; and AI audit functions. Any Copilot deployment should adhere to these defined requirements.
Promoting security, privacy and compliance
Copilot is integrated into Microsoft 365 and thus inherits all your organisation’s security, compliance and privacy settings. On top of that, prior to deploying the solution customers must have a clear and defined baseline data strategy that includes sensitivity labelling, retention, data loss prevention and archiving. Having these capabilities in place will ultimately define what the Copilot core engine can generate to formulate its responses.
Managing change
When deploying any Generative AI technology, organisations must realise that sustainable success is inseparable from the experience of their workforce. So, it is crucial to have an effective change management and communication plan in place, which addresses areas such as the vision for change and readying the organisation to move toward that. That includes empowering the end user population for that change and detailing how the change will be managed over time.
Global systems integrators such as DXC Technology will play a critical role in helping customers on their Generative AI and conversational UX journey. Given that most employees will be unfamiliar with a conversational UX, companies must measure the experience they have with a natural language interface such as Copilot’s. DXC pairs its Modern Workplace services, which include the capability to get operational data on service delivery, with Qualtrics' EmployeeXM™ experience management platform for gathering continuous feedback about employees’ technology experiences. Capturing employee sentiment and workforce perception data and analysing them in conjunction with service volumetrics provides insightful and objective employee experience measurements.
DXC's Global AI practice provides Generative AI services including discovery workshops, use case design and implementation.
The capabilities that solutions such as Copilot are bringing to the workplace are exciting—game-changing, in fact. Their impact on the user experience, employee empowerment, self-service enablement and learning will be great—but businesses need to keep in mind the importance of properly preparing for and monitoring them.
About the authors
Rich Harnett is an offering manager for DXC Modern Workplace Intelligent Collaboration service, focused on workplace collaboration with Microsoft. He has over 35 years of experience spanning networking, unified communication and collaboration-managed services offering development.
John Hyland is an architect for DXC Modern Workplace and a DXC-accredited Master Technologist, focused on the DXC-Microsoft offering strategy and roadmap.