Beyond Copilot: Unlocking your Organisation's Unique Knowledge

Many businesses are curious about Microsoft Copilot and how it stacks up against building their own generative AI solutions. This article explores the differences and when to move beyond Copilot to leverage your organisation’s unique knowledge.

Microsoft Copilot is designed to integrate tightly with Microsoft 365 applications. It’s essentially sold as a pre-built AI assistant for everyday tasks.

The idea is simple: it helps you get things done faster and better, by:

1. Understanding context: understanding what you’re working on.
2. Making suggestions recommending ideas, answering questions, or completing tasks for you.
3. Learning: The more you use it, the smarter it gets.
   

Virtual Assistant?

As a business, you may want to offer a virtual assistant to customers, that can answer questions and quickly find the right knowledge within your database(s).

For a virtual assistant to be useful, it needs to be able to answer specific questions relating to your products, services, policies, or resources.

Large language models like ChatGPT–which Copilot is based on–lack access to specific data, hindering fine-tuning and often resulting in generic responses.

Ever feel frustrated wasting your time with a generic response from a 'virtual assistant'?

While Copilot Studio lets Copilot tap external data, complex internal sources like wikis and PDFs require extensive customisation, hindering its ability to unlock the goldmine of information within your organisation.

Where Does your Data Go?

With Copilot and Copilot studio, user interactions and your data might be analysed externally, potentially including sensitive information. Even with careful data collection, leaks can occur.

Businesses with unique knowledge and internal databases should consider a private network solution, unavailable with Copilot.

Lack of Customisation

While Copilot and Copilot Studio offer customisation, they lack the granular control needed for crucial tasks. This includes ensuring response accuracy and reliability through "guardrails."

A recent example was a client who needed their virtual AI assistant to answer questions from its users without showing any bias toward any particular products. With a custom solution, we were able to create guardrails to prevent that and keep the assistant bias free.

Consider RAG

Copilot is a great tool for assisting workers day-to-day using the Microsoft 365 platform, but for businesses with specific needs, a custom RAG (retrieval augmented generation) solution offers significant advantages. It leverages your unique data, integrates with your workflows, and provides a secure environment for your sensitive information.

To do this typically requires a lot of complex development, fine tuning, and setup work.

That's where Caitlyn comes in. Our platform empowers businesses to leverage advanced generative AI like RAG solutions without the need for in-house AI specialists.