Indian Businesses Lining Up For ‘Copilot’, AI: Samik Roy, Microsoft India

Digital transformation has been on a huge uptick world over, doubly so, in India where the smallest of businesses have kept an open mind to leveraging the latest innovations to solve their daily business challenges. One doesn’t have to look too far to spot the local vegetable vendor at the street corner or a chai-wala using the Paytm soundboxes to keep track of hundreds of payments made in real time.

Similar instances can be seen across small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and businesses across the length and breadth of the country, where bringing efficiency and productivity by leaning on technology has seen a big boom in the past few years.

According to IDC data, over 95 per cent of Indian companies are looking to increase their Digital Transformation (DX) spending or keep it at the same level in 2023 as they did in 2022. The report mentioned that the overall DX spending in India is expected to reach USD 85 billion by 2026.

The IDC report highlighted that Indian organisations are increasingly inclined towards the cloud, automation, artificial intelligence (AI), network infrastructure, Internet of Things (IoT) and other advanced technologies to transform them digitally, spendings on digital transformation (DX) and IT modernisation are at the top of the mind of Indian companies.

But during a recent event, IDC India MD Vasant Rao revealed that the latest data suggests that IT spending across most companies in India will be lesser than previously anticipated over the next eight months (7.5-8 per cent growth in IT spending as opposed to 10 per cent in 2023). But he also emphasised that the proportion of DX spend and non-DX spending will continue to grow. “I think that is something that we will continue to see in the coming years,” Rao added.

‘Copilot’ And AI

Saying that Artificial Intelligence (AI) has caught the eye of everyone since November 2023 would be the understatement of this year as businesses continue to scramble to adopt AI and AI-powered chatbots to empower their businesses.

“The floodgates have opened. We have people lining up to try and understand how Copilot and AI can make their work and business more productive and efficient than ever before,” says Samik Roy, Executive Director, Corporate, Medium, Small Business, Microsoft India.

He explains that a lot of interest is being generated due to what Copilot can do. “Because what it is doing is in a natural language. Even a person who is not very well-versed with the computer, can talk to the computer (in his/her language) and get an answer on basic instructions and even forego tough clerical tasks and deliver exceptional customer care.”

In March, Microsoft launched its Dynamics 365 Copilot as the world’s first AI Copilot in both CRM and ERP to bring the next-generation AI for businesses. The Copilot in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales and Viva Sales has been pointed at helping sellers dramatically reduce the time they spend on clerical tasks. Besides, AI helps write email responses to customers and can even create an email summary of a Teams meeting in Outlook. Additionally, the meeting summary pulls in details from the seller’s CRM such as product and pricing information, as well as insights from the recorded Teams call. This means that the sellers can spend a lot more time with customers rather than spending time checking and responding to emails.

Meanwhile, Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Service empowers agents to deliver exceptional customer care. Dynamics 365 Copilot can deliver contextual answers to questions in both chat and email, in addition to providing an interactive chat experience over knowledge bases and case history so this AI-powered expertise is always available to answer questions.

The tech giant has also integrated Copilot into Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and Dynamics 365 Marketing to enable marketers in simplifying their workflow in data exploration, audience segmentation and content creation.

Copilot was subsequently integrated into Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams as well, which took all of the Microsoft 365 products even closer to the business leaders.

“Productivity, which is fundamentally the tagline today, is what we are helping organisations do more – but in less time. Because time is money and time is also cost. It is helping organisations be more productive, efficient, and be much more specific with the way they do their jobs and execute their functions,” explains Roy.

A GitHub survey revealed that Copilot was successful among developers as those who used GitHub Copilot said they were 88 per cent more productive. Also, 74 per cent of developers said that they could focus on more satisfying work and 77 per cent said it helped them spend less time searching for information or examples.

Could this productivity be replicated in other vocations/jobs/workplaces/businesses? Time will tell. But most businesses seem to buy this idea.