Very concerning copilot news has come out recently

Very interesting news is coming regarding custom copilots. Franck Cornu, Microsoft MVP and developer of PnP Modern Search, has unearthed some information that custom copilots don’t use the semantic index in the same way as Copilot for M365. In fact, it hardly uses it at all, querying the Graph index instead to locate files, then passing the documents to an LLM. It also has no access to custom metadata columns? It certainly explains a LOT of issues I’ve had while building POCs for clients. It seems custom copilots need a lot more time in the oven before they’re ready for complex use cases. It makes me VERY concerned about how successful Click-to-copilot will be.

Meanwhile SharePoint Premium is looking better and better, to be honest. It’s ready-to-go features powered by AI, but in very specific ways. Think of these features as “solutions in a box”. If you have a need for it (like document translation), you just enable it and use it. Aside from the document processing models, very little setup and configuration is needed. You simply use it.

In the battle of AI features, there’s certainly a difference between these large ambitious products that have broad use cases, and smaller niche products that do one thing very well. How will this all turn out? Will Copilot take over everything? It doesn’t seem that way just yet…

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