Microsoft Copilot
- Coppage, Preston
- Snyder, Jason
- Trubitt, Lisa V
Description:
**Looking for Copilot for Microsoft 365? Send us your feedback and suggestions about it here.**
Getting Started:
Microsoft Copilot with commercial data protection is available at copilot.microsoft.com by logging in with your M365 credentials.
Start chatting: Once you have signed in, you can start chatting with the AI-powered assistant. Use it to generate content, compare products, and protect data. You can also use it to create documents, presentations, and spreadsheets based on your commands and data sources. When chatting with Copilot, use natural language. Good prompts are the key to good answers.
Protect your data: Microsoft Copilot encrypts, deletes, and does not use chat data for any other purpose. User and business data in Microsoft Copilot is protected and will not leak outside the organization. Chat data is not saved, and Microsoft has no eyes-on access to it. Chat data is also not used to train underlying models.
Be sure to login to copilot.microsoft.com with your UAlbany M365 credentials to enable this data protection.
Data Classification Standards: When using any type of generative AI (Microsoft Copilot or others) it's important maintain alignment with the university's data classification standard.
Category 1 (Protected PII or regulated): Should NEVER be included in generative AI prompts or inputs.
Category 2 (Internal Use Data): Can be included in Microsoft Copilot prompts when logged in with your UAlbany account
Category 3 (Public Data): Can be included in generative AI prompts with Microsoft Copilot or similar AI tools.
Get help: If you need any assistance, you can refer to the official documentation.
Getting Started Prompts
Draft up a meeting agenda for a recurring leadership meeting
How do I create an Excel query to find the median of a range of cells?
I want this email to sound less formal (insert body of email)
Create an image for my slide deck explaining cloud storage that I will present to a customer
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FAQs
Who has access to Microsoft Copilot?
Staff & Faculty only. Student access isn't available currently - options for student access within our Microsoft licensing entitlements will continue to be evaluated.
What do you mean by “generative AI?”
Generative AI is AI (Artificial Intelligence) that can generate new content—like text, images, etc.—on its own. Copilot is a generative tool: you can prompt it with something, and it will generate a response based on its underlying AI models and the web.
Can my company see my chat prompts or responses?
Your prompts and responses are de-identified and not retained when using Copilot. Because of this, your company cannot see them and are not provided with any auditing or logging tools as part of Copilot.
What kind of questions can you ask Copilot?
Think of Copilot as a new, more powerful way to search the internet for answers. If you’re trying to learn about a new topic, start your prompt with “Explain this” or “how come.” If you have a lot of different articles with multiple perspectives on a topic but still can’t make a design, try asking, “Compare this option and another option in the form of a table” or “Give me the pros and cons on <topic of interest>.” And if you need more help with making content, you can ask Copilot to “write an email based on bullet points pasted below,” or “Create an image” in a specific style.
Copilot cannot answer questions about your work data, such as your emails, chats, and files, because it does not have access to those items.
How do I know that I’m in the protected experience of Copilot?
When you’re in the protected experience of Copilot, you’ll find the green “Protected” badge next to the sign-in credentials in the top right corner. Above the text box, you’ll find a sentence that reads “Your personal and company data are protected in this chat.” If you don’t find these cues, you don’t have data protection for your AI chat. To fix this, just sign at Bing.com/chat (or copilot.microsoft.com) with your work account.
