AI-first working: what built-in AI does differently from a separate assistant

It is Tuesday afternoon and you are looking for the quote you sent to a customer last month. It is in an email, or in a folder, or both. An AI assistant finds it in a few seconds. The only question is: which assistant, and where does your quote go then?

Many SMEs on Microsoft 365 are now considering Copilot. That is a logical step. There is also another model: a workplace in which the AI has been built in from the start. In this piece you read what that difference means in practice.

On top or built in, what is the difference?

Copilot is an assistant that Microsoft has placed on top of Word, Outlook and Teams. Those programs existed long before there were language models. The assistant was added later and works within programs that were built for something else.

With a workplace with built-in AI, you start the other way round. Mail, files and documents are in one environment, and the assistant is built into it from the start. The difference lies in small things:

• You ask a question and such an assistant first looks up the passages that matter.
• It can look things up in emails, tickets and invoices, even if you do not know which program something is in.

Where does your data go?

This is the question you should ask every AI provider. Copilot processes your data in the Microsoft cloud. Microsoft is an American company and therefore falls under the CLOUD Act from 2018. That law lets US authorities request data from American companies, even if it is stored in a European data centre.

How do you choose?

Two questions help you further:

1. Which tasks do you really want to hand off? Write down five. Searching, summarising and drafting can be done by any good assistant. Above all, check whether it can access the right data.
2. Where may your data go? Ask every supplier where the processing takes place, under which law and who the sub-processors are. If you do not get a clear answer, that tells you enough too.

If you have worked in Microsoft 365 for years and everything there works well, Copilot is an understandable choice. If you want to keep your work in a European environment, see how Noveu Werkplek brings your mail, calendar and files together.