What is the True Value of Copilot?

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Who should listen: Microsoft 365 service owners, adoption and change leads, and UC professionals building the business case for Copilot or planning a rollout beyond the initial pilot.

Guest: Brett Johnson — Microsoft 365 + Copilot Global Black Belt (EMEA), Microsoft

Brett Johnson is a long-serving Microsoft technical specialist who has moved from Exchange support, unified comms and Surface into an EMEA Microsoft 365 + Copilot Global Black Belt role. He talks to Tom Arbuthnot about how the GBB function unblocks customer deals, where Copilot is delivering real value day to day, prompting technique, and the shift towards agents and custom Copilots.

Many thanks to Jabra, sponsor of this episode.

Key insights

• The Global Black Belt role is an EMEA-wide overlay that supports solution and technical sales professionals and, crucially, has closer ties to engineering and corporate teams to unblock stalled customer Copilot conversations. ▶ 1:32
• Organisations sitting on the fence should start with the Microsoft Copilot web/browser experience (formerly Bing Chat Enterprise), which is included in most Microsoft 365 SKUs at no extra commercial cost and is commercially data protected — Johnson opens most customer demos there because attendees have usually already tried ChatGPT. ▶ 7:12
• Don't overlook the Copilot mobile apps on Android and iOS, which can be connected to the corporate Microsoft 365 tenant — customers frequently assume it is a PC or Mac-only experience. ▶ 9:47
• Meetings do not have to be recorded to get Copilot value: transient (unsaved) transcription unlocks most of the in-meeting Copilot capability, which is a significant unblocker for customers with recording restrictions. Microsoft has a new white paper on best practice for recording and transcription. ▶ 10:17
• A concrete time saving: after a 30–40 minute technical call, two people used Copilot on the Teams transcript with a precise prompt (not just "summarise") to draft an escalation question for engineering — five minutes instead of another 30–40 minutes of wordsmithing. ▶ 14:25
• Johnson uses the GCSE prompting framework — Goal (what output you want), Context (why and who is involved), Source (which document, meeting or email to draw from) and Expectations (how Copilot should respond, e.g. three bullets in a table). Prompt guidance is published on the Microsoft Copilot adoption site. ▶ 16:31
• Copilot respects existing permissions and works entirely on the user's behalf — it does not inherit rights or surface content the individual cannot already access, which is the key answer to the graph-access security question. ▶ 13:23
• The next phase for customers who have already adopted M365 Copilot is Copilot Studio and custom Copilots, built around specific departmental KPIs and line-of-business workflows; because these are consumption-based, it is easier to build an ROI case for a single team than for the whole business. ▶ 19:37
• Tom's own highest-value uses are Teams meeting recap, extracting content ideas from conversations, and data manipulation (turning lists into CSVs, tables and bullets) — rather than generative writing. ▶ 23:42

Insights summarised by AI from the episode transcript, reviewed by the Empowering.Cloud team.

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