Spotlight on Adelaide’s Copilot User Group

The buzz surrounding Microsoft Copilot has seen the emergence of user groups spring up around the country and globally to help users and industry peers learn how, why and where Copilot fits in.  

Daniel Brown is leading the charge of the dedicated Copilot User Group in Adelaide. He also leads two other user groups in Microsoft 365 and Azure.  

On a mission to spread the awareness of the Adelaide technology scene, Brown said the idea behind the group is to build a strong community around Microsoft technology in the user groups and Adelaide’s strong technology history.  

“Considering this enthusiasm and with my history of running another User Group since 2007, I decided to setup it up, lock in some speakers utilising my LinkedIn and business network, get Microsoft Adelaide on board and off we went with our first meeting in February,” he said.  

User Groups are traditionally a place where IT professionals, IT managers and decision makers come together for sound independent expert and industry advice. They serve as the starting point to gain and share knowledge, insights and connect with fellow attendees, Microsoft and other experts. 

“With the Copilot User Group, we hope to take attendees on a journey, from the beginning of Microsoft Copilot and lead them as the technology progresses, improves and matures,” Brown said. 

While there are many M365 groups rolling the Copilot discussion into them, Brown said dedicated Copilot user groups are being holistic across the whole stack – Copilot, Copilot Pro, Copilot for M365, Copilot Studio (Formally Power Virtual Agents), then Copilot in SPO, Copilot in PowerBI, Copilot for Sales/Finance/Security/Service and Microsoft AI as a whole. 

Nationally, there are two other Copilot User Groups – one in Perth and another in Brisbane. 

The user group caters to all levels of knowledge, providing a welcome space for non-IT users to aiding people in their own professional development in certain topical areas and building their own personal and peer network.  

Brown said some of the top challenges and opportunities facing the market at the moment was knowing when and where to adopt and utilise Copilot for the best outcome.  

“There has been massive interest with Copilot since its launch and a lot of businesses rushed to deploy it throughout their organisation without having solid use cases or a foundational understanding of its capabilities, limitations and lack solid data governance and controls to ensure accurate information and context,” Brown said. 

“As such we are seeing a bit of a pullback and organisations are now looking assessing it and seeing where it fits.” 

Another challenge and opportunity in implementing generative artificial intelligence (AI) is keeping corporate data controlled, protected and safe, Brown said.  

“In order to truly achieve this, a strong data governance plan (and often a project) is required to ensure that corporate data is not only protected by accurate permissions, but also labelled and tagged according to its sensitivity level – public, confidential and sensitive,” he said.  

“The general expectation of AI is that it is a general AI and capable of not only providing us the information we ask of it, but also create new information based on data sources and perform actions. However this is not the case with Copilot. This may in time change as the product and AI become more mature, but for now, it is Copilot and not ‘Pilot’; it’s intended for you to be the pilot.”