Dr.dat. Baiba Apine

Director, IT Consulting, PwC Latvia

One day I tried out Copilot for Microsoft 365 and realised this GenAI tool isn’t going to replace me at PwC but it will certainly change my daily life.

PwC Latvia has been a Microsoft partner since last Christmas, and I’ve been encouraging Latvian companies to test Copilot’s capabilities. Each company can come up with its own scenario and see how it can benefit from using GenAI. It’s important that your company has its own task where it expects added value from GenAI. It wouldn’t be right to use the technology ‘unattended’ and laugh about images it generates with two-headed persons or about Neil Armstrong being hailed as the first astronaut. Below I offer my scenario and findings.

My day is made up of conversations with clients and consultant teams, plus analysis of text and figures. Certain days would see me read up to 300 pages of text in different languages. I tried out Copilot by giving it specific tasks, and you can see the outcome below:

I didn’t ask it to write email letters because I don’t like the ‘rounded’ language of AI and prefer to write letters myself. I found it hard to trust the new summaries – do they contain everything that matters, is the summary correct? I knew what the documents I had Copilot create summaries for said, so I could be pretty sure the summary was complete. Copilot did help me, but I’m not going to trust the outcome too much. I must check it myself, and this is dictated by responsible use of AI technology under the EU Artificial Intelligence Act (proposal). My use cases with Copilot didn’t fall under any of the Act’s prohibitions, i.e. they didn’t pose an unacceptable or even high risk for any of the parties concerned.

Go ahead and explore the capabilities of Copilot for Microsoft 365, ask me (Baiba Apine), and attend our webinar ‘Using GenAI in practice’.