AI is everywhere right now, but where does it actually deliver value?
Kane Baden, Lanter’s Business Automation Consultant has put together a short video showcasing practical ways Microsoft Copilot is helping businesses improve productivity, including:
- Find Information Across Your Busines Copilot can pull together information from emails, Teams conversations, documents, SharePoint, and other connected systems, giving you quick answers without spending time searching across multiple platforms.
- Stay on Top of Your Day. Automated “look ahead” and “look back” summaries can help you prepare for upcoming meetings, review outstanding tasks, identify emails that still need responses and prioritise your workload.
- Research Complex Topics. Need to investigate a new technology, regulation, competitor, or business challenge? Copilot’s Researcher agent can perform detailed research, ask clarifying questions, and generate comprehensive reports for you to review when it’s finished.
- Create Better Presentations Faster Instead of spending hours formatting slides, Copilot can transform basic content into polished presentations and even apply your company branding and visual style guidelines.
- Work Smarter in Excel. From extracting information from invoices to explaining complex formulas and building pivot tables, Copilot helps both everyday users and Excel experts work more efficiently.
- Simplify Document Creation. Populate templates, draft documents, and automate repetitive data entry tasks, allowing your team to spend more time reviewing and less time copying and pasting.
- Get More Value from Teams Meetings. Copilot can generate meeting summaries, capture action items, assign responsibilities, identify due dates, and help standardise meeting outputs across your organisation.
Kane Baden, Business Automation Consultant
With over 10 years of development and automation experience across industries ranging from food wholesale and insurance to legal services, Kane helps businesses find smarter ways to work through AI, automation, and process improvement.
Known for his practical approach, Kane focuses on solving business problems rather than promoting specific technologies. He enjoys tackling complex challenges and building innovative solutions, but equally values simple, effective changes that make a measurable difference to the way people work.
Book an obligation-free consultation today.
FAQs
1. What is the best way for a business to start using AI?
The best place to start is usually with personal productivity tools that help each team member improve their own work. For many businesses, that means giving staff access to tools like Microsoft Copilot or Claude before trying to automate everything at once. This approach helps teams find practical, low-friction use cases early and builds familiarity with AI in day-to-day work.
2. Why should businesses start with Microsoft Copilot for productivity?
Microsoft Copilot is a strong starting point because it works across the tools many businesses already use, including Outlook, Teams, Word, Excel, SharePoint and OneDrive. That means staff can use AI inside existing workflows instead of learning a completely separate system. For businesses looking for quick wins, this can make AI adoption faster, more practical and easier to manage.
3. How does Microsoft Copilot work with Microsoft 365?
Microsoft Copilot connects across the Microsoft 365 environment, allowing users to pull together information from sources like emails, files, meeting notes, Teams chats and documents. This makes it useful for tasks such as preparing for meetings, finding business information, drafting emails, summarising discussions and pulling details into templates. The value comes from reducing manual admin and making information easier to access.
4. What are some practical business use cases for Microsoft Copilot?
Some of the most practical use cases include meeting preparation, email drafting, document creation, spreadsheet assistance, research, task capture and post-meeting follow-up. For example, Copilot can help summarise a week ahead, extract details from documents, draft a response, explain Excel formulas or turn spoken notes into tasks. These are the kinds of everyday uses that can save time and reduce friction without requiring a major transformation project.
5. Can Microsoft Copilot help with meetings and follow-up actions?
Yes. Microsoft Copilot can help businesses get more value from meetings by using transcripts, summaries and follow-up prompts. It can support faster turnaround on notes, action items and structured meeting outputs, especially when teams need information captured in a consistent format. This is particularly useful for people moving between back-to-back meetings who need a reliable way to keep track of decisions and next steps.
6. Can Microsoft Copilot help with Excel, Word and Outlook tasks?
Yes. In Excel, Copilot can help fill templates, organise data, write or explain formulas and create quick first-pass analysis. In Word, it can help complete forms, draft documents and move information between systems. In Outlook, it can support email drafting and help users manage communication more efficiently. For many businesses, this means less time spent on repetitive admin and more time focused on work that needs human judgement.
7. Is Microsoft Copilot useful for research and business preparation?
Yes. Copilot can be useful for research, business context gathering and meeting preparation. It can help users explore topics, review sources, understand competitors, gather company background and prepare for stakeholder conversations more quickly. For businesses that want better preparation without adding hours of manual research, this can create measurable value very quickly.
8. Why is now a good time for businesses to start using AI tools like Copilot?
Now is a good time to start because teams benefit from building familiarity early. AI tools are changing quickly, and businesses that begin using them now are often better placed to adapt as capabilities evolve. A practical rollout gives staff the chance to test real use cases, identify value early and decide where broader AI adoption makes sense. In many cases, if a tool saves even a small amount of time each week, the return can be clear.