Unified endpoint management (UEM) describes a set of technologies used to secure and manage a wide range of employee devices and operating systems — all from a single console.

Seen as the next generation of mobility software, UEM tools incorporate several existing enterprise mobility management (EMM) technologies — including mobile device management (MDM) and mobile application management (MAM) — with some of the tools used to secure desktop PCs and laptops.

“UEM in theory ties this all together and gives you that proverbial one pane of glass, so you can see the state of all of your endpoints,” said Phil Hochmuth, program vice president at IDC. “It gives you visibility into what people are doing with corporate data, corporate apps, on any conceivable type of device.”

The ability to manage various device types in one place is increasingly important as businesses face a growing cybersecurity threat, said Tom Cipolla, senior director analyst at Gartner. “We need to patch faster; everybody acknowledges that,” he said. “UEM gives people a consolidated view into their environment and a consolidated patching and configuration management approach.”

The evolution of mobile management – MDM, MAM, and more

At its core, UEM consists of several device management technologies that emerged to help businesses control employee mobile devices. The first iteration of such tools was MDM, which arrived about a decade ago.

Introduced in response to the initial wave of smartphones used in the workplace, MDM was designed to help IT centrally provision, configure, and manage mobile devices that had access to corporate systems and data. Common MDM features included security configuration and policy enforcement, data encryption, remote device wipe and lock, and location tracking.

However, as employee bring-your-own-device (BYOD) schemes became more prevalent in the office — driven first by the iPhone’s popularity, later by the growth of Android — vendors began to offer more targeted management of apps and data. MAM capabilities delivered more granular controls, focusing on software rather than the device itself; features include app wrapping and containerization, and the ability to block copy/paste or restrict which apps can open certain files.

MAM features were soon packaged with MDM and other tools, such as mobile identity management and mobile information management, and sold as comprehensive enterprise mobility management (EMM) product suites. Those suites led to the next stage in the evolution of device management: UEM.

What is UEM?

UEM merges the various facets of EMM suites with functionality typically found in client management tools (CMT) used to manage desktop PCs and laptops on a corporate network. One example is Microsoft’s Intune, which combined its MDM/MAM platform with Configuration Manager (formerly System Center Configuration Manager) in 2019.

UEM platforms tend to have comprehensive operating system support, including mobile (Android, iOS) and desktop OSes (Windows 11, macOS, ChromeOS, and, in some cases, Linux). Some UEM products support more esoteric categories too, including IoT devices, AR/VR headsets, and smartwatches.

Unlike traditional CMT products, UEM tends to be available as a software-as-a-service, cloud-based tool, allowing management and updates of devices such as desktop PCs without connection to a corporate network. 

The emergence of UEM has been partly driven by the inclusion of API-based configuration and management protocols within Windows and macOS, enabling the same level of device management that was already possible with iOS and Android devices.

It speaks to a wider development, too, of the convergence of mobile and traditional computing devices, with high-end tablets often on par with laptops in terms of processing power. “You have a real blurring of the lines between what is mobile computing and what is traditional endpoint computing,” said Hochmuth.

Why invest in UEM tools?

All of these devices — mobile, desktop, Windows, Mac, in the office and remote — require a unified approach to end user device management, an approach that can provide a variety of benefits, say analysts.

Among these is the opportunity for simplified and centralized management. In short, it’s more efficient for one team to provision and manage all devices from a single tool, rather than have separate support teams and tools that were traditionally divided between mobile and Windows or macOS computers. 

“If you have a separate software product or management platform for four different operating systems, that can be cumbersome and expensive,” said IDC’s Hochmuth. “Converging down to one or two is a goal for a lot of organizations.”

UEM products can reduce manual work for IT, with the ability to create a single policy — such as requiring device encryption — that can be deployed to many devices and operating systems. The same goes for patching.  

By ensuring consistent policies across apps, devices and data, UEM tools can reduce risk, with less complexity and fewer opportunities to misconfigure policies. 

There are cost benefits in replacing separate PC and mobile management applications too. “Getting rid of one software platform and all the licensing associated with that is a cost saving. That’s not the primary driver, but it’s definitely a reason to explore UEM,” said Hochmuth. 

The UEM vendor market

The global market for unified endpoint management software is forecast to grow from $5.9 billion in 2023 to $8.9 billion in 2028, according to IDC data. The rate of yearly growth is set to slow, however, from around 16% to 6% during this period. 

There are a variety of vendors, from big-name firms to smaller, more targeted companies. Microsoft (Intune) and VMware/Broadcom (Workspace One) are often considered the UEM market leaders with the broadest offerings and largest market share by revenue. BlackBerry UEM, Citrix Meraki Systems Manager, IBM MaaS360, ManageEngine, Cisco, and Ivanti UEM are also popular products.

“All these companies have roles or verticals or use cases that they address specifically,” said Hochmuth. For instance, BlackBerry is often viewed as strong in regulated markets, such as finance or healthcare, due its focus on encryption, while Microsoft has a more of a “horizontal” product with general business use cases.  

Among the vendors that have taken a more specialized approach is Jamf, which is focused purely on Apple devices running everything from macOS to tvOS, and SOTI, whose products are tailored to certain industries, such as warehouse workers with ruggedized mobile devices.

UEM reaches mainstream adoption

Gartner defines UEM as being “a late-stage maturity market,” meaning “widespread adoption has already occurred,” said Cipolla. 

IDC data indicates that around two-thirds of US businesses have now deployed a UEM tool. That doesn’t mean most organizations will use a single UEM platform, however. 

Among those that have deployed UEM, around 70% have two or more  management products in place, said Hochmuth.   For example, an organization might have one tool to manage certain Windows devices, another for both mobile and macOS devices, and then a legacy PC management tool still in use for another set of Windows devices. “The norm is more the mixed type of organizations that have different tools and multiple UEMs,” said Hochmuth, though the trend in recent years has been towards consolidation of these tools.

What’s on the horizon for UEM? AI and autonomous endpoint management 

An ongoing trend related to UEM is the rise of digital employee experience (DEX) software. DEX tools can provide IT with data and insights into how employees interact with devices and applications, with the ability to measure usage and highlight performance problems. “That’s a growth area that all the UEM vendors are pushing into,” said Hochmuth.

Also coming to UEM tools: the integration of artificial intelligence (AI). “This space in particular, is incredibly ripe for help from an AI product,” said Hochmuth. 

AI could help manage a longtime challenge for endpoint management — scale. That’s because the wide range of devices, vulnerabilities, and configurations that have to be managed.

“The pure amount of data given off by thousands of devices running different operating systems, it’s super chaotic,” said Hochmuth. “That’s a perfect use case for an AI tool that could sift through data, help you find information you need, or even more importantly, automate a lot of the manual patching, updating, configuration – the reactionary type things that people in IT ops do. Anticipating when someone might need a fix before something breaks: AI could really help with that.”

Gartner’s Cipolla points to the emergence of autonomous endpoint management (AEM), a term that describes the combination of UEM and DEX, with additional automation and AI-assistance capabilities. “The idea is to take the human out of the middle doing the research and the leg work, and put them in control of the automation,” said Cipolla.

Several UEM vendors have already begun to incorporate AEM-like functionality into their software, said Cipolla. But it’s still early for the technology, meaning it will likely be at least a couple of years before AEM tools become more fully developed and more widely used by organizations. “It’s not a product yet, it’s a future idea, it’s a concept. As the vendors work on their ideas, it becomes a market,” he said. 

As Apple faces continued waves of regulation, Apple Pay is about to open up in Europe, allowing rival payment services to gain access to the NFC chips inside iPhones to enable one-click payments.

The motivation behind forcing Apple to open up is to stimulate competition in the mobile payments space. It should enable rival services to offer mobile payments and settles a long-running dispute between Apple and the European Commission. 

What this means to Apple Pay

Under the arrangements, Apple will allow third-party wallet providers access to the NFC chip inside iOS devices without requiring them to use Apple Pay or Apple Wallet. It means rivals can now compete directly with the Apple service, and in theory means customers can choose a payment system they prefer. This relies on an extensive number of commitments, captured in a 36-page document published today.

What Europe says

“From now on, competitors will be able to effectively compete with Apple Pay for mobile payments with the iPhone in shops,” Margrethe Vestager, executive vice president in charge of competition policy, said in a statement. “So, consumers will have a wider range of safe and innovative mobile wallets to choose from.”

EC authorities have put some steel around the agreements. They will by law remain in force for 10 years and apply throughout the EEA. “Their implementation will be monitored by a monitoring trustee appointed by Apple who will report to the Commission for the same time period,” the European Commission said.

In the event Apple fails to keep its commitments, it faces a fine of up to 10% of its total annual turnover without having to find an infringement of EU antitrust rules, or a “periodic penalty” payment of 5% per day of its daily turnover for every day of non-compliance.

How will it work?

A look at the 36-page agreement suggests how the new system will work. First, developers of payment systems will need to obtain entitlements to access a series of APIs Apple will make available to support rival payment systems, but only those operating in the European Economic Area. 

The company will also work to support evolving standards; developers will be subject to developer fees, but no fees related to the use of the NFC system. That sounds like Apple will not receive a cut of payments made.

For consumers, it will be possible to choose a preferred payment system (including Apple Pay) with a new section in Settings. The iPhone will also maintain a register of installed payment apps that want NFC access, and you’ll be able to select which one to use, rather like rifling through payment cards in your real wallet.

You’ll also be able to use Apple Pay on Apple Watch and choose another system for your phone.

What about disputes?

If a developer/payment provider thinks they aren’t getting fair treatment from Apple, they will be able to submit a written complaint to the monitoring trustee. Appointed and reimbursed by Apple and approved by the European Commission, the trustee will be an independent party who monitors the company’s compliance to the agreement.

The trustee may recruit a support team of up to three advisors, and there are strict controls in place to prevent trustees running off to work for Apple or its competitors within a certain time frame. There will also be an Appeal Board to adjudicate in the event a dispute requires independent oversight. 

What about the DMA?

Apple’s decision to reach a constructive settlement concerning Apple Pay in Europe could yet turn out to be a harbinger of similar future détente regarding Europe’s Digital Markets Act. While recent statements from Vestager suggest she has little empathy for Apple’s arguments, the company has already revised some of the arrangements it proposed to bring its business practises into line with the DMA or similar rules looming in other nations.

There’s no reason to think it won’t continue to reach a constructive, if unenthusiastic, dialogue. It does remain open to question whether the agreements will go far enough for Europe or for some of the company’s loudest critics. 

But for the next decade, at least, you’ll be able to use whatever payment system you like across the European bloc as easily as you may already use Apple Pay.

Please follow me on Mastodon, or join me in the AppleHolic’s bar & grill and Apple Discussions groups on MeWe.

Investment firm SAI Group this week announced it has acquired Get Well, a 24-year-old company that provides digital patient engagement technology to 1,000 healthcare organizations.

The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

SAI said the purchase of Get Well adds to its portfolio of AI healthcare companies. SAI plans to integrate its own generative AI (genAI) platform – GPT 4.0-powered RhythmX AI — “into the patient experience inside and outside the hospital.”

(RhythmX is also the name of SAIGroup’s subsidiary company.)

GetWell’s own digital patient engagement platform — Get Well 360 — already interacts with more than 10 million patients annually, offering them online point-of-care engagement and “guided care,” among other modules. The RhythmX platform offers patients prescriptive actions and recommendations doctors can drill into using a generative AI-enabled natural language interface and AI-native copilots.

“As part of SAIGroup, Get Well’s mission to enable the best patient experience will undergo a rapid transformation with AI to a full precision care platform for hospitals and ambulatory centers,” SAIGroup CEO Romesh Wadhwani said in a statement. “This strategic investment underscores SAIGroup’s commitment to innovative AI-driven solutions in healthcare and highlights our confidence in Get Well as a leader in the digital patient engagement space.” 

GetWell’s competitors in the Healthcare Management System arena include EPIC, Cerner, and eClinicalWorks.

Through mergers and acquisitions, SAIGroup has grown into a company with a massive trove of healthcare data from 300 million patients, 4.4 billion annual claims, and information on more than 1.8 million healthcare professionals, according to its own reports.

“Experience, which is often where engagement falls, continues to be the top outcome sought from digital investments,” but many organizations are still falling short of goals set by their executive leadership, according to Faith Adams, a Gartner senior director analyst.

As in most other industries, healthcare providers face a massive shortage of AI-skilled employees and IT pros needed to integrate new automation tools. Healthcare also faces a shortage of clinicians, which automated patient interactions could help address, according to Adams.

A 2024 survey by online education company Pluralsight showed more than 80% of IT pros think they can use AI, but just 12% have the skills and expertise to do so. That same survey showed 97% of firms that have deployed AI have benefited from it, citing increased productivity and efficiency, improved customer service, and reduced human error.

““The biggest part of the story is the shortage of AI tech experience, and patient engagement experience,” Adams said. “One of the bigger opportunities we see here is bringing together SAI’s AI expertise with GetWell’s patient engagement expertise.”

AI platforms can serve as digital tools to bolster patient access to personalized medicine and health literacy — the ability to obtain, read, understand, and use healthcare information to make appropriate health decisions and follow treatment instructions. AI tech can also help patients with their “digital literacy,” allowing them to better find, evaluate, and communicate information through digital media platforms.

In other words, instead of struggling to contact clinicians, online query and answer engines powered by AI can give patients answers based on their own health record information and clinical recommendations.

Gartner coined the phrase “Intelligent Health” last year to describe what it sees at the future of digital transformation in healthcare and the life science industries. Intelligent Health refers to the harnessing of the ever-growing volume and variety of patient and clinical data to offer providers and patients a better and more precise healthcare experience.

“Given the complexity of healthcare patient journeys, there is really no one-size-fits-all, and this is where technology can help better support personalization [and] precision using data and insights,” Adams said. “Intelligent health is interoperable by default, relying on continuous data to deliver experience through the unification of digital and in-person care delivery that is precise, equitable and ethical.”

Every patient needs to be approached differently to drive behavioral changes, according to Adams. For example, if a patient needs to lose weight or eat healthier to lower their cholesterol and/or blood pressure levels, AI-based technology can assess their history and make recommendations.

“Patients continue to demand more from their experiences, and they have more choice now than ever. Each patient type needs to be approached differently to drive behavioral change.  This [AI tool] simplifies it,” Adams said.

“There are other factors that can influence it, too, but this is always a good starting point to show the no-one-size-fits-all approach will drive behavior change and engagement.”

Initially called Microsoft 365 Copilot when it launched in November 2023, the renamed “Copilot for Microsoft 365” brings a range of generative AI (genAI) features to office productivity apps such as Word, Outlook, Teams and Excel. 

In a blog post announcing the tool, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella described it as “the next major step in the evolution of how we interact with computing…. With our new copilot for work, we’re giving people more agency and making technology more accessible through the most universal interface — natural language.”

At launch, Microsoft explained that the Copilot “system” consists of three elements: Microsoft 365 apps such as Word, Excel, and Teams, where users interact with the AI assistant; Microsoft Graph, which includes files, documents, and data across the Microsoft 365 environment; and the OpenAI models that process user prompts, such as the ChatGPT-4 large language model and DALL-E 3 model for image generation.

With the tool, Microsoft aims to create a “more usable, functional assistant” for work, J.P. Gownder, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester’s Future of Work team, told Computerworld in fall 2023. “The concept is that you’re the ‘pilot,’ but the Copilot is there to take on tasks that can make life a lot easier.” 

The Copilot for M365 is “part of a larger movement of generative AI that will clearly change the way that we do computing,” he said, noting how the technology has already been applied to a variety of job functions — from writing content to creating code — since ChatGPT-3.5 launched in late 2022.

A Forrester report last year predicted that 6.9 million US knowledge workers — around 8% of the total — would be using Copilot for M365 by the end of 2024.

Nadella talked up the effectiveness of the M365 Copilot during a 2023 earnings call, claiming customers had seen productivity gains in line with that of the GitHub Copilot, the AI assistant aimed at developers that launched two years ago. (For reference, GitHub has previously claimed developers were able to complete a single task 55% quicker thanks to the GitHub Copilot, while acknowledging the challenges in measuring productivity.)

Even priced at $30 per user per month, there’s potential to deliver considerable value to businesses, assuming the Copilot delivers on its promise over time. Said Gownder: “The key issue is, ‘Does it actually save that time?’ because it’s hard to measure and we don’t really know for sure. But even conservative time savings estimates are pretty generous.”

The Copilot for M365 is billed as providing employees with access to genAI without the security concerns of consumer genAI tools; Microsoft says its models aren’t trained on customer data, for instance. But deploying the tool represents significant challenges, said Avivah Litan, distinguished vice president analyst at Gartner.

There are two primary business risks, she said: the potential for the Copilot to ‘hallucinate’ and provide inaccurate information to users, and the ability for the Copilot’s language models to access huge swathes of corporate data that’s not locked down properly.

“Information oversharing is one of the biggest issues people are going to face in the next few months, or six months to a year,” said Litan. “That’s where the rubber is going to hit the road on the risk — it’s not so much giving the data to Microsoft or OpenAI or Google, it’s all the exposure internally.”

Copilot for Microsoft 365 features: How do you use it?

Copilot interactions within apps can take a variety of forms, depending on the application. In many cases, users will interact with it via the chat interface available in a sidebar; Copilot functionality is also built more directly into some apps, such as a pop-up in a Word document or Outlook email, for instance. 

Here’s how the Copilot works in some M365 apps.

In a Word doc, it can suggest improvements to existing text or let users create a first draft from scratch. To generate a draft, a user can ask Copilot in natural language to create text based on a prompt, and can upload additional files and sources of information to guide the AI assistant. Once created, the user can edit th document, adjust the style, or ask the Copilot to redo the whole thing. A Copilot sidebar provides space for more interactions with the bot, which also suggests prompts to improve the draft, such as adding images or an FAQ section, or summarize the text. 

During a Teams video call, the Copilot provides a recap of what’s been discussed so far, with a brief overview of conversation points in real time. It’s also possible to ask the AI assistant for feedback on people’s views during a call, or what questions remain unresolved. Those unable to attend a particular meeting can send the AI assistant in their place to provide a summary of what they missed and action items they need to follow up on. 

In PowerPoint, Copilot can automatically turn a Word document into draft slides that can then be adapted via natural language in the Copilot sidebar. It can also generate suggested speaker notes to go with the slides and add more images. 

These are just some examples. Other apps that feature Copilot integration include Excel, Outlook, OneNote, Loop, and Whiteboard.

The other way to interact with Copilot is via a separate chat interface that’s accessible via Teams. Here, the Copilot works as a search tool that surfaces information from a range of sources, including documents, calendars, emails, and chats. For instance, an employee could ask for an update on a project, and get a summary of relevant team communications and documents already created, with links to sources.

Microsoft will extend Copilot’s reach into other apps workers use via “plugins” — essentially third-party app integrations. These will allow the assistant to tap into data held in apps from other software vendors including Atlassian, ServiceNow, and Mural. Fifty such plugins are available, with “thousands” more expected eventually, Microsoft said. 

How much does Copilot cost — is it worth $30 per user, per month?

The main Microsoft 365 Copilot is available for enterprise customers on E3, E5, F1 and F3 plans, as well as Office E1, E3, E5, and Apps for Enterprise. It’s also available for smaller business customers on the following plans: Businesses Basic, Business Standard, Business Premium, and Apps for Business.

In each case, the Copilot for Microsoft 365 costs an additional $30 per user each month.

It’s a significant extra expense given that M365 subscriptions start at $6 per user each month for Busines Basic and go up to $55 per user each month for E5. Part of this due to the cost of the high computing costs of the Copilot incurred by Microsoft, said Raúl Castañón, senior research analyst at 451 Research, a part of S&P Global Market Intelligence.

“Microsoft is likely looking to avoid the challenges faced with GitHub Copilot, which was made generally available in mid-2022 for $10/month and, despite surpassing more than 1.5 million users, reportedly remains unprofitable,” said Castañón.

In addition to the core Copilot for M365, job role-specific Copilots are available as paid add-ons. Sales and service Copilots each cost an additional $20 per user each month, while a finance Copilot is currently in preview.

The pricing strategy reflects Microsoft’s confidence in the impact that genAI will have on workforce productivity.

Per Forrester’s calculations in the “Build Your Business Case For Microsoft 365 Copilot” report, an employee earning $120,000 annually — roughly $57 per hour — might save four hours a month on various productivity tasks; those four hours would be worth around $230 a month. In that scenario, it would make sense to invest in Copilot for an employee earning even half that amount, and that’s leaving aside less tangible benefits around employee experience when automating mundane tasks.

There are, as the Forrester points out, other costs to consider beyond licensing — employee training, for instance, as employees learn the new technology. Gartner also predicts that enterprise security spending will increase in the region of 10% to 15% in the next couple of years as a result of efforts to secure genAI tools (not just M365 Copilot).

Businesses are likely to take a cautious approach to deploying the Microsoft tool, at least at first. Microsoft expects revenue related to M365 Copilot to “grow gradually over time,” Microsoft CFO Amy Hood said during the company’s Q1 2024 earnings call. On the same call, Nadella noted that Copilot will be subject to the usual “enterprise cycle times in terms of adoption and ramp.”

Even if the pace of adoption is gradual, there appears to be plenty of interest in deploying it. Forrester expects around a third of M365 customers in the US to invest in Copilot in the first year. Companies that do so will provide licenses to around 40% of employees during this period, the firm estimated.

(Note: while not actually branded as Copilot, Microsoft also makes some genAI features available in Teams Premium. This includes AI-generated notes, AI-generated tasks and live translations in video calls, all of which are powered by ChatGPT AI models. For businesses that are mostly interested in AI assistant features for meetings, this offers a cheaper option than a full Copilot for M365 subscription.) 

What are Microsoft’s other Copilots?

Microsoft’s Copilot is embedded in a wide array of products. Beyond the M365 suite, there are Copilots for Dynamics, Power BI, GitHub, and Microsoft’s security suite.

And then there are Copilots aimed primarily at consumer, rather than business, users. 

Microsoft launched Copilot Pro in January 2024, a $20 a month subscription that provides individuals with similar functionality to the Copilot for M365. Copilot Pro customers gain access to Copilot chatbot and genAI image creation, as well as AI assistant features in free web versions of apps such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook (though not Teams). Those with Microsoft 365 Personal and family subscriptions can also access the Copilot in desktop apps. 

There’s also a free version of the Copilot with access to chatbot functionality only.

The Copilot chat interface is accessible in several ways by both paid and free users. There’s a dedicated web page, a mobile app, and a chatbot built into the Windows operating system, Edge browser, and Bing search engine.

How are early customers using Copilot?

There are two basic ways users will interact with Copilot. It can be accessed directly within a particular app — to create PowerPoint slides, for example, or an email draft — or via a natural language chatbot accessible in Teams, known as Microsoft 365 Chat. 

Interactions within apps can take a variety of forms, depending on the application. When Copilot is invoked in a Word document, for example, it can suggest improvements to existing text, or even create a first draft.

To generate a draft, a user can ask Copilot in natural language to create text based on a particular source of information or from a combination of sources. One example: creating a draft proposal based on meeting notes from OneNote and a product road map from another Word doc. Once a draft is created, the user can edit it, adjust the style, or ask the AI tool to redo the whole document. A Copilot sidebar provides space for more interactions with the bot, which also suggests prompts to improve the draft, such as adding images or an FAQ section. 

During a Teams video call, a participant can request a recap of what’s been discussed so far, with Copilot providing a brief overview of conversation points in real time via the Copilot sidebar. It’s also possible to ask the AI assistant for feedback on people’s views during the call, or what questions remain unresolved. Those unable to attend a particular meeting can send the AI assistant in their place to provide a summary of what they missed and action items they need to follow up on. 

In PowerPoint, Copilot can automatically turn a Word document into draft slides that can then be adapted via natural language in the Copilot sidebar. Copilot can also generate suggested speaker notes to go with the slides and add more images. 

The other way to interact with Copilot is via Microsoft 365 Chat, which is accessible as a chatbot with Teams. Here, Microsoft 365 Chat works as a search tool that surfaces information from a range of sources, including documents, calendars, emails, and chats. For instance, an employee could ask for an update on a project, and get a summary of relevant team communications and documents already created, with links to sources.

Microsoft will extend Copilot’s reach into other apps workers use via “plugins” — essentially third-party app integrations. These will allow the assistant to tap into data held in apps from other software vendors including Atlassian, ServiceNow, and Mural. Fifty such plugins are available, with “thousands” more expected eventually, Microsoft said. 

How are early customers using Copilot?

Prior to launch, many businesses accessed the Copilot for M365 as part of a paid early access program (EAP); it began with a small number of participants before growing to several hundred customers, including Chevron, Goodyear, and General Motors. 

One of those involved in the EAP was marketing firm Dentsu, which began deploying 300 licenses to tech staff and then employees across its business lines globally. The most popular use case so far is summarization of information generated in M365 apps — a Teams call being one example.

“Summarization is definitely the most common use case we see right out of the box, because it’s an easy prompt: you don’t really have to do any prompt engineering…, it’s suggested by Copilot,” Kate Slade, director of emerging technology enablement at Dentsu, said.

Staffers would also access M365 Chat functions to prepare for meetings, for instance, with the ability to quickly pull information from different sources. This could mean finding information from a project several years ago “without having to hunt through a folder maze,” said Slade.

The feedback from workers at Dentsu has been overwhelmingly positive, said Slade, with a waiting list now in place for those who want to use the AI tool.

“It’s reducing the time that they spend on [tasks] and giving them back time to be more creative, more strategic, or just be a human and connect peer to peer in Teams meetings,” she said. “That’s been one of the biggest impacts that we’ve seen…, just helping make time for the higher-level cognitive tasks that people have to do.”

Use cases have varied between different roles. Denstu’s graphic designers would get less value from using Copilot in PowerPoint, for example: “They’re going to create really visually stunning pieces themselves and not really be satisfied with that out-of-the-box capability,” said Slade. “But those same creatives might get a lot of benefits from Copilot in Excel and being able to use natural language to say, ‘Hey, I need to do some analysis on this table,’ or ‘What are key trends from this data?’ or ‘I want to add a column that does this or that.’”

How does Copilot compare with other productivity and collaboration genAI tools?

Most vendors in the productivity and collaboration software market have added genAI to their offerings at this point.

Google, Microsoft’s main competitor in the productivity software arena, launched DuetAI for Workspace in 2023, and rebranded to Gemini Enterprise ($30 per user each month) and   Gemini Business ($20 user each month). Google’s AI assistant can summarize Gmail conversations, draft texts, and generate images in Workspace apps such as Docs, Sheets,and Slides. 

Slack, the collaboration software firm owned by Salesforce and a rival to Microsoft Teams, launched its Slack AI feature in February. Other firms that compete with elements of the Microsoft 365 portfolio, such as Zoom, Box, Coda, and Cisco, have also touted genAI plans. 

Meanwhile, Apple announced that it will build generative AI features into its range of productivity tools.

Then there are the AI specific tools, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, as well as Claude, Perplexity AI, Jasper AI and others, that provide also provide text generation and document summarization features. 

Copilot has some advantages over rivals. One is Microsoft’s dominant position in the productivity and collaboration software market, said Castañón. “The key advantage the Microsoft 365 Copilot will have is that — like other previous initiatives such as Teams — it has a ‘ready-made’ opportunity with Microsoft’s collaboration and productivity portfolio and its extensive global footprint,” he said. 

Microsoft’s close partnership with OpenAI (Microsoft has invested billions of dollars in the company on several occasions since 2019 and has a large non-controlling share of the business), likely helped it build generative AI across its applications at faster rate than rivals. 

“Its investment in OpenAI has already had an impact, allowing it to accelerate the use of generative AI/LLMs in its products, jumping ahead of Google Cloud and other competitors,” said Castañón. 

What are the genAI risks for businesses? ‘Hallucinations’ and data protection

Along with the potential benefits of genAI tools like the Copilot for M365, businesses should consider risks. These include the hallucinations large language models (LLMs) are prone to, where incorrect information is provided to employees.

“Copilot is generative AI — it definitely can hallucinate,” said Slade, citing the example of one employee who asked the Copilot to provide a summary of pro bono work completed that month to add to their timecard and send to their manager. A detailed two-page summary document was created without issue; however, the address of all meetings was given as “123 Main Street, City, USA” — an error that’s easily noticed, but an indication of the care required by users when relying on Copilot.

The occurrence of hallucinations can be reduced by improving prompts, but Dentsu staff have been advised to treat outputs from the genAI assistant with caution. “The more context you can give it generally, the closer you’re going to get to a final output,” said Slade. “But it’s never going to replace the need for human review and fact check.

“As much as you can, level-set expectations and communicate to your first users that this is still an evolving technology. It’s a first draft, it’s not a final draft — it’s going to hallucinate and mess up sometimes.”

Tools that filter Copilot outputs are emerging that could help here, said Litan, but this is likely to remain a key challenge for businesses for the forseeable future.

Another risk relates to one of the major strengths of the Copilot: its ability to sift through files and data across a company’s M365 environment using natural language inputs.

While Copilot is only able to access files according to permissions granted to individual employees, the reality is that businesses often fail to adequately label sensitive documents. This means individual employees might suddenly realize they are able to ask Copilot to provide details on payroll or customer information if it hasn’t been locked down with the right permissions.

A 2022 report by data security firm Varonis claimed that one in 10 files hosted in SaaS environments is accessible by all staff; an earlier 2019 report put that figure — including cloud and on-prem files and folders — at 22%. In many cases, this can mean organization-wide permissions are granted to thousands of sensitive files, Varonis said.

In many cases, the most important data, around payroll, for instance, will have strict permissions in place. A greater challenge lies in securing unstructured data, with sensitive information finding its way into a wide range of documents created by individual employees — a store manager planning payroll in an Excel spreadsheet before updating a central system, for example. This is similar to a situation that the CTO of an unnamed US restaurant chain encountered during the EAP, said Litan. 

“There’s a lot of personal data that’s kept on spreadsheets belonging to individual managers,” said Litan. “There’s also a lot of intellectual property that’s kept on Word documents in SharePoint or Teams or OneDrive.”

“You don’t realize how much you have access to in the average company,” said Matt Radolec, vice president for incident response and cloud operations at Varonis. “An assumption you could have is that people generally lock this stuff down: they do not. Things are generally open.”

Another consideration is that employees often end up storing files relating to their personal lives on work laptops.

“Employees use their desktops for personal work, too — most of them don’t have separate laptops,” said Litan. “So you’re going to have to give employees time to get rid of all their personal data. And sometimes you can’t, they can’t just take it off the system that easily because they’re locked down — you can’t put USB drives in [to corporate devices, in some cases].

“So it’s just a lot of processes companies have to go through. I’m on calls with clients every day on the risk. This one really hits them.”

Getting data governance in order is a process that could take businesses more than a year to get sorted, said Litan. “There are no shortcuts. You’ve got to go through the entire organization and set up the permissions properly,” she said.

In Radolec’s view, very few M365 customers have yet adequately addressed the risks around data access within their organization. “I think a lot of them are just planning to do the blocking and tackling after they get started,” he said. “We’ll see to what degree of effectiveness that is [after launch]. We’re right around the corner from seeing how well people will fare with it.”

The Copilot for M365 pros and cons

Pros:

• Boost to productivity. GenAI features can save time for users by automating certain tasks. 
• Breadth of features. Copilot for M365 is built into the productivity apps that many workers use on a daily basis, including Word, Excel, Outlook and Teams. 
• Responses generated by the Copilot for M365 are anchored in the emails, files, calendars, meetings, contacts, and other information contained in Microsoft 365. This means the Copilot for M365 can arguably offer greater insights into work data than any other generative AI tool. 
• Enterprise-grade privacy and security controls. Unlike consumer AI assistants, Microsoft promises that customer data won’t be used to train Copilot models. It also offers tools to help manage access to data in M365 apps.   

Cons:

• Price. GenAI isn’t cheap and M365 customers are required to pay a significant additional fee each month for access to Copilot features. An individual employee might not need access to Copilot in more than a couple ofM365 apps.
• Need for employee training. Getting the most out of genAI tools will require guidance around effective prompts, particularly for employees that are unfamiliar with the technology — an additional cost businesses must factor in.
• Accuracy and hallucinations. LLMs are notoriously unreliable, confidently offering answers that are incorrect. This is a particular concern when it comes to business data, and users must be on the lookout for errors in Copilot outputs.
• Data protection risks. The ability for Copilot for M365 to access a wide range of corporate data means businesses must be careful to ensure that sensitive documents are not exposed.
• The Copilot functionality in Excel is limited at this stage.

More on Copilot for Microsoft 365:

• Copilot for Microsoft 365 deep dive: Productivity at a steep price
• Microsoft Copilot Pro review: Office joins the genAI revolution
• Microsoft extends Copilot access to individuals and SMBs

OpenAI models are still accessible through Microsoft Azure’s cloud in China despite the fact that the company has banned the use of these models in the region. The backdoor access to the models is part of a changing dynamic in China’s tech space, where emerging players hope to fill the gap the ban is poised to leave in the market, even as US-based tech firms look to circumvent growing trade restrictions.

Azure China operates as a joint venture with local company 21Vianet in China, which offers OpenAI’s service, according to an exclusive report by The Information on Monday. Three Azure customers in China also confirmed to the publication that they still have access to OpenAI’s models; two claimed they’ve used OpenAI’s API to train AI models sold to Chinese customers.

Microsoft confirmed to Computerworld Tuesday that Azure regions operated by 21Vianet are physically separated instances from Microsoft’s global cloud, though they are built on the same cloud technical base as its global peers. The company did not confirm or deny that access to OpenAI is still possible through Azure in China.

Two weeks ago OpenAI sent letters to Chinese users warning it plans to cut off its AI development software and tools starting in July, according to multiple reports, incuding oneby Time magazine. This caused a rush by other China-based AI companies to incentivize developers using OpenAI to switch to their platform. 

“Already we see Baidu, Tencent, Alibaba and many other Chinese companies stepping in with heavy discounts in an attempt to pick up current OpenAI users in China,” said Brad Shimmin, chief analyst, AI and data analytics, at Omdia.

Baidu, for example, has promised free AI model fine-tuning and expert guidance on its flagship Ernie model, along with 50 million free tokens developers can use to query the bot, according to the Time report. Alibaba and Tencent posted ads encouraging the move, while Chinese technology pioneer Kai-fu Lee’s 01.AI is promoting heavy discounts to use its service, Time reported.

Meanwhile, at the World AI Conference in Shanghai last week, another Chinese AI company, SenseTime, unveiled its latest model — SenseNova 5.5; like Baidu, it offered companies 50 million free tokens to use the model, according to a separate report by The Guardian. SenseNova also promised to deploy staff for free to help new clients migrate from OpenAI to SenseTime’s AI tools.

Getting around trade restrictions

Microsoft invested billions of dollars in OpenAI in January 2023 and is closely aligned with the ChatGPT maker, integrating its technology through its own AI chatbot called Copilot, which is hosted on Azure and an integral part of its own products and services.

Microsoft did not provide a motive for allowing access to OpenAI in China through Azure. Shimmin, however, noted that China is a “sizeable market opportunity” for “mega-brands” like Microsoft, Google, Meta and Apple, “one worth the additional cost of establishing sometimes complex operating policies in order to do business in-country.”

For many companies operating within China’s borders, restrictions on technology and other products from US vendors are nothing new given the long-term battle between the two nations over tech supremacy. “Many companies have and are actively circumventing in-house blocks from the government using VPN services,” Shimmin said. 

The US most recently imposed a series of tight restrictions on the export of microprocessors to China. However, US President Joseph R. Biden Jr. made it clear last year that the tech trade war with China extends to other technology, including AI.

A competitive advantage

In addition to OpenAI, a number of US-based AI services aren’t currently operating in China, including Anthropic, which does not support mainland China or Hong Kong, and Amazon Bedrock from AWS, which is only available in the region in Singapore, Japan, and Australia, Shimmin said.

Microsoft’s circumvention of the OpenAI ban “underscores its commitment to the region and to its customers,” Shimmin said. 

It also could help the company maintain its competitive edge and market share, not only in AI but also in China’s lucrative cloud services market, even while keeping its relationship with OpenAI on track, said Stephen Kowski, Field CTO at SlashNext Email Security+.

“By offering continued access to OpenAI models, Microsoft can attract and retain enterprise customers seeking advanced AI capabilities,” he said. “This approach allows Microsoft to balance its partnership with OpenAI and its business interests in China.”

When given the choice to access OpenAI GPT models directly from OpenAI or via Microsoft OpenAI Azure Service, most enterprise customers would likely opt for Microsoft, Shimmin noted, “because they can access GPT without worrying about issues like data leakage or model privacy/security.”

Microsoft has ordered its staff in China to use iPhones for their work starting in September.

The decision effectively bars the use of Android smartphones by the tech giant’s Chinese staffers, Bloomberg reports.

The decision has more to do with standardising use of the Microsoft Authenticator and Identity Pass app among all personnel rather than security concerns about the Android mobile operating system.

In a step that perhaps symbolizes the steady erosion of bridges between nations, Microsoft is ordering its staff in China to abandon Android phones to exclusively use iPhones. 

The ban begins in September, when staff will be required to use iPhones for work — specifically for identity verification when logging into devices. Microsoft wants all its staff to use Microsoft Authenticator and Identity Pass. Microsoft is going to distribute iPhones to employees that currently use Android devices as part of the initiative, a report from investing.com claims.

That’s what I call fragmentation

What makes that decision problematic is that in China there is no Google Play store, which means Android app stores are fragmented, with local Chinese manufacturers offering their own app platforms. Chinese smartphone companies are also building their own operating systems, further fragmenting the mobile landscape there.

This may become a bigger problem in the future as regulators force Apple to support sideloading: “Forced sideloading could open the door to risks like fake apps, malware, and social engineering attacks that have long plagued the Android ecosystem,” Hexnode CEO Apu Pavithran recently warned.

Microsoft’s decision to coalesce around the iPhone echoes and reflects what’s allegedly taking place in China, where a growing number of government agencies and companies are asking staffers to avoid using foreign-owned devices. That’s yet another manifestation of the growing political tension between Washington and Beijing.

Microsoft didn’t get mobile

But beyond the story of political conflict lurks two additional realities. Not only does Microsoft’s decision illustrate the security hazards of a fragmented app store market, it also shows the extent to which the developer has failed to secure a strong foothold in the mobile device market.

Cast your mind back — and it really isn’t so long ago — when the notion that Microsoft would recommend its employees use Apple iPhones would have been unthinkable. Things have changed, perhaps for the better, as the additional security benefits unlocked through multi-platform enterprise deployments is now widely understood.

Political tensions remain

Apple may have cause for concern about Microsoft’s decision, as it sheds light on the delicate dance it is engaged in. Apple has been doing its diplomatic best to maintain cordial relationships in both China and the US. 

All parties benefit in the dance. Both the US and China enjoy the economic benefits the relationship delivers, particularly (at least at present) around employment across the iPhone factories in China and wider iOS ecosystems elsewhere. Apple in China creates lots of wealth that lands in the exchequers of both nations, even as the tech itself enhances productivity.

Apple is, of course, not blind to the growing tension between the two nations. It’s rapidly increasing investments in India and manufacturing hubs elsewhere across the APAC region, evidence of that awareness. But even now the vast majority of its products are made in China. Building a replacement manufacturing ecosystem was always going to take vast amounts of money and time, and it wasn’t merely the pandemic that forced Apple’s operations staff to accelerate investment in manufacturing outside of China.

It’s complicated

One thing Apple doesn’t need is for trading conditions to worsen in what remains its biggest market outside the US. The slow move by China’s government to reject iPhone use at work is potentially as significant a problem to the company as the US government’s poorly considered anti-trust litigation against it. Both sets of decisions are likely to hit Apple’s bottom line, even as the gulf between the two nations continues to grow. 

The race to AI is unlikely to improve things. The US has already taken steps in the form of sanctions to hamper China’s progress in AI development, though the impact seems limited. At the same time, Apple’s decision to introduce its own AI tools first only in the US, and to confirm that the EU will not gain access to them for some time yet, reflects a similar story of disunity as nations vie for tech prominence. 

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