Optimizing your Microsoft 365 tenant for Copilot success: Q&A with Eric Overfield

Microsoft 365 Copilot is powerful—but only in a well-optimized environment. Microsoft MVP Eric Overfield shares expert tips to ensure Copilot success.

Microsoft 365 Copilot has the potential to revolutionize the way we work—but only if your environment is ready for it. Copilot can only be as good as the environment it’s working in.

Think of it like hiring a Michelin-star chef to cook in a messy kitchen where most of the pots, pans, utensils, and food is old or hard to find—if your Microsoft 365 tenant isn’t optimized, Copilot can’t serve up its best work.

That’s why we sat down with Eric Overfield—Microsoft MVP and CIO at Creospark—to chat about how IT pros can optimize their Microsoft 365 setups for Copilot success. From the value Copilot brings to IT teams and end users, to common pitfalls and practical tips for simplifying complex environments, Eric has plenty of expert advice to share.

Ready to unlock the full potential of Copilot? Let’s get started.

Q: IT teams never have a shortage of work to do. Why should they go through all the effort of optimizing their environment for Copilot? What value will Copilot bring to their organization as a whole, and what value will it bring to IT pros specifically? 

A: I’m going to leave some of the kind of bigger stories around security and whatnot alone just because it’s overplayed. But the thing is, Copilot is going to be needed by everybody soon.

And the value that it drives for us is that it actually surfaces and utilizes our data.

This is the time where the IT team needs to make sure that our data is set up in such a way—and is in fact valid and useful for the individual users—so that they can drive the value that they’re looking for within Copilot, within generative AI, within the conversational AI that we now have.

Q: Are there specific use cases where you’ve seen Copilot drive significant time savings or innovation? 

A: Copilot is designed to save time out-of-the-box, which is awesome.There are a lot of materials on all these different use cases. So I think a way of answering this is I’m going to tell you what I have found to be useful.

When I use Copilot, every time I use it—and I use it daily—it is saving my company the amount of money it cost to buy this license.

The big productivity aspect for me is about generating new content. So if I need to generate a blog post, if I need to create a new marketing material, if I’m going to help create an e-mail response to something, I might go to Copilot and it gives me the great first draft that could save me 10, 20, 30 minutes.

Now, I would never copy and paste that, but I definitely would use that as an initial piece to then go and create the real content that I want, edit it to make sure it’s in my voice. So that’s a huge thing right there.

Another big component for me is on Teams, especially the Teams recap. I’m in too many meetings like everybody else. I’m at this conference and I’ve been missing meetings every day. But we have transcripts turned on, so I can go to the meeting recap.

I can understand the value of that meeting including any action items right away. That’s a huge time savings for me.

And the third big one for me is upskilling. So, I’m a software engineer by trade. I still like to dabble a little bit, but I don’t have time to learn the new languages that are out there.

I can ask Copilot, “Hey, here’s what I’m doing. How do I do this in Excel? How do I do this over in Power Query? How can I build an M Query to do what I’m looking for?”

And the results, again, are 90% of the way there. I might have saved three months of learning by doing 2-3 minutes worth of prompt engineering. So the upskilling, to me, is invaluable.

What I like about all this, it’s secured by my tenant. I’m not going outside of the boundary of my tenant if I don’t want to, or even if I am through the Copilot web, I’m still protected by the Microsoft ecosystem and I like that. I don’t want to use another service out there.

Q: How does data quality and structure in SharePoint, Teams, or OneDrive impact Copilot’s performance?

A: The big value of Copilot is that it’s grounded on your data. But if your data is incorrect in SharePoint, it’s not secured properly, it’s not organized well, it doesn’t have the right structure built around it, Copilot’s going to have problems grounding itself on your data.

So, this is a time to make sure people have access to what they should have access to and there is good structure to that data.

There is a concern right now that some of the metadata is a little more challenging to pull out of your data. So you’ve got document libraries or lists, and lists really can’t be crawled very well because of the way it’s all set up, so that’s kind of a concern.

But really, it’s a garbage in, garbage out kind of thing. If you have weird stuff in your in your SharePoint environment, you have old data, you have lots of versions of something, Copilot might struggle to figure out the right answer to a given prompt that you give it.

Q: What are some common mistakes organizations make when setting up their environment for AI tools like Copilot?

A: So a couple of things that I see when trying to set up Copilot, some mistakes that are made:

1. They just get the licensing wrong
2. They don’t worry about their content at all. They just turn it on and go.
3. They’re not prepping their users for it. They’re not helping create a Center of Excellence. They’re not supporting users in actually utilizing this successfully.
4. They’re not reviewing analytics, they’re not checking to see who’s using the tool, and where they’re using it.

We know that Copilot works really well in Teams. And so you would think that Copilot can really help cut down on meetings and maybe someone said, “We should be able to cut down meeting time or by 20%” or something.

Well, if you’re not following the analytics, you aren’t paying attention to any of that. So then you can’t prove Copilot’s value. And I see that too often.

Q: How can IT admins help their teams maximize Copilot’s productivity potential?

A: To me, beyond just setting SharePoint up to make sure the data is good, I think that IT teams can still really help creating and ensuring that their use cases are there, the right scenarios are there to be able to support the end users.

I’m thinking here like a Center of Excellence. I’m thinking of helping create initial sets of prompts that are useful.

You can start to extend that into things in this Agentic world where it can start to help build the agents that might be useful to make Copilot that much more useful to the end user. I think we’ll talk about that more next year.

You know, this is all really new and I would think that right now we’re seeing Copilot adoption is still below everyone’s expectations—including the IT team.

Let’s help get Copilot in people’s hands. Let’s give them winning scenarios and help support that, or help support the people that are rolling it out, like leadership, with those scenarios so the end users can actually find the value that Copilot can offer them.

Q: What strategies would you recommend to ensure end-user adoption of Copilot?

A: So the strategies to really help the end user that I find most useful is to work with them to find what good scenarios would exist for them. Every organization is still a little different and so, ask yourself:

• What are the things that we would want to do?
• What are the kind of prompts and use cases?
• How might we be using Copilot in Word?
• How might we use it in Outlook?
• How might we be using it in Teams?

Every organization might use these tools differently for different reasons. And helping come up with examples, like this is a really good scenario for someone in marketing, for someone in HR, for someone in engineering, for someone in leadership.

The typical the number I’ve seen is six—can you give six different ideas for each of these different personas so that they can understand?

And then you can promote that out for a Center of Excellence and through support of the end users. Tell them, “these are the things that you can do with Copilot,” and support them through to understand how to create good prompts and when to use them.

Copilot isn’t in our workflow. We’re not thinking through, “Oh, I have a problem. Let me go to Copilot to help me with it.” We need to help our end users understand this tool is there. Here’s a good way to use it. Here’s a good way to create prompts. And here are some suggested prompts so that you can be more productive with the tool.

Once we get our end user seeing it, I have found really 100 times out of 100 times, once it clicks with the end user they start saying, “I can’t live without this tool. I must have this tool. If you don’t give it to me, I’m going to go to a competing tool because I’m just saving too much time.”

Q: What metrics should organizations track to measure Copilot’s impact on their productivity or efficiency?

A: There are a couple of ways that we want to track Copilot usage:

1. Within Copilot
2. End user surveys

Within Copilot itself, Microsoft Copilot, there are general analytics. You can see generally who’s using it, what tools are being used now.

I would suggest when looking at deploying Copilot, you set out some guidelines and some metrics you want to hit, like if you create a lot of Word documents,”We really want to see that 20% of our users are using Copilot within Word by X date.”

And therefore, you’d want to see an acceleration of productivity because Copilot is helping create first drafts, let’s say.

Alright, so that a first big piece is using the Copilot analytics that exist.

The second one that I really like is using something like Glint to basically ask people who are using this:

• Is this helping you?
• Where are you stuck?
• Is this a valuable tool or not?

It’s kind of like an net promoter score (NPS). You’re asking the end users in your organization, on a scale of 1 to 10, would you recommend Copilot? And you’re shooting for those 9s and 10s,

So to me, it’s not just looking at the analytics Copilot provides, it’s talking to your end users and asking them, “Is this working?”

I have found generally Copilot is deployed well in pilot groups. You don’t just deploy it to your organization of 1,000 people. Often it starts at SLT, it starts at leadership, it starts with IT.

But creating some pilot groups, if your organization is not fully ready, work with them to figure out some good use cases. Deploy to them, see how it’s going. Watch the analytics—are they using it?

But then ask them how it’s going. Record that, track that, and then start to release the tool out to the larger groups.

And again, just continue to evolve and continue to refine, going back to the Center of Excellence, supporting them and helping track to make sure we’re actually getting the value out of this tool. I have yet to find it ever fail.

Once you use something like Copilot, you’re not going to go back.

Q: How can businesses with complex Microsoft 365 environments simplify their setup for better Copilot integration?

A: So with Copilot being grounded on the data that we have—and we often have very complex SharePoint environments—it could be really helpful to help simplify that.

And using tools such a ShareGate is what we use a lot to help consolidate Microsoft 365 content, to help archive the data that we don’t want anymore, to help shut things down, to help control permissioning on old sites, you know, basically cleaning up our data.

I’m going to go back to garbage in, garbage out. You should have been doing this already—you should have been simplifying your data, you should have been securing it properly—most of us haven’t been.

This is the time to really do it and then to maintain it because you’re going to start to see once you’ve deployed Copilot, I believe it’s just going to continue to snowball more and more.

This is where we’re going to want really good, clean data, not have those 30 versions of V1, V2, V3, V-final, and V-final-1. All that kind of stuff is really going to start to cause some problems.

Q: If you could give one piece of advice to an IT admin setting up their environment for Copilot, what would it be?

A: If I was going to talk to an IT person and give them that one piece of advice, it’s to me—don’t be scared of this tool. This is the time to embrace AI and to help our organization.

Help your organization be successful with it. Support the ability to clean up your data to make it available to people to then support the deployment of Copilot. Creating and supporting the use cases that will help drive that adoption.

I do believe end users are thinking, “We don’t know what to do with this thing. We hear it’s there, but we just don’t know how to make it valuable.”

IT, we need to support this, this is a good thing for us all. It’s going to help all of us.

Your job is going to become a lot easier as well. There’s so many things you can do. And I’m going beyond just one piece of advice, but my main point is, you should embrace this change. This is a good one.