Build, buy, or both? How to choose the right approach for your AI transformation

After more than a year of AI innovation and excitement, leaders are now getting down to business—determining exactly how they’ll take advantage of this new wave of AI solutions to achieve their business goals.

We’re already seeing how Microsoft Copilot can help turn “I can’t” into “watch me” for people around the world in their everyday lives. But for business leaders, Microsoft Copilot is just the start—there are so many additional ways you can bring this transformative technology into your organization. Understanding your options—and the business scenarios best suited for each—is critical. Read on to learn how you can approach making these decisions for your organization.

Establish your business objectives

Before you think about how you’ll deploy AI solutions, you have to start with why. Aligning your AI investments with a clear business strategy is imperative, as my colleague Susan Etlinger explores in this blog post.

With specific goals in mind, you can prioritize use cases based on their potential for impact and scope your solution based on data and infrastructure requirements. This will help you make decisions aligned with your business objectives and drive your company forward.

Once you’ve identified your why, there are a few common pathways we’re seeing for how to apply AI to reach those goals—from buying off-the-shelf software as a service (SaaS) solutions to building a custom solution that meets your specific needs. Let’s explore the options.

Use Microsoft Copilot to boost employee productivity

If your priority is employee productivity across your business, Microsoft Copilot should be one of the first solutions you consider. If you’re already using Microsoft Entra for identity management, your employees can sign in using their work or school account and get commercial data protection for free—which means chat data isn’t saved, Microsoft has no eyes-on access, and your data isn’t used to train the models.

Copilot helps your people to get the answers and time-saving assistance they need from powerful AI models without putting your company data at risk. But that’s just the start.

Copilot for Microsoft 365 is our best Copilot experience for organizations. It gives you priority access to the very latest models—starting with OpenAI’s GPT-4 Turbo. You get Copilot in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, and Microsoft Teams—combined with your universe of data in the Microsoft Graph, including data you bring in from external sources through Microsoft Graph connectors. Copilot for Microsoft 365 has enterprise-grade data protection, which means it inherits your existing Microsoft 365 security, privacy, identity, and compliance policies. It also includes Copilot Studio to customize Copilot for Microsoft 365 and build standalone copilots—more on this in a minute.

Built on Microsoft’s comprehensive approach to security, compliance, privacy, and responsible AI, Copilot for Microsoft 365 is designed to be enterprise-ready, helping employees in every part of your business unlock productivity and unleash creativity.

And with Copilot for Sales, Copilot for Service, and Copilot for Finance, we’ve added role-specific workflow automation, guided actions, and content generation to the applications professionals use the most. With built-in integration across business systems—whether Dynamics 365 or a third-party customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), or contact center applications—sellers, service agents, and financial professionals can be more effective and efficient as they work, guided by Copilot. 

When you’re thinking about boosting employee productivity in common business scenarios, an out-of-the-box solution like these can deliver incredible impact. But a solution like this may not be the right fit—so let’s look at the next pathway.

Customize Microsoft Copilot to serve the unique needs of your business

No two organizations are alike, and neither are the apps, data, and workflows that drive your business. Microsoft Copilot can help boost employee productivity in the usual functions of every business, but you may also need solutions customized for your own business processes. With Microsoft Copilot Studio, a low-code tool, you can tailor and extend Copilot for Microsoft 365 or build standalone copilots specific to your needs.

For example, within Copilot for Microsoft 365, you may be looking to add specific plugins to address nuanced topics like legal, finance, or human resources (HR). You may want to create and call new workflows within Copilot or connect Copilot with data that lives outside the Microsoft Graph. These customization capabilities are included with Copilot for Microsoft 365.

Create your own copilots to deliver transformational experiences

Now let’s take this a step further. Instead of building on the foundation of Microsoft Copilot, you may be looking to bring copilot experiences into your own applications with other data sources. The new copilot category is not limited to internal productivity and employee-facing applications, but can extend into external, customer-facing experiences that differentiate your business and drive growth.

With your customized copilot solution, you can bring generative AI to your own unique business processes like supply chain management, manufacturing line operations, or quality control. You can engage customers and users with more personalized experiences and recommendations. The potential for new innovation is limited only by your imagination—and with Microsoft’s range of development tools, you can build generative AI-powered experiences exactly where you want them.

To quickly and securely build your own copilots, you can start in a low-code environment with Copilot Studio, going beyond the extensibility capabilities we already covered. With Azure OpenAI Service behind the scenes, Copilot Studio is a fully managed, hosted SaaS service, with built-in analytics as well as security and governance controls. You also maintain control over dialog management and conversational orchestration, and you can deploy custom copilots built with Copilot Studio to many channels across web, apps, social channels, and Microsoft Teams.

You can also take your custom copilot a step further with a pro-code approach giving developers full control in an end-to-end application development platform—Azure AI Studio.

Azure AI Studio is a generative AI environment for developing intelligent applications from end-to-end, including custom copilots. For skilled development teams that need to benchmark models, mix and match models, fine tune, evaluate, and continuously monitor their solutions, this is the place. Azure AI Studio enables developers to build new AI applications or augment existing apps with AI capabilities. Developers can identify the best models for a custom copilot, create multimodal capabilities beyond text alone, design and evaluate prompts, build extensions with custom AI search, mitigate risk with robust content safety tools, deploy at scale, and continue to monitor applications in production.

Use the right tool—or tools—for the job

Though we’ve outlined a few different options for how you can use AI to help reach your business goals, these pathways are by no means mutually exclusive—you can and should use more than one approach to meet your needs. And with the Microsoft Cloud, you can easily work across approaches, and shift gears as your needs change.

You can start with Copilot for Microsoft 365 and use Copilot Studio to quickly build a workflow that serves a specific business function, then as you uncover more advanced applications for that workflow, Copilot Studio also works with Azure AI Studio and additional Azure services. This connected, end-to-end AI toolchain allows your developers to use the right tool for the job at hand, spanning low-code and pro-code capabilities as their needs change.

And keep in mind that AI safety and responsibility should be top of mind from the very beginning. Make sure you’re considering the principles, corporate standards, tools, and governance that you’ll need to ensure your AI experiences are built on trust. The Responsible AI Standard is a great place to start.

Next steps

I hope you take the time to explore the breadth of Microsoft’s AI innovation, and dig deeper into the various AI approaches I’ve outlined here. Remember—no matter what your business priorities, or where you’re starting from, Microsoft is ready to help empower your AI transformation.