As chief information officer of Tech Mahindra, a global digital consulting company headquartered in India, Pallavi Katiyar starts each morning with this question: “What does my day look like?”
These days, the answer is clearer, thanks to Microsoft 365 Copilot.
Copilot summarizes her numerous meeting invitations for the day, the issues to be discussed and each meeting organizer in a way that’s easy to scan. Katiyar doesn’t have to click through each invitation for details and can now quickly decide which are crucial and which ones she can skip and ask Copilot to summarize later.
“Now I don’t have the pressure to be part of every meeting,” Katiyar said. “I’m able to prioritize my work better, in terms of what I want to attend and what I don’t want to attend.”
About 10,000 Tech Mahindra employees now have access to Microsoft 365 Copilot. C-suite executives – those at the highest level, whose titles include “chief” – are experimenting with Microsoft 365 Copilot along with everyone else, figuring out how best to use it and ultimately get more done in less time.
She gets a lot of emails, many on ongoing issues. Recently, she received an email thread with more than 15 emails sent over several weeks, involving many stakeholders. “It would have taken me significant time to go through the mails to understand the background,” she said.
Instead, she got Copilot to summarize the thread. “It was very effective and accurate, with a problem statement, key elements, what was discussed in previous meetings. Nothing can be better.”
Katiyar said she’s learning more about Copilot use cases as she goes along, particularly “the art of prompting.” She’s learned that Copilot needs more specificity to be relevant.
“It’s very important to have a focused question,” she said. For example, it’s helpful to state a source so Copilot knows whether to find the answer in emails, or chats or other databases.
Overall, Copilot has made her more productive, Katiyar said.
She also uses it to help her vet documents and contracts where she is a signatory, asking it to summarize key elements “rather than going through multiple pages of documents.”
While “the volume of work has not reduced,” she said, “the amount of work I am postponing to the next day or next week has come down,” adding that she is tagging fewer items for follow-up.