Why organisations aren’t ready to deploy AI 🤖

Have you been playing around with lots of the AI tools and products that organisations like Microsoft have been releasing lately? Noticed much productionisation of AI products and solutions in your own organisation yet? Has your organisation purchased and switched on Microsoft 365 Copilot or other Copilot products yet?

If not, don’t be suprised! In this post, we’re going to explore some of the reasons organisations might and most probably aren’t ready for deploying AI in production systems and applications! 😮

What will the AI do…

So let’s take Copilot as an example. Copilot for Microsoft 365 is an AI-powered productivity tool that helps you work more efficiently and creatively with Microsoft 365 apps such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, and more. Copilot will effectively pull data from a range of places you tell it to based on the Microsoft Graph. Out the box this includes a whole BUNCH of things like meetings, files, messages and more… however if you’ve extended things like Microsoft Search by adding Graph connectors to your tenant, it’ll look at those too.

This means that the AI is almost going to act as a bit of a SUPER POWERED search engine to all of that data we can already get access to if we look hard enough.

We are not data or security ready

So the bit that wide spread is causing organisations to not be ready for deploying AI tools in production, using things like Microsoft 365 Copilot and other assistants, is the fact that we are NOT data or security ready. This is already a huge risk in organisations all over the globe, however at the moment there is some form of “security” layer in that it isn’t easy to find all of the things we have access to at the moment. Copilot and other AI tools will make this incredibly easy and they’ll find the things we have access to to use them when responding to us.

Data

In organisations today, there are countless issues with the places data is sat, the way it is structured, how it relates to other data and more, providing tools like Copilot with messy resources to be able to utilise when responding to our queries.

Security

When it comes to things like security, there are yet again countless issues with the data and resources that people in organisations have access to, but no-one realises it! Do you follow a common ‘share all’ link policy in your organisation where it’s super easy to copy a link that anyone in the organisation can use and then send it out to people.

Well let me tell you friends, when you do that, even if you don’t give that link to someone in your organisation, they still now have access to that file and if they looked hard enough, they’d be able to open it up and use it.

So why aren’t we ready for AI

So we just came to that realisation that hey even if I didn’t give someone the link, they still have access to the file if they look hard enough for it. Well here’s the next thing, and this is why we aren’t ready for AI in lots of cases… tools like Copilot are about to make that whole search and ‘finding the file’ experience 1000x easier and quicker.

Copilot will suggest files to you that seem relevant to what you’re trying to do, it’ll use them as context and stuff you shouldn’t have access to, or data that is a real mess, will start to show up real quick!

So what do we do?

So here’s the thing friends, you NEED to get on your Data and Security game NOW. Do NOT let the Copilot find the issues in these spaces in your organisation and be ready today!