Copilot is Microsoft’s branding for the way they plan to enhance end-user productivity by making generative AI capabilities available in all their offerings, including Microsoft 365. The M365 Copilot is currently in its Early Access phase which means a select group of organisations already have access to it. No date has been fixed for its general availability but Microsoft are unlikely to want to delay it too long.

The impact of generative AI on records management will be felt from the moment an end-user can go to the Copilot Business chat feature within their Teams Chat client within Microsoft 365 and obtain a useful answer to the following prompt:

give me a timeline of all documents and messages arising from insert name of project. Summarise each document and each message thread and provide a link to the sources.

Copilot will search for the answer to such a prompt across all the information that the individual has access to within the tenancy. It will not matter to Copilot where the information is stored. What will matter is the access permissions on that content. Copilot will only return to an end-user information that they already have access to.

From the point at which Copilot returns good answers to this question there is even less incentive for an individual to move messages and documents out of their individual accounts (such as their email account, Chat account and OneDrive account) into shared spaces like SharePoint libraries and Team Channels. They may feel able to use their Copilot to pull together content scattered across different applications and to find content buried in accumulations of email/chat.

Any attempt to shift end-user behaviour to do more work outside of individual accounts or to move content out of individual accounts will face an uphill struggle because Copilot will reinforce rather than challenge the behaviour of working and storing content in individual accounts.

As Copilot gains in strength a key records management task will be to build pathways to ensure continuity of access to business correspondence and documentation held in individual accounts as staff move post or leave employment. A person new-to-post does not have access to content in their predecessor’s individual accounts. Neither will the Copilot acting on their behalf. The Copilot of a person new-to-post will have access to considerably less content than their predecessor did, because it will take time for them to build up accumulations of correspondence and documentation in their individual accounts.

Short term adaptations to the problem of unequal access to information

It is possible to predict some short-term adaptations that teams and individuals may make to address this unequal access to content. For example if an individual is about to leave post, then their manager might ask them to:

• run a Business Chat Copilot prompt for each of the main projects/cases/matters they had been dealing with, to get a timeline of documents and messages
• run a Business Chat Copilot prompt for each of the key stakeholder relationships that they had been dealing with to get a timeline of documents and messages
• make the outputs of the above prompts accessible to their teammates and their successor-in-post.

An individual new-to-post who receives a disappointing response to a Copilot prompt might ask a colleague who has been in post longer (and hence has a longer memory in their individual accounts) to run the same prompt and send them the answer.

A pathway to support continuity of access to business content in individual accounts

The above adaptations are unsatisfactory because they are ad-hoc and haphazard. Records management works better when it is routine and comprehensive. A better approach would be for AI models to run within individual accounts to make distinctions that make it as easy and safe as possible for an end-user to grant access to named individuals (and their successor-in post) to sections of their email/chat/OneDrive content.

In the email environment Microsoft 365 already provides a focused inbox feature that relegates unsolicited emails to a secondary ‘other’ tab. It would be beneficial if that feature could be extended to make a further distinction within ‘focused’ email, that separates out ‘business’ email from ‘personal’ or ‘social’ email. This would enable an organisation to ask individuals if they were willing to grant access to their successor-in-post (and their successor-in-post’s Copilot) to the emails marked as ‘business’.

The more fine-grained the distinctions that AI models can make within individual email accounts the better. If an AI model could make distinctions within the emails marked ‘business’, to cluster together the emails arising from particular pieces of work, then:

• it would support end-user productivity (for example by supporting a Copilot prompt focused on one particular cluster) and
• it would support pathways for continuity of access by enabling the end-user to grant access for their successor-in-post (and/or a named individual) to emails arising from a specific piece of work, once they were satisfied that the AI model was assigning items to the cluster in a predictable and precise manner.

Note that such a clustering model would not require the organisation to build a records classification. Nor would it require the AI model to learn a records classification. it could be an unsupervised learning model that was able to recognise the features (in terms of commonality of vocabulary, commonality of attachments, and/or commonality of participants to the messages) that meant that certain emails were likely to have arisen from the same piece of work.

Note also that such clusters would not do away with the need or value of having a records classification. An obvious next step would be a capability to allow an end-user and/or an administrator to link particular clusters within their email account to a records classification.