Last week, Adam and I had the pleasure of attending the 2nd annual Microsoft Global Nonprofit Leaders Summit in Seattle.
This brought together charity leaders from over 1,000 organisations, to hear the latest updates and roadmap for Microsoft’s AI capabilities in the sector.
The mood at this year’s summit was really positive. There was a sense of excitement as many charities have started to dip their toes into the AI space, exploring how tools like Copilot and AI Agents might enhance their operations and streamline manual processes.
One of our highlights was a deep dive demo of Copilot Studio. This allows organisations to build their own AI Agents, trained on their own data (think SharePoint document libraries or files) to allow users to interact and ask questions of large data sets. The “classic” use case example being to create an AI agent that sees all your organisational policies, allowing your staff to ask questions of it within Teams. It took minutes to set up.
Another point we noted is that Copilot Chat is completely free to use for everyone. And because Copilot Chat is accessed within your Microsoft 365 environment, your prompts don’t leave your Microsoft tenant. This means you can reference internal documents to give the AI context, and it will produce outputs based on your data – making it a more valuable and safer alternative to public AI tools like ChatGPT.
You can try this yourself by going to https://copilot.microsoft.com (make sure you’re signed into the Edge browser with your work account) – it’s free!
Most of the chat this year was about “Agentic AI” – creating AI Agents (chat bots in old money) to help staff find information. Whilst this is not a new thing per se, what excited us the most was the news that upcoming waves of Copilot will allow these AI Agents to carry out tasks instead of just providing information back. So for example, your agent could go ahead and book a meeting into your diary, or send an email out, or update a form on your behalf, moving it more towards a genuine personal assistant that actions things for you, which would be genuinely game changing.
Despite some hurdles getting there (thank you Heathrow!) it was a very engaging couple of days, and Microsoft’s AI capabilities have moved on a lot in a year. We can’t wait to see where they are this time next year!
The key sessions from the 2025 Microsoft Global Nonprofit Leaders Summit will be uploaded for on demand viewing soon here and we will be sharing a more detailed Microsoft AI briefing paper in the coming weeks.
