Copilot Readiness is Content Governance
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In this Ask Sympraxis episode, the team explores the foundational considerations for preparing your organization for Microsoft Copilot. As excitement builds around AI integration in the workplace, it’s essential to pause and examine the critical issues of readiness, governance, and long-term strategy.
What is Copilot readiness?
At its core, Copilot readiness is about evaluating your organization’s current state in terms of security, privacy, compliance, and governance. It shines a spotlight on content management and challenges you to ensure that the right content is in the right place - with the right permissions. Copilot doesn’t follow a one-size-fits-all model, so training and upskilling users on how to use AI responsibly is crucial. This includes helping them understand how to craft better prompts and ask the right questions.
What is content governance?
Content governance encompasses what we traditionally think of as information architecture. It includes naming conventions, metadata, content types, and other structural elements that bring consistency and accessibility to your content. Good governance ensures that content is organized and managed in a way that makes it useful - not just searchable.
Copilot Readiness = = = Content Governance
Much like the early days of search, organizations assumed search would solve all problems and neglected the importance of structure. We’re seeing that again with Copilot. Without proper permissions and cleanup, outdated or irrelevant content can be surfaced as part of AI-generated answers. Unlike traditional search, Copilot doesn’t just retrieve - it interprets. That makes the accuracy and governance of content even more critical.
What business problem are you trying to solve?
Jumping into Copilot because of fear of missing out is not a strategy. Organizations must ask themselves what specific challenges they’re trying to address. Broadly rolling out Copilot with the assumption it will improve everything for everyone can introduce risk - particularly for organizations concerned about oversharing and permission sprawl.
Copilot readiness strategy
Based on experience with clients, a solid readiness strategy starts with understanding your digital estate - what sites exist, how they’re used, and where sensitive content resides. Sensitivity labels, if configured properly, can be powerful tools in this process. However, permission checking is the most critical task. Analyzing years of shared links, checking who still has access, and unraveling broken permission inheritance is a complex but necessary step. Tools like Orchestry’s Copilot Readiness Portal can offer dashboards to help manage and visualize this effort.
RCD: Restriction Content Discovery
If your information architecture isn’t where it should be, Restriction Content Discovery (RCD) can help. RCD acts as a filter at the end of the search pipeline, deciding whether certain content should be exposed to search or Copilot. You can tag sites to be indexed but not visible in organization-wide search or Copilot’s Business Chat.
Purview: automate some Copilot restrictions
Microsoft Purview is becoming increasingly valuable as organizations adopt Copilot. Sensitivity labels in Purview are especially helpful in managing what Copilot can and can’t access. While there may be additional costs, the investment may be worthwhile to mitigate the risk of exposing sensitive or outdated content through AI.
Copilot is a powerful tool - but only as powerful and safe as the foundation it stands on. Readiness isn’t just about enabling the feature; it’s about building the infrastructure and practices that support secure, meaningful use. If you focus on governance, define your business needs, and train your users, Copilot can become a trusted ally instead of a risky unknown.
All Resources
- Microsoft 365 Copilot data protection and auditing architecture | Microsoft Learn
- Restrict discovery of SharePoint sites and content - SharePoint in Microsoft 365 | Microsoft Learn
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