Microsoft 365 released their highly-awaited AI-powered assistant, Copilot, on November 1st to companies with an enterprise subscription. It promises to revolutionize how we use technology in the workplace and our overall efficiency.
At UpSlide, we’ve spent the last twelve years building software to achieve the same result: boosting productivity and job satisfaction in Microsoft 365. We feel aligned with Microsoft’s vision and are excited about the benefits it could bring to our clients.
How will UpSlide and Copilot work alongside each other?
Having recently cemented our three-year strategy – it’s the perfect time to share UpSlide’s positioning on AI, how we will continue to deliver value to the finance industry alongside Microsoft Copilot, and what this means for the future of UpSlide.
How UpSlide adds value on top of Microsoft Copilot
At UpSlide, we resonate with Microsoft’s mission of making day-to-day work more efficient and rewarding with technology. However, instead of focusing on the 350 million Microsoft Office users worldwide, we’ll remain dedicated to delivering a solution that meets the unique use case of our client base: the ten million financial professionals worldwide.
For the past twelve years, we’ve built software to help financial and professional services firms solve company-wide strategic branding and productivity challenges, and that won’t change. We pledge to continue helping clients achieve their goals with industry-specific functionality to:
- Efficiently create documents containing Excel or Power BI data and refresh all data points in one click
- Save time when building, reviewing and auditing financial models
Guarantee the whole business achieves brand consistency with tools to:
- Easily access automated, brand-compliant templates, tombstones and bios from within PowerPoint
- Instantly apply company branding and formatting to elements in Excel, like charts and tables
Enhance collaboration across departments and geographies by:
- Standardizing templates and corporate materials held in an in-app content library
- Encouraging front-line teams to suggest content changes from within PowerPoint to ensure all materials remain best practice
Looking towards the future, our clients will continue achieving their strategic goals using our non-AI features. On top of that, we’ll introduce complementary generative AI functionality and build upon Copilot features. UpSlide and generative AI have different purposes and can be helpful independently or together, depending on your needs. We’re committed to using generative AI on high ROI activities for busy financial services professionals who do not want too many buttons or half-useful features.
What could UpSlide with AI capabilities look like?
How UpSlide will integrate with generative AI
At UpSlide, we always have and always will use technology to solve challenges for financial services clients – and using AI will be no different.
We plan on building AI-powered, industry-specific features that address clients’ key challenges surrounding productivity, branding and collaboration.
We’ll use model fine-tuning and prompt-engineering techniques on GPT-4 (and successors) to make them more relevant to financial services, thus encouraging higher adoption for our clients.
How UpSlide will connect with Copilot
Here are two examples of how we’ll leverage Copilot to offer functionality specific to the financial services:
- Connecting Copilot to high-quality, marketing approved content that’s hosted within UpSlide’s Content Library. For example, when trying to build a pitch with Copilot, it will be able to recognize your ‘About Us’ slide within the Library as the default, rather than an old version saved to your desktop.
- Extending Copilot functionality to enable even faster content generation specific to the financial services. For example, accessing up-to-date tombstones and credentials via Copilot’s user-friendly search bar, while still leveraging your centralized, accurate database within UpSlide.
Our product and development teams are currently investigating what the future of UpSlide with AI looks like. Our product will evolve, our core mission won’t. We remain focused on meeting the challenges of financial services.
What we’ve done so far with AI
Step 1: We built an AI-specific roadmap based on client research about what saves them time and improves the quality of their deliverables.
Step 2: From this client insight, we’ve crafted several proofs of concepts (POCs) using AI services from Microsoft, continually assessing the ROI before pushing them into development.
Step 3: UpSlide has enrolled into the Copilot partner community, meaning we, alongside other technology experts, gain insider knowledge and resources, which we can use to assist our clients with their transition to AI and Copilot.
We’ll also continue investing time and resources into developing our in-house AI talent to ensure we stay ahead of the curve.
What UpSlide’s AI functionality might look like
We don’t want to promise the world – nor give away all our secrets – but here are a few areas we’ll continue investigating to help financial services achieve brand consistency and accuracy more efficiently:
- Leveraging a user’s contextual data when using existing features like Slide Check to make better proofing recommendations tailored to the finance industry. For example, flagging if you’ve referred to ‘EBITDA’ within a placeholder but it doesn’t align with the data presented in the chart on the slide.
- Building functionality that would enable individuals to:
- Generate a PowerPoint slide from a hand-drawn picture
- Automate glossary slide creation
However, as with everything AI-related – it’s constantly changing, and so might our position!
Moving forward
While our product might change and evolve, our core mission won’t. We remain committed to serving our clients in the finance and professional services industries to help them boost productivity, brand compliance, and global collaboration. Stay tuned for more news about UpSlide’s promising future with AI.
To stay up-to-date with our position on AI and other emerging technologies, follow us on LinkedIn or bookmark our Knowledge Hub.
