For decades, our relationship with information has revolved around ‘search’. Whether it’s typing keywords into Outlook, SharePoint or a search engine, the workflow was always the same: identify what you need, submit the query, and sift through the results. This system provided information, but the responsibility for evaluating that information fell squarely with you, the searcher.
This was manageable when knowledge bases were relatively contained, but as organisations have expanded and embraced hybrid working models, the volume and sprawl of the information available to us has exploded. Files live across OneDrive, Teams and shared drives; conversations that stretch across chat threads and email chains; these all mean that even with advanced indexing, searching remained a scavenger hunt.
Copilot represents a fundamental break from this pattern: instead of forcing you to locate and assemble information, it allows you to ask for an outcome in natural language. You don’t need to search for the meeting notes, the financial report and the project updates separately, you can simply ask Copilot to prepare a summary, create a comparison, draft a response, and brin relevant content together for you.
This is more than a productivity shortcut, it’s a new interaction model where the user can define the intent and the system can deliver the response. The friction of switching between apps and threads completely disappears.
The move from ‘search’ to ‘ask’ reshapes the way we think about data. Traditional search was about retrieval but Copilot pushes beyond this, creating tangible insights out of scattered information so that instead of relying on memory and manual effort, your employees get access to collective information contextualised for them.
Beyond just efficiency, removing the burden of assembling information frees up your teams to focus instead on information interpretation, allowing you to reclaim hours across projects and meetings. This new way of searching doesn’t just accelerate tasks, but also outcomes.
It is important to note that this new method of surfacing information does put more of an importance on the security and accuracy of your information. Whilst users no longer have to assemble information, they should still validate it, critically assessing the context of the information presented to eliminate any bias. On top of this, organisations must continue to enforce robust governance to ensure that sensitive information is not surfaced by anyone and everyone within the company.
A mix of digital literacy, thoughtful prompting and critical thinking will help to determine whether or not this new searching model will replace one form of inefficient searching with another.
The future of this new model is not so much a technical one, but a cultural one, and productivity will increasingly be defined not by who can locate information, but who can frame the right questions in the right way. At Perspicuity, we can see prompting skills (as well as critical evaluation skills) becoming core school and workplace skillsets, much like spreadsheet fluency was in the 1990s and 2000s.
The age of search is giving way to the age of ‘ask’, and with Copilot embedded inside of Microsoft 365 tools, the workplace future is already starting to take shape.