Will Copilots (Microsoft) be a good-enough onramp to using Generative AI in a company? Envisioning this as a 'buy' option rather than proposing 'build' & skill in first party Gen AI models and tools. For this 'it depends' angle, just getting off the ground with this, specific use cases to be discovered via pilots.

You will need to assess your organization's resources and process/ RNR to evaluate the specific functions/ role that will be very productive by Copilot example marketing, product design, general coding for IT infra, MIS etc. Post which an ROI with investment and HC cost will help to prioritize deployment against the functions/ role.  

Microsoft Copilots family/ecosystem is how GenAI capabilities are offered to users of Microsoft products - O365, Edge browser, GitHub. GenAI capabilities can be broadly leveraged into 2 types - Individual productivity and Enterprise Differentiators. CoPilots out of the box lead to the first type - Individual productivity. So it depends on how you as a company are seeking to leverage GenAI. For Organizations that want to kickstart using these tools , Copilots would be the way to go. If you have larger plans to use GenAI for enterprise products, you would need expertise of foundational models, RAG etc.

A word of caution though, make sure you come up with an AI Policy and governance that covers which GenAI tools are approved for use, access to publicly available tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude etc , understand the risks involved of data leakage.  

This is a good first step to familiarize yourself with the possibilities it offers. This will certainly help you define your exact needs and whether Copilot itself can meet them.

Yes, copilots will definitely act as a start point for entering in GenAI rather then building something internally. 

Well for comparison sake today I found it way better than gemini advance.