Recently, I was lucky enough to gain access to Microsoft Copilot for Azure as part of a limited preview. For anyone who missed the announcement at Ignite, here is what Microsoft describe it as:

Microsoft Copilot for Azure (preview) is an AI-powered tool to help you do more with Azure. With Microsoft Copilot for Azure (preview), you can gain new insights, discover more benefits of the cloud, and orchestrate across both cloud and edge. Copilot leverages Large Language Models (LLMs), the Azure control plane, and insights about your Azure environment to help you work more efficiently.

So – what does that mean in practice? For me, this means reading the docs, then getting stuck into actually trying elements of this out. To be transparent, I had low expectations for this service. I am not 100% sure whether it is aimed at me, or someone with less Azure experience. I was also conscious that this is the limited preview I am working with, so there will be some oddities.

First up, the integration into the Portal UX – I like it. It’s simple, and consistent. As it is a tenant level service, it stays in place as you jump around the Portal from a Subscription to a Resource to Entra ID for example.

Next, what can I use this for that is quicker than me doing this myself? I will be honest, I struggled a bit here. This is for two reasons. One, this is enabled in my MVP tenant, so I have very little Production or day-to-day work to be done. Two, I was looking for something interesting rather than ‘tell me how to build a VM’.

So, I started with a question I know the answer to, but anyone who follows #AzNet knows we are all dying for progress on…

Imagine my surprise with how confident that response is! OH MY GOD I FOUND A THING. Well no, it doesn’t work. And I have no idea what it means in Step 3. If you find out – please let me, Aidan and Karl know, thanks 🙂 But I do like that it attempts to back up its answer with links to documentation.

As you make requests, it dynamically updates the text to tell you what it is ‘thinking’ which I really like.

And that ability to write queries, is a real winner for me. saves a lot of time, but you need to be quite specific with the ask and detail, but that’s no real surprise at this stage.

I do like its ability to take quite a non specific question and offer a decent and useful output in response

However, I am finding myself trying to find things for it to do. This is OK during preview, where there is no additional cost, however, it’s not clear on what pricing will actually be just yet, vague language on the landing site makes me think this will be charged for

Overall, I think it’s a welcome addition to the AI assistant space from Microsoft. I think those of us working with Azure would feel quite left behind otherwise. But I do think that as the platform is so vast and as each environment is unique, the core use case for different people will vary and that could significantly impact whether this is used widely or not. Having said that, I am looking forward to how this progresses, and more people having access can only mean improvements.