CoPilot vs AskGemmma: which is better?

Written By Charlie Hyde

Microsoft is a tech giant and they’ve invested $13bn in their AI capabilities across the Microsoft ecosystem. 

If you’re already using Microsoft products in your organisation it’s tempting to assume that Microsoft’s flagship AI offering, CoPilot is a natural choice for your HR AI chatbot. 

However, like any technology, Microsoft’s CoPilot has its strengths and weaknesses which HR leaders need to evaluate when deciding which HR AI digital assistant provider is right for you. 

In this blog, we’re comparing Microsoft CoPilot and AskGemma to help you decide which HR AI chatbot is right for your organisation. 

Summary

Overall, Microsoft’s AI capabilities extend further into your overall organisation ecosystem than AskGemma, however the key feature which most organisations are looking for: automating responses to employee HR queries doesn’t come ready-made from Microsoft and there are some hidden complexities around cost. 

Microsoft CoPilot is a very powerful AI tool, but it’s not natively built for HR teams which is reflected in the costs and set-up efforts meaning that AskGemma is a more cost-effective and lower effort deployment solution specifically for HR teams. 

Before we compare each key feature, let’s explore why you need an HR AI chatbot in the first place.

Why should you invest in an HR AI chatbot?

Gartner predicts that 75% of employee HR queries will be handled by conversational AI platforms and 92% of HR teams recognise the value that chatbots bring to the HR function. 

There are three key areas the HR AI chatbots can add value:

  • Respond to employee HR queries

  • Support employee engagement initiatives

  • Gather and analyse strategic HR data to support HR strategies and implementation

The average HR professional spends at least 10 hours per week answering employee questions. By delivering this through an HR AI chatbot, HR functions could realise up to 520 hours of increased productivity per HR professional per year. By reducing the burden of employee HR queries, we can free HR teams up to work on strategic HR work and decrease HR burnout.

But it’s not just HR functions who feel the benefit. A McKinsey study found that the average employee spends 1.8 hours per day searching for information and given that the top 50 Googled employee questions all relate to HR, we can assume that much of this 1.8 hours is spent looking for HR-related information. 

HR AI chatbots liberate both HR teams and employees to increase efficiency and productivity and ultimately deliver more strategic value to your organisation. 


Feature Comparison

Set Up…Winner: AskGemma

Microsoft CoPilot and AskGemma are both SaaS products operating on a licence model. However, one comes ready to use out of the box and the answer to which one might surprise you…AskGemma!

Microsoft CoPilot comes with three out-of-the-box role-based agents: sales, finance and customer service agents. Not HR. 

This means that if you want to use Microsoft CoPilot in your HR function, you will need to configure CoPilot yourself. Whilst it is possible to do, this doesn’t solve the primary challenge that most HR teams have: time. 

Your HR function will need to configure CoPilot yourselves, connecting it up to all the relevant knowledge sources and ensuring that you’ve correctly configured it to minimise hallucination. Once you’ve created the initial HR chatbot, you will then need to consider any integration requirements, for example Workday or SuccessFactors if you want to be able to connect your Copilot chatbot with your HCM system. 

Meanwhile, AskGemma is an HR AI chatbot built by HR for HR so you can quickly deploy AskGemma into your HR ecosystem. All we require from you is a list of places we need to connect to to create your unified HR knowledge base and the rest, including integration, is taken care of by us. 

Because the setup is simpler and requires substantially less effort from HR teams, we declare AskGemma the winner of this category. 

Integration…Winner: AskGemma

HR teams will only realise the benefit of automating responding to employee HR queries if the HR AI chatbot is itself easy to find. Therefore, integration is very important when choosing the right HR AI digital assistant for your organisation. 

How do Microsoft CoPilot and AskGemma stack up against each other?

Obviously CoPilot integrates seamlessly with other Microsoft products. CoPilot is embedded in the Microsoft ecosystem meaning that you can call on CoPilot to help you create a job description directly in a Word document or create a PowerPoint for training material. CoPilot will also help you convert a Word document or Excel into a PowerPoint and vice versa. 

You can also use CoPilot to help you schedule HR meetings as well as take and distribute notes from an HR meeting.

CoPilot’s cross-product capabilities are very powerful indeed. 

In terms of Microsoft integration we have a clear winner: CoPilot.

However, what if your organisation uses Office365 but your HR systems are outside the Microsoft ecosystem, for example you’re using Workday, SuccessFactors, or iTrent. How do CoPilot and AskGemma compare when we consider integration outside of Microsoft? 

Here we have a clear winner: AskGemma.  

Getting a Microsoft product to integrate with a non-Microsoft product is quite challenging and often requires you to use a Microsoft Partner to help you achieve this. For example, CoPilot can integrate with Workday but given that Microsoft largely leaves this to you, you’ll either need to use your in-house IT team or use a certified Partner to help you.

Meanwhile, AskGemma has open APIs meaning that integration is much simpler and is also something that we will take care of for you during setup, meaning you don’t need to rely on your equally busy IT team or incur expensive costs that come with using a Microsoft Partner.

AskGemma brings HR help where employees need it most meaning we can embed AskGemma into your intranet, your communication channels and she’s even available through WhatsApp. 

Therefore, when it comes to integration more broadly, AskGemma is the winner.

Employee HR Queries…Winner: AskGemma

When it comes to using conversational AI to respond to employee HR queries AskGemma is the winner. 

Earlier in this blog we mentioned that CoPilot wasn’t created specifically for HR teams. This means Microsoft will supply you with the tools to create an HR AI chatbot but your HR team has to do the actual creation and tuning themselves.

However, AskGemma was created specifically to answer employee HR queries so you can confidently deploy AskGemma, knowing that it will provide company-accurate answers to employee HR questions. We also have a library of over 200 HR templates ranging from processes and policies to document templates so if you have gaps in your knowledge base we can quickly plug those to ensure you’re up and running as efficiently as possible.  

Sorry Microsoft, it’s another one to AskGemma!


HR Material Creation….Winner: Microsoft

Microsoft CoPilot is the clear winner when it comes to using generative AI to help create HR material. 

As we discussed earlier, CoPilot sits throughout the Microsoft ecosystem which means you can use it to help you create HR documents. You can prompt Copilot to help you create job descriptions, policies and other HR-related material. These can help HR teams generate powerful first drafts which you can then edit to perfection.

In comparison, AskGemma has a library of over 200 templates that you can access as an AskGemma customer but our HR AI platform will not generate fresh ones for you.

So on this one we declare Microsoft CoPilot the winner. 


Recruitment….Winner: Microsoft

Many of the HR AI products focus on recruitment support and Microsoft is no exception. Using CoPilot Studio, you can connect your CoPilot to LinkedIn, applicant tracking systems and PowerBI to analyse your hiring processes, identify improvement opportunities and visualise these against your candidate pipeline to ensure you’re hiring the highest quality talent. 

You can interrogate your data using CoPilot in Excel to maximise your data insights and make the right recruitment decisions and benchmarking for your organisation. 

AskGemma is not designed to be used for recruitment so Microsoft CoPilot is the winner here. 

Data Analysis…Winner: Draw

Both Microsoft CoPilot and AskGemma have powerful data analytics capabilities but they achieve these in different ways. 

Microsoft CoPilot is embedded in Excel and PowerBI which allows you to interrogate your HR data to extract strategic insights through simple queries. 

Similarly, you can use Microsoft CoPilot on historic spreadsheets to be able to compare previous and new data to identify trends over time. 

However, your HR team will need to create the dashboards themselves or utilise your in-house data team and you will need to ensure these are set up correctly to reflect the right data.

Meanwhile AskGemma’s comes with a pre-configured analytics dashboard out-of-the-box which will start populating with data as soon as you launch the HR AI chatbot to your organisation.

This means it is much easier to set up than Microsoft CoPilot. The AskGemma analytics dashboard also serves HR teams with strategic HR data insights, however this is only on data in AskGemma. This means that the more your organisation uses the AskGemma HR AI chatbot the more data insights your HR function gets. However, you cannot upload previous spreadsheets so it will take a few months to be able to see trends forming in AskGemma. 

Whilst both Microsoft CoPilot and AskGemma offer rich, powerful strategic HR data insights, they do this using very different approaches. Therefore we’re calling this category a draw.


Cost…Winner: AskGemma
If your organisation is already using Microsoft 365 then it should be easier and cheaper to add CoPilot, right? Not so fast…

Here’s some information about Microsoft CoPilot pricing you should know:

  • You have to purchase CoPilot separately to your main Microsoft 365 or Office 365 licence

  • CoPilot and CoPilot Studio are separate purchases

  • To purchase CoPilot you first need to have an eligible Microsoft 365 or Office 365 licence

  • If you want to use CoPilot in Teams, you need to make sure you have an eligible licence for that too (not all Microsoft 365 or Office 365 licences have Teams included)

On top of your existing Microsoft licence, you will need to pay:

  • £30 per user per month for CoPilot

  • £200 per month for 25,000 messages in CoPilot Studio

This means that, depending on your current licences, upgrading to Microsoft CoPilot might be more expensive than anticipated. 

AskGemma offers enterprise licences starting at just £2.00 per user per month plus a setup fee which is determined by the number and complexity of integrations your HR function requires. 

Find out more about AskGemma’s tiered pricing to find the right solution for you.

All things considered, AskGemma is the winner here. 

Summary

No one can deny that Microsoft CoPilot is a very powerful tool overall. However, for HR use cases specifically, CoPilot still has some limitations that increase the effort and cost for HR teams. 

Similarly, you need a range of Microsoft products to really get the full end-to-end benefit out of CoPilot as many HR journeys require you to extract data into an Excel spreadsheet or PowerBI dashboard and then query your data to gather the strategic insights. 

The fact that Microsoft CoPilot hasn’t been built specifically for HR is a blessing and a curse: on the one hand you can use it for a range of tasks beyond HR; on the other hand this means your HR function will need to invest more time in setup and data extraction to fully realise the benefits. 

Meanwhile, AskGemma is an HR AI chatbot specifically built for the HR function which means the overall functionality of AskGemma is narrower compared to Microsoft CoPilot. However, it delivers more HR-specific features and arrives more ‘ready-made’ than CoPilot. 


Reach out today for a demo of AskGemma to help you decide which HR AI chatbot is right for you.



Charlie Hyde