Are you on Microsoft Frontier? You probably should be.
Your Copilot licence might be doing a lot less than it could.
Not because the features aren't there. Because nobody turned them on.
In this week's briefing, I share two real examples from our club's live implementation sessions, and explain what Microsoft Frontier is and why your firm should probably be on it.
What happened at our implementation session
Last week I ran live implementation sessions with the members of the AI with Inbal community. We all take time to implement something with AI, then we share what worked and how, and then we go again.
Jesse came back from holiday to 2,500 emails. He used Copilot Cowork to sort the whole inbox. Get rid of the marketing emails. Tag the important ones. Accept the meeting invites. Move anything where he was just CC'd over to one side.
He described the experience with a light in his eyes.
Then he set it to run every 15 minutes. His inbox has been tidy ever since.
Ben, a New Zealand accountant, used Copilot Cowork to create a GST review workpaper. Front page summary, recommendations, and issues found. It saves him meaningful time every day. (He also tried to connect it with Xero to automate the data pull. We hit some walls there. That's a work in progress for us in the club.)
And I shared how I used Copilot Workflows to notify me in Teams whenever I get an email from a particular contact who I needed to reply quickly to.
"How come I don't have Cowork or Workflows?"
Then people in the chat started saying: "I don't have Workflow." "I don't have Cowork."
Ah! We looked at their screen, and the penny dropped. They were not on the Microsoft Frontier program.
What is Microsoft Frontier?
Frontier is Microsoft's early access program. It gives you capabilities before they roll out to everyone.
Researcher and Analyst, for example, were in Frontier for a while. Now they're available to all Copilot Premium users.
Cowork and Workflows are in Frontier now.
To turn it on, you don't need to be an influencer or know the right people.
You (or your IT person) just need to turn it on in your Microsoft Copilot admin environment. You can enable Frontier for your whole team (most smaller organisations do this), or just for a small group (most larger orgs).
These features are not beta. They are mature, robust, and secure at Microsoft's level. They are ready to use.
Should your firm be on Frontier?
I think you should.
If you want to be at the front of the early majority, not innovators, not early adopters, just the leading edge of firms who are doing this properly, you need to be using Frontier.
If you want to do this live with a group of other accountants, the AI with Inbal July cohort is now open. Monthly briefing sessions, live implementation sessions where everyone shares what they're building, and weekly activities you can take straight to your team.
A third of the spots are already taken when I am writing this. Join here
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Inbal Rodnay
Guiding Firms in AI Adoption and Automation
Keynote speaker | AI Workshops | Executive briefings | The Tech Savvy Firm
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When you are ready, here is how Inbal can help:
AI with Inbal
- Meetups: See what other firms are actually doing: real use cases, real results, no polish.
- The Radar: What to act on now, what to watch, and what to safely ignore
- The resource hub: prompt packs, policy templates, and implementation guides
AI Magic: 6 Steps to AI Mastery In Your Firm:
- A step-by-step roadmap that shifts your firm from dabbling to safe, impactful AI Adoption
- A hands-on guide for mastering AI in your firm, solo practice, or team.
- Access to a live AI Resource Hub
AI Bootcamp in Sydney
- Practical, business-safe AI use cases
- How to move from “sporadic prompting” to real workflow
- What AI agents are, and what they can do for you right now
