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MCC Daily Tribune

Empowering Your Work and Studies: Get to Know Microsoft Copilot at MCC

Please share with students:

We are excited to officially reintroduce you to Microsoft Copilot, at MCC. Copilot is the College's recommended generative AI tool designed to help you work, learn, and create more efficiently and securely.

Microsoft Copilot is an intelligent partner embedded directly into the Microsoft 365 apps Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, and OneNote.

  • It helps you to quickly generate first drafts for reports, memos, or emails, and summarize long email threads or lengthy reports.
  • It can transform content between document types. For example, it can parse a PDF document and give you Excel columns.
  • It can analyze spreadsheets to determine key trends and insights without manually creating complex formulas.
  • It can summarize Teams meeting transcripts.

The College understands that adopting new technology, especially AI, raises important questions about data security and privacy. Protecting MCC’s institutional data remains our highest priority. When you use Copilot while signed into your MCC account and working with institutional data, both your inputs and the data stay secure within MCC’s established security environment.

This means:

  • Your interactions with Copilot are protected by the same advanced security controls your email, documents, and other College systems.
  • Your institutional data is never used to train public large language models.

What is Institutional data?

It is defined by the College’s Data Classification policy, including but not limited to, protected student records, proprietary institutional document (drafted strategic plans, policies, procedures, etc.), financial data, health records, social security numbers, etc.

Copilot provides critical security safeguards built into MCC’s contract with Microsoft, Copilot is currently the only AI tool recommended by the College for use with institutional data. When you use Copilot within your MCC account, all inputs and institutional data stay securely within the MCC enterprise tenant, and this protected environment, chosen specifically for its contractual safeguards, applies regardless of personal preferences or the perceived capabilities of other AI tools.

To protect the College’s overall data security posture, faculty and staff are strictly prohibited from entering institutional data into any non-approved AI platforms (such as publicly available versions of ChatGPT, Gemini, or other AI tools) unless the Vendor Risk Assessment Committee has completed a formal review and granted approval.

As part of our commitment to responsible Al adoption, the College is establishing an AI Steering Committee to monitor best practices, evaluate emerging opportunities, and ensure our policies remain aligned with evolving industry standards in AI.

Using only MS Copilot for institutional data ensures we maintain compliance and protect our institution’s sensitive information. If you have any questions about using Copilot’s features, please reach out to the IT Help Desk for assistance.

Brenda Ronan
Internal Audit
03/24/2026