Viva Goals Copilot: How to Achieve Your Objectives with AI

Imagine having an assistant that makes setting and achieving your work goals easier than ever. That’s exactly what Microsoft Copilot in Viva Goals offers.

It’s like having a personal assistant that turns your big ideas into clear plans, retrieves goals from documents or presentations you already have, and helps you kickstart your projects quickly—while keeping everything on track. It summarizes progress and identifies potential roadblocks before they turn into major issues.

In this article, we’ll explore how Copilot in Viva Goals makes goal achievement smarter and more seamless.

Viva Goals Copilot: a brief introduction

Having clear and well-defined goals is one of the fundamental pillars of organization for any employee and company, regardless of industry, role, or importance. Everyone must strive to effectively structure and focus on their tasks, the milestones to achieve, and the steps needed to complete their journey toward them.

Can the latest advancements in Gen AI—the technology that is rapidly transforming today's workplace—help employees and organizations define and achieve their goals? According to Microsoft, the answer is a resounding yes.

For the Redmond-based company, Microsoft Copilot, the AI-powered digital assistant hailed as one of the most powerful productivity tools in recent years, could be the key to meeting this need.

Specifically, its integration with Microsoft Viva—and Viva Goals in particular—can help businesses and their teams build, manage, and track clear roadmaps for goal achievement, ensuring employees always have a well-defined target to aim for.

But what features does this integration offer? What are the benefits?

Let's take a closer look in the following sections.

What are Microsoft Copilot and Viva Goals?

Before diving into the specifics of their integration, let's take a moment for those who may not be familiar with Copilot or Viva Goals.

Here’s a quick recap of their features and functionalities.

Microsoft Copilot

Microsoft Copilot is an AI-powered digital assistant designed to simplify users' daily tasks, boost productivity, and enhance creativity. Its primary focus is code generation, writing assistance, and collaboration.

Seamlessly integrated with popular Microsoft 365 applications such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams, Copilot provides contextual suggestions and helps users effectively understand and process information.

Powered by the cutting-edge GPT-4 language model, Microsoft Copilot offers advanced features like auto-completion for code, documentation search, and collaborative writing. Microsoft continues to enhance Copilot with new features, highlighting the company’s significant investment in Generative AI to shape the future of its business products.

The AI assistant caters to a wide range of users and professionals, including developers, content creators, and business employees looking for AI-powered support in their tasks.

Microsoft Copilot can be leveraged in three main ways:

1. Adopt Copilot: Microsoft offers multiple Copilot assistants to enhance productivity and creativity. Integrated across various Microsoft products and platforms, Copilot transforms the digital workspace into a more interactive and efficient environment.
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2. Extend Copilot: Developers can incorporate external data, simplifying user operations and reducing the need for context switching. This not only improves productivity but also fosters greater collaboration. Copilot makes it easy to integrate external data into commonly used Microsoft products.
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3. Build Your Own Copilot: Beyond adoption and extension, businesses can create a customized Copilot for a unique conversational experience using Azure OpenAI, Cognitive Search, Microsoft Copilot Studio, and other Microsoft Cloud technologies. A custom Copilot can integrate enterprise data, access external data in real time via APIs, and embed itself within enterprise applications.

Microsoft Copilot is available in different versions, with pricing plans tailored to specific use cases:

• Copilot (Free): The free version provides access to generative AI functionalities for PC management (in Windows), online searches (in Edge), and general chatbot conversations on the web.
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• Copilot Pro: Designed for individual users who want to maximize generative AI. For around $20 per month per user, it grants access to Copilot within Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote.
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• Copilot for Microsoft 365: Built for individuals and teams working with Microsoft apps, this version offers access to Copilot Studio, enterprise-level security, privacy, compliance, and advanced features.

Additionally, various industry-specific Copilot versions are available for Microsoft tools, such as:

• Copilot for Microsoft Dynamics, tailored for sales and customer service teams.
• Security-focused Copilot solutions integrated into Microsoft Purview.

Recently, Microsoft has also begun rolling out industry-specific "Agents", designed for sectors like finance, customer service, and marketing, with AI models trained for specialized use cases.

While Windows 11 users were initially skeptical about Microsoft's push for Copilot, the service has grown significantly since its preview phase. Today, it is regarded as one of the best productivity tools in the AI era.

Viva Goals

Viva Goals is a management tool developed by Microsoft that enables companies, teams, or individual employees to create, track, and modify goals within the OKR framework.

The OKR (Objectives and Key Results) framework is an agile method for defining and implementing strategic goals in organizations, based on three key elements:

• Objectives: What do I want to achieve?
• Key Results: How can I measure whether the objective has been achieved?
• Initiatives: What actions do I need to take to reach the objective?

Typically, each team formulates 2 to 4 Objectives and 2 to 4 Key Results for each Objective, focusing on measurable outcomes. These elements are then translated into Initiatives, which represent concrete activities.

OKRs introduce a dynamic goal measurement system, with continuous refinement based on achieved results.

From this perspective, a solution like Microsoft Viva Goals is highly effective in defining objectives and aligning teams with the organization’s strategic priorities. It provides a tangible way to track and monitor daily progress, ensuring that every team member contributes to shared goals.

Viva Goals is one of the nine modules within Microsoft Viva, a relatively new platform focused on Employee Experience.

This platform aims to enhance employee communication, workplace experience, and well-being by integrating relevant knowledge into everyday workflows.

Viva Goals provides a clear and visual way to align the organization’s strategic priorities with individual teams. It highlights the company’s mission and vision, helping employees understand how their work directly impacts business outcomes.

This alignment enables them to focus better and make more effective decisions to achieve concrete results.

Among the main features of Viva Goals, we can find:

• ‍Goal creation and management: In Viva Goals, all employees can enter their Objectives, specifying deadlines, responsibilities, and priorities. Objectives can be pursued individually or shared with the team. Key Results and Initiatives are created as sub-elements of the Objectives.‍
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• Progress tracking: Employees can monitor their progress toward goal achievement in real time. Each Objective in Viva Goals includes a status indicator that displays both the actual and expected values. Progress updates can be made automatically (via integrations) or manually (by users). Status indicators use color codes to quickly highlight whether the OKRs are still "On Track" or "At Risk." Automatic alerts, if enabled, notify when a goal requires attention.‍
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• Built-in templates: OKRs can be created from scratch in Viva Goals or added using built-in templates, making it easier to get started. Customizable templates are also available for presentations, helping teams share progress and insights effectively.

Viva Goals can be integrated with popular applications such as Microsoft Teams, Outlook, and SharePoint. This allows users to view and update OKRs without switching applications. For example, through the Microsoft Teams chat extension, employees can share objectives directly within the platform.

Viva Goals Copilot: features of the integration

After this brief introduction, it’s time to get to the core of this article and talk about the combination of the Viva module and the AI-powered digital assistant from Redmond.

Copilot in Viva Goals leverages Microsoft’s next-gen AI to help leaders align organizational goals with daily work outcomes. This includes a range of management and communication activities aimed at engaging stakeholders and motivating them to give their best for the common interest.

How? Let’s dive in:

• Strategic documents are analyzed by Copilot to create high-quality goals.
• Copilot can generate potential goals based on user-provided suggestions.
• Goal summaries for individuals or teams are seamlessly handled by Copilot.
• Copilot can accurately create additional goals, key results, or metrics based on a provided goal title.
• Familiarity with methodologies like OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) and SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound) accelerates goal-setting programs, and Copilot can assist in this process.

Users have access to various tools to create and better understand their goals, while Copilot employs a conversational approach to assist in decision-making and organizational processes, simplifying and speeding up goal-setting and achievement.

Let’s break down how it works with a simplified overview:

• Using strategic documents: By analyzing strategic or planning documents, Copilot can suggest appropriate goals or OKRs. It’s important to note that Viva Goals does not store documents or user conversation suggestions for any purpose. Additional details on Microsoft’s data usage related to Copilot in Viva Goals are available.
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• Copilot’s conversational interface: During the planning phase, interacting with Copilot in Viva Goals can generate new goal ideas. Copilot’s suggestions are influenced by organizational goal data, user profiles linked to Viva Goals, and any interactions with Copilot.
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• Entering goal titles: Simply input a goal title in natural language and then select Copilot in the New Goal dialog. This facilitates the generation of aspirational goals accompanied by measurable key results.
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• Generating key results for existing goals: By choosing to generate key results with Copilot in the "Add Child Items" menu, Copilot in Viva Goals can suggest potential key results for the relevant goal.
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• Goal summarization: Copilot in Viva Goals provides access to goal summaries, covering both team goals and OKR collections. Team progress summaries can be easily generated by team managers and department leaders. These summaries can be shared as updates, used to prepare review meetings, or serve as goal checkpoints.

Through automated OKR recommendations and progress summaries based on contextual data, Copilot in Viva Goals effectively helps business leaders achieve critical organizational goals more efficiently and with fewer resources.

Viva Goals Copilot: How to access from the Microsoft 365 Admin Center

Clients with a Viva Suite or Viva Goals standalone license, or a trial version of either, can activate Copilot in the Viva Goals Admin Center.

It is possible to enable or disable access to Copilot in Viva Goals for everyone, for specific users, or for specific groups by creating tenant-level or group-level access policies through Viva Feature Access Management.

Additionally, access to Copilot in Viva Goals can be managed from the Microsoft 365 Admin Center.

Let’s take a closer look at this option and understand how to proceed.

To enable or disable access for all users, follow these steps:

• In the Microsoft 365 Admin Center, select Copilot, then select Viva Goals.
• The Org-wide setting shows whether access is enabled for the entire organization.
• To enable or disable this setting, select Manage.
• Select On to enable access for all users or Off to disable it for everyone.
• Finally, select Save.

To enable access for specific users or groups, follow these steps:

• In the Microsoft 365 Admin Center, select Copilot, then select Viva Goals.
• Select Create policy under Custom policies for people and groups.
• Assign a descriptive name to your policy, for example, "Disable for users in Office X."
• Select Off for specific people if you want to disable access to Copilot in Viva Goals only for selected users. Conversely, choose On for specific people if you want to enable access only for selected users.
• Add the users or groups to which you want to apply the new policy.
• Select Save.

Conclusion

Generative AI is undeniably transforming the way businesses operate across industries and company sizes. Since its first appearance, this technology has not only captured the attention of professionals but has also become an integral part of daily work life, reshaping how employees approach their tasks.

Microsoft Copilot has been at the forefront of this technological shift, and 2024 has been the year where Microsoft's AI-powered assistant started revealing its true potential.

The integration of Copilot in Viva Goals could mark a turning point in how organizations define and achieve their goals, as it leverages cutting-edge AI technology to enhance traditional goal-setting methods.

Of course, Copilot will never replace human decision-making, nor will it take over our jobs. However, for those who know how to use it effectively, it can be an invaluable ally—helping structure and organize goals while automating tedious tasks that often slow down productivity.

FAQ on Microsoft Copilot in Viva Goals

What is Copilot in Viva Goals?

Copilot in Viva Goals is an AI assistant that helps companies and teams define, monitor, and achieve their goals. Using Microsoft's Gen AI technology, it transforms strategic documents into clear objectives, automatically generates OKRs, and provides progress summaries.

What are the benefits of integrating Copilot with Viva Goals?

The integration allows business leaders to create goals based on strategic documents, automatically generate key results and metrics, obtain progress summaries to monitor team performance, and become more familiar with methodologies like OKR and SMART.

Does Copilot in Viva Goals store user documents or suggestions?

No, Viva Goals does not store user documents or conversational suggestions.

How do you use Copilot in Viva Goals to create a goal?

To create a goal, simply enter a title in natural language and select Copilot in the "New Goal" dialog. The system automatically generates key results that can be customized. Once the goal is created, progress can be monitored through status indicators.

How do you activate Copilot in Viva Goals?

Copilot in Viva Goals can be enabled from the Microsoft 365 Admin Center for users with a Viva Suite or Viva Goals Standalone license. The administrator can activate access for all users or customize settings for specific groups by creating dedicated access policies.

What methodologies does Copilot in Viva Goals support?

Copilot in Viva Goals primarily supports two methodologies for goal management. The OKR (Objectives and Key Results) framework helps define strategic goals and measure results using precise metrics. The SMART method ensures that goals are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.

Is Copilot in Viva Goals available for all Microsoft plans?

No, access to Copilot in Viva Goals is reserved for users with a Viva Suite or Viva Goals Standalone license, or those with an active trial version.

What integrations does Viva Goals offer?

Viva Goals integrates with several Microsoft applications to streamline goal management. In Microsoft Teams, users can share and update goals directly in chat. In Outlook, progress can be tracked without leaving the application. SharePoint allows organizations to align goals with business content for more effective strategy management.

How does Copilot help with business goal management?

Copilot analyzes strategic documents and suggests objectives based on available information. It can automatically create OKRs, generate progress summaries, and facilitate team communication and review processes. It also allows users to define key results from a goal title, making the planning process simpler and faster.

Can Copilot replace human goal management?

No, Copilot does not replace human decision-making. Its role is to support business leaders in defining, monitoring, and managing goals by simplifying repetitive tasks and providing data-driven suggestions. Human input remains essential for interpreting results and making strategic decisions.