We already have Copilot. Why can't we just point it at the manuals?
A fair question, asked in almost every evaluation. Keep Copilot: it is a good product and you should be using it. This is about the four things that break the moment the user isn't at a desk.
Who this is for
IT and operations leaders who have rolled out Microsoft 365 Copilot and want to know whether a dedicated frontline product is still justified.
Keep Copilot
This isn't an argument that Microsoft 365 Copilot is a bad product. It is a good one, and if your organisation is on Microsoft 365 you should be using it. Drafting, summarising, searching SharePoint, working through a mailbox: Copilot is well suited to all of it, and its reach across a Microsoft 365 tenant is something no separate tool matches.
What FieldPal is for
The ninety minutes when the user has both hands on a vehicle, a pump or a switchboard. Voice-first, running on RealWear head-mounted devices as well as phones and tablets, grounded in the service bulletins and repair history that never made it into your tenant, and producing the structured record your claim or report actually requires.
Head to head
| Capability | FieldPal | Microsoft 365 Copilot |
|---|---|---|
| Voice-first, hands-free at the point of work | Yes | No |
| Head-mounted devices (RealWear) | Yes | No |
| Grounded in bulletins, OEM manuals, repair history | Yes | Limited |
| Source shown for every answer | Yes | Varies |
| Fills in a form at all | Yes | No |
| Structured record written into your target form | Yes | No |
| Retained, auditable record of what was asked | Yes | Limited |
| General office productivity | No | Extensive |
| Drafting, email, documents, meetings | No | Extensive |
The argument
1. The technician doesn’t have a laptop
They have both hands on a vehicle, a pump or a switchboard. Copilot assumes a keyboard, a screen, and a user who can look at it.
FieldPal is voice-first and runs on RealWear head-mounted devices as well as phones and tablets. The technician speaks and is answered while working.
2. The knowledge isn’t in SharePoint
Copilot answers well from what your tenant has indexed. Service bulletins from a manufacturer portal, OEM manuals held under licence, and repair history sitting inside a DMS or CMMS are usually none of those things.
FieldPal Find is built to be pointed at exactly this material.
3. General models answer confidently from general training
Ask a general assistant a specific technical question and it’ll produce a plausible answer drawn from everything it has ever read about that class of equipment.
Plausible isn’t good enough when someone is deciding whether to open a high-voltage pack. Find answers from your documents, and names the document the answer came from, so it can be checked.
4. It can’t fill in a form. At all.
This is the one that ends most evaluations, and it is worth being blunt about: Copilot has no mechanism for completing your job sheet, your inspection report or your warranty claim. It isn’t a limitation of the current version or a feature on a roadmap. Producing a chat response and writing a structured record into a line-of-business system are different things.
The best it can do is draft text a person then copies, pastes and reformats into the real form by hand, which is the task you were trying to remove.
Answering is only half the job
The other half is the record. FieldPal Capture turns what the technician says about the work into the structured record your warranty claim, inspection report or job sheet requires.
A chat transcript isn’t a submitted claim.
The build-it-yourself version
Some organisations reach the same conclusion and propose building it: Azure AI Search, a vector store, a model endpoint. It is a reasonable weekend prototype and a demanding production system.
The prototype is the easy part. The work is everywhere else: ingesting and re-ingesting supplier documentation that changes without notice, evaluating answer quality against a corpus where being wrong has consequences, running speech recognition that survives a workshop at eighty decibels and an accent your model has never heard, packaging it onto a head-mounted device, and standing behind the output when a regulator asks.
Build it if that is your business. If it isn’t, the maths rarely works.
Which one is right for you
Copilot is the right tool for
- Desk-based knowledge work: drafting, summarising, mailbox triage
- Questions answerable from content already indexed in your tenant
- Users with a keyboard, a screen, and attention to spare
- Broad organisational productivity rather than a specific frontline task
You need FieldPal as well when
- The user has both hands occupied and no screen to look at
- The knowledge lives in OEM portals, licensed manuals or a CMMS, not SharePoint
- A plausible-sounding answer isn't good enough to act on
- The output has to be a submitted claim or report, not a chat transcript
Run the test yourself
Take the ten questions your technicians most often ring the central expert about. Ask them of Copilot. Then ask them of FieldPal, pointed at your own bulletins and repair history. We'll set the second half up for you.