Users of Microsoft 365 may produce Office documents with the aid of Copilot, a cutting-edge AI assistant. With its Microsoft 365 apps and services, Microsoft is now launching a new AI-powered Copilot that will help users create documents, emails, presentations, and much more. The Copilot, powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4, will coexist with Microsoft 365 apps in a similar manner to an assistant (remember Clippy?) It will appear in the sidebar as a chatbot that Office users can call upon to generate text for documents, produce PowerPoint presentations based on Word documents, or even assist with Excel features like PivotTables. Copilot from Microsoft leaked earlier today.
Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, and more are just a few of the apps it is integrated into and works with, according to Microsoft 365 chief Jared Spataro. Copilot is an entirely new method of working.
Users of Microsoft 365 will be able to call Copilot into a Microsoft Teams meeting to tell attendees about relevant projects, organizational changes like recent hires, and even information on coworkers who may have just returned from vacation.
Also available across all Microsoft Office programs, Copilot can be used in Word to create documents based on other files. The text produced by AI can then be freely modified and changed. As Copilot is essentially a chatbot, you may even ask it to format or analyze Excel data, construct a 10-slide PowerPoint presentation from a Word document, or any other task.
Hence, Copilot can be used by Excel users to quickly produce a SWOT analysis or a PivotTable based on data. The Copilot function in Microsoft Teams may record meetings, remind you of information you might have missed if you arrived late, or even summarize action items as they are discussed.
But as Spataro quickly pointed out, Copilot won’t always be right. “Copilot will sometimes get it right, other times it will be productively wrong, giving you an idea that’s not perfect but still offers you a head start,” said Spataro during today’s AI event hosted by Microsoft.
Outlook will have Copilot as well, allowing you to react and delete emails more quickly. Summary of email threads is possible, and Copilot even enables the creation of draft responses with toggles too.
Also, Microsoft intends to introduce a Business Chat feature that integrates with all Microsoft 365 apps and data. It integrates contacts, emails, notes, presentations, and other files into a unified chat interface in Microsoft Teams that can produce summaries, planning overviews, and other things using the Microsoft Graph.
This morning, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella revealed the new AI Copilot during a unique AI productivity event. Microsoft is pushing swiftly toward the integration of OpenAI’s massive language models into its Microsoft 365 suite after recently introducing an AI-powered chatbot to Bing. Just a few days prior, Google unveiled comparable AI features for Google Workspace, including text production helped by AI in Gmail, Docs, and other applications.
Microsoft is obviously starting modestly to make sure that any costly errors are found at an early stage. Jamie Teevan, chief scientist at Microsoft, adds that mitigations are in place when the system makes mistakes, exhibits biases, or is abused. “We’re dealing with the long-term effects and cutting-edge hazards like jailbreaks. We’re going to make mistakes, but we’ll fix them right away.
