Microsoft has launched Copilot, bringing in the power of generative artificial intelligence to most of its apps in the Microsoft Office 365 suite.
“You can be more creative in Word, more analytical in Excel, more expressive in PowerPoint, more productive in Outlook and more collaborative in Teams,” Jared Spataro, Corporate Vice President, Modern Work & Business Applications of Microsoft, says in a blog on Copilot.
Copilot is integrated into Microsoft 365 in two ways. Firstly, it has been integrated with the apps such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams. Secondly, it has launched Business Chat, which works across your calendar, emails, chats, documents, meetings and contacts to lessen your drudgery and make you more productive.
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You can ask it to write a message to your team about the updated product strategy. In no time, it can generate a quick summary based on the meeting you held an hour ago based on the meetings, emails and chat threads around the meeting.
“Today marks the next major step in the evolution of how we interact with computing, which will fundamentally change the way we work and unlock a new wave of productivity growth,” Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO, Microsoft, comments.
“With our new Copilot for work, we’re giving people more agency and making technology more accessible through the most universal interface — natural language,” he says.
Copilot in Word
According to Microsoft, Copilot can give you a first draft, based on the prompts you give, to edit and iterate on. This can save you a lot of effort and time.
In PowerPoint, it can help you in creating ‘beautiful’ presentations with a simple prompt, adding relevant content from a document you made last week or last year.
“And with Copilot in Excel, you can analyse trends and create professional-looking data visualisations in seconds,” Jared Spataro said.
“In Outlook, Copilot helps you clear your inbox in minutes and, in Teams, it can summarise key discussion points — including who said what and where people are aligned, and where they disagree,” he points out.
Earlier this month, Bloomberg reported that the software giant unveiled Dynamics 365 Copilot. The AI tool is meant to assist applications that handle tasks such as sales, marketing and customer service. Based on technology from OpenAI, the software can draft contextual chat and email answers to customer-service queries.