AI-powered Copilot added to Microsoft 365 apps to improve creativity and productivity

Microsoft is bringing AI to one of its most popular products – Microsoft 365 which includes Word, PowerPoint, Excel and Outlook – with a new Copilot feature designed to increase your creativity and productivity.

Copilot is still in the testing phase with a small group of customers and will provide an all-new workflow.

It will be embedded in the Microsoft 365 apps we use every day including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams.

Copilot combines the power of large language models (LLM) like ChatGPT with a new experience called Business Chat.

Business Chat brings LLM and the Microsoft 365 apps together and combines them with your calendar, your email, documents, chats, meetings and contacts so users can do more than ever before.

Business Chat can respond to natural language questions and prompts.

For example, you might say “tell my team how we updated the product strategy” and Business Chat will go off and create a status update based on recent email exchanges and chats.

With Copilot users will be able access similar tools when they are creating in Word, analysing in Excel, expressing themselves in PowerPoint, trying to be productive in Outlook and collaborating in Teams.

“Copilot combines the power of large language models with your data and apps to turn your words into the most powerful productivity tool on the planet,” said Jared Spataro, corporate vice president, Modern Work and Business Applications, Microsoft.

“By grounding in your business content and context, Copilot delivers results that are relevant and actionable.

“It’s enterprise-ready, built on Microsoft’s comprehensive approach to security, compliance, privacy and responsible AI.

“Copilot marks a new era of computing that will fundamentally transform the way we work.”

Here’s how it would work across the Microsoft 365 apps:

– Copilot in Word writes, edits, summarizes and creates right alongside people as they work.

– Copilot in PowerPoint enables the creation process by turning ideas into a designed presentation through natural language commands.

– Copilot in Excel helps unlock insights, identify trends or create professional-looking data visualizations in a fraction of the time.

– Copilot in Outlook can help synthesize and manage the inbox to allow more time to be spent on communicating.

– Copilot in Teams makes meetings more productive with real-time summaries and action items directly in the context of the conversation.

– Copilot in Power Platform will help developers of all skill levels accelerate and streamline development with low-code tools with the introduction of two new capabilities within Power Apps and Power Virtual Agents.

– Business Chat brings together data from across documents, presentations, email, calendar, notes and contacts to help summarize chats, write emails, find key dates or even write a plan based on other project files.

Microsoft says Copilot has been built with data security and privacy in mind.

Copilot is being tested by a select group of customers who will offer critical feedback.

Details on pricing and licensing will be announced in the coming weeks.