“Introducing Microsoft 365 Copilot—Your Copilot for Work”, 2023-03-26 ():
[video] Today, we are bringing the power of next-generation AI to work. Introducing Microsoft 365 Copilot—your copilot for work. It combines the power of large language models (LLMs) with your data in the Microsoft Graph and the Microsoft 365 apps to turn your words into the most powerful productivity tool on the planet.
…Copilot is integrated into Microsoft 365 in two ways. It works alongside you, embedded in the Microsoft 365 apps you use every day—Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams and more—to unleash creativity, unlock productivity and uplevel skills. Today we’re also announcing an entirely new experience: Business Chat. Business Chat works across the LLM, the Microsoft 365 apps, and your data—your calendar, emails, chats, documents, meetings and contacts—to do things you’ve never been able to do before. You can give it natural language prompts like “Tell my team how we updated the product strategy”, and it will generate a status update based on the morning’s meetings, emails and chat threads…Microsoft 365 Copilot transforms work in 3 ways:
Unleash creativity:
With Copilot in Word, you can jump-start the creative process so you never start with a blank slate again. Copilot gives you a first draft to edit and iterate on—saving hours in writing, sourcing, and editing time. Sometimes Copilot will be right, other times usefully wrong—but it will always put you further ahead. You’re always in control as the author, driving your unique ideas forward, prompting Copilot to shorten, rewrite or give feedback.
- Copilot in PowerPoint helps you create 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 analyze trends and create professional-looking data visualizations in seconds.
Unlock productivity: We all want to focus on the 20% of our work that really matters, but 80% of our time is consumed with busywork that bogs us down. Copilot lightens the load.
From summarizing long email threads to quickly drafting suggested replies, Copilot in Outlook helps you clear your inbox in minutes, not hours.
And every meeting is a productive meeting with Copilot in Teams. It can summarize key discussion points—including who said what and where people are aligned and where they disagree—and suggest action items, all in real time during a meeting.
And with Copilot in Power Platform, anyone can automate repetitive tasks, create chatbots and go from idea to working app in minutes.
GitHub data shows that Copilot promises to unlock productivity for everyone. Among developers who use GitHub Copilot, 88% say they are more productive, 74% say that they can focus on more satisfying work, and 77% say it helps them spend less time searching for information or examples.
But Copilot doesn’t just supercharge individual productivity. It creates a new knowledge model for every organization—harnessing the massive reservoir of data and insights that lies largely inaccessible and untapped today. Business Chat works across all your business data and apps to surface the information and insights you need from a sea of data—so knowledge flows freely across the organization, saving you valuable time searching for answers. You will be able to access Business Chat from Microsoft 365.com, from Bing when you’re signed in with your work account, or from Teams.
Uplevel skills: Copilot makes you better at what you’re good at and lets you quickly master what you’ve yet to learn. The average person uses only a handful of commands—such as “animate a slide” or “insert a table”—from the thousands available across Microsoft 365. Now, all that rich functionality is unlocked using just natural language. And this is only the beginning.
…Grounded in your business data. AI-powered LLMs are trained on a large but limited corpus of data. The key to unlocking productivity in business lies in connecting LLMs to your business data—in a secure, compliant, privacy-preserving way. Microsoft 365 Copilot has real-time access to both your content and context in the Microsoft Graph. This means it generates answers anchored in your business content—your documents, emails, calendar, chats, meetings, contacts and other business data—and combines them with your working context—the meeting you’re in now, the email exchanges you’ve had on a topic, the chat conversations you had last week—to deliver accurate, relevant, contextual responses.
…Designed to learn new skills: Microsoft 365 Copilot’s foundational skills are a game changer for productivity: It can already create, summarize, analyze, collaborate and automate using your specific business content and context. But it doesn’t stop there. Copilot knows how to command apps (eg. “animate this slide”) and work across apps, translating a Word document into a PowerPoint presentation. And Copilot is designed to learn new skills. For example, with Viva Sales, Copilot can learn how to connect to CRM systems of record to pull customer data—like interaction and order histories—into communications. As Copilot learns about new domains and processes, it will be able to perform even more sophisticated tasks and queries.
…In the months ahead, we’re bringing Copilot to all our productivity apps—Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, Viva, Power Platform, and more. We’ll share more on pricing and licensing soon. Earlier this month we announced Dynamics 365 Copilot as the world’s first AI Copilot in both CRM and ERP to bring the next-generation AI to every line of business.
See Also:
Programming Possibility: Kevin Scott on AI’s Impact on Cognitive Work
Microsoft and OpenAI have a new AI tool that will give coding suggestions to software developers
New Bing, and an Interview with Kevin Scott and Sam Altman About the Microsoft-OpenAI Partnership
Allen & Overy breaks the internet (and new ground) with co-pilot Harvey