What is Microsoft 365 Copilot? The AI coming to Word, Excel, and more

Microsoft has dominated the tech information cycle in latest months, because of its $10 billion funding in ChatGPT creator OpenAI and a flurry of latest releases like Bing Chat. The Redmond large isn’t stopping there both because it’s now poised to roll out a brand new AI-powered assistant in its workplace suite. Dubbed Microsoft 365 Copilot, the characteristic will automate duties like writing emails, summarizing conferences, and even making stunning PowerPoint displays. All of this will likely sound too good to be true, however Microsoft’s early demos look promising.

So on this article, let’s take a better have a look at Microsoft 365 Copilot, what it could possibly do, and the way you should use it.

Microsoft 365 Copilot is a brand new generative AI characteristic that assists with work duties like writing paperwork, enhancing spreadsheets, and summarizing conferences. You’ll discover it inside varied Microsoft 365 apps, together with Phrase, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote.

For context, right here’s a fast rundown of Microsoft 365 Copilot’s capabilities:

• Copilot can write whole paperwork based mostly on a brief immediate. For instance, you can say “Draft a canopy letter for the position of a senior software program developer”.
• In PowerPoint, Copilot can assist scale back the quantity of textual content in slides, add AI-generated photographs, and scale back an extended presentation to a handful of slides.
  If you’re coping with massive quantities of information in Excel, you can ask Copilot to rapidly analyze it and create an easily-digestible visualization.
• In case your office makes use of Microsoft Groups, you’ll be able to ask Copilot to summarize a gathering, make amends for unread chats, and even ask about particular person workforce members.
• In Microsoft’s e-mail app Outlook, you’ll be able to depend on Copilot to tailor your writing to sound skilled, pleasant, or a particular tone of your alternative. You can too ask the AI to write down a draft, eliminating the entire exhausting work.
• For digital note-takers, Microsoft has additionally built-in Copilot into OneNote and Loop. You possibly can consider this integration as a digital assistant which you could ask to rapidly type, search, and summarize your notes.

In addition to these remoted examples, Microsoft has additionally developed Copilot to work seamlessly throughout the whole app suite. So for instance, you can create a brand new Phrase doc and ask Copilot to draft a report based mostly on a special Excel file. Likewise, you’ll have the ability to ask Copilot to carry notes from Microsoft Groups into OneNote and summarize the textual content earlier than including it to a notice.

If the idea of Microsoft 365 Copilot sounds acquainted, that’s as a result of Google already has a competing characteristic referred to as Duet AI for Workspace. Nevertheless, it’s not as absolutely featured because the examples we’ve seen from Microsoft thus far. Issues could enhance sooner or later, however because it stands, right here’s a fast comparability between Google and Microsoft’s AI-powered productiveness options:

Whereas Microsoft 365 Copilot appears extraordinarily promising on paper, the corporate hasn’t opened up entry to it simply but. It first introduced the characteristic in March 2023 however didn’t decide to a concrete launch date on the time. Quick ahead just a few months later and Microsoft has solely simply began rolling out the characteristic to a closed group of trusted testers. We noticed Google undertake an identical technique within the early days of its generative AI characteristic too.

To date, the corporate has introduced the Microsoft 365 Copilot Early Entry Program. Nevertheless, not like the Bing Chat waitlist or Google’s Bard chatbot that slowly rolled out, Microsoft isn’t letting anybody from most of the people signal as much as entry Copilot. As a substitute, it’s an invitation-only program for an unique group of 600 paying prospects. That’s proper — you and I can’t merely join to make use of Microsoft 365 Copilot totally free.

At this level, it’s unclear if Microsoft 365 Copilot will ever turn into free to make use of. However based mostly on the corporate’s aggressive AI push with its chatbot and Bing Picture Creator, it could occur. Microsoft additionally faces some competitors from Google, the place anybody can freely be a part of a waitlist to entry generative AI in Google Search, Gmail and Docs proper now.

On the flip facet, nonetheless, Microsoft’s AI options value cash to function. Giant language fashions, particularly superior ones like GPT-4, eat numerous computing sources. So from that perspective, it’s straightforward to see why you could want a Microsoft 365 subscription to make use of Copilot.