Contents
Microsoft recently announced a new AI-powered Copilot for its Microsoft 365 apps and services, designed to assist people with generating documents, emails, presentations, and much more.
The Copilot, powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4, will run alongside Microsoft 365 apps like an assistant (remember Clippy?). It’ll appear in the sidebar as a chatbot that allows Office users to summon it to complete various activities such as generating text in documents, creating PowerPoint presentations based on Word documents, or even helping use features like PivotTables in Excel.
Microsoft boss Satya Nadella said it would “fundamentally change the way we work.”
Microsoft 365 users will be able to use Copilot to provide information on upcoming Microsoft Teams meetings by preparing people with updates on related projects, organisational changes and more.
How Microsoft 365 Copilot Will Transform the Way We Work
Unleash Creativity
How often have you stared at a blank Word document, wondering where to start? With Copilot in Word, you can jump-start the creative process, so you never start with a blank slate again. Copilot will give you a first draft to amend, saving hours in writing, sourcing, and editing time. Sometimes Copilot will be correct, other times usefully wrong — but it will always put you ahead of where you were. As the author, you’re always in control. Use Copilot to drive your ideas forward; prompt it to shorten, rewrite or even give feedback.
Copilot will help you create beautiful PowerPoint presentations with a simple prompt, adding relevant content from a previous document you made. You’ll be able to analyse trends and create professional-looking data visualisations with Excel in seconds.
Unlock Productivity
80% of our time is consumed bogged down with busy work. Copilot lightens the load. From summarising long email threads to quickly drafting suggested replies, Copilot in Outlook helps you clear your inbox in minutes, not hours.
By now, we’ve all wasted our valuable time in Teams meetings; Copilot aims to put unproductive Teams meetings to bed by summarising key discussion points — including who said what, where people are aligned, and where they disagree — and suggesting real-time action items during a meeting.
When it comes to Power Platform, Copilot empowers you to automate repetitive tasks, create chatbots and go from idea to working app in minutes.
But Copilot doesn’t just supercharge individual productivity. Business Chat works across your business data and apps to surface information and insights you need from a sea of data — so knowledge flows freely across the organisation, saving you valuable time searching for answers.
Uplevel Skills
Copilot makes you better at what you’re good at and lets you quickly master what you’ve yet to learn. From the thousands available across Microsoft 365, most people only use a handful of commands — such as “insert a table” or “left align text”. Soon, you’ll be able to unlock all that functionality using natural language. And this is only the beginning.
Copilot will fundamentally change how people work with AI and how AI works with people.
Of course, as with any new work pattern, there’s a learning curve, but those who embrace this new way of working will quickly gain an edge.
When Will Microsoft 365 Copilot Become Widely Available?
Microsoft is starting small by testing 20 customers to ensure any costly mistakes are discovered early on. “When the system gets things wrong, or has biases, or is misused, we have mitigations in place,” says Jamie Teevan, Microsoft’s chief scientist. “We’re tackling the long-term implications and novel risks like jailbreaks. We’re going to make mistakes, but when we do we’ll address them quickly.”
Pricing and licensing will be shared in the coming months. Learn more on the Microsoft 365 blog and visit WorkLab to get expert insights on how AI will create a brighter future of work for everyone.
As Microsoft Gold partners, we are incredibly excited about the opportunities Copilot will unlock for ourselves and our clients. We’ll keep our ear to the ground for updates and test the new features as soon as they’re readily available!
