Blog

Microsoft has made an exciting announcement with the launch of Copilot, an AI-powered Chatbot that will revolutionize the way people generate documents, emails, presentations, and more in Microsoft 365 apps and services. Powered by OpenAI's GPT-4, Copilot will sit alongside Microsoft 365 apps as an assistant, appearing in the sidebar as a Chatbot that allows Office users to summon it to generate text in documents, create PowerPoint presentations based on Word documents, or even help use features like PivotTables in Excel.

Copilot can be summoned throughout Microsoft’s Office apps and be used in Word to draft documents based on other files. The AI-generated text can then be freely edited and adapted. As Copilot is essentially a Chatbot, you can even ask it to create a 10-slide PowerPoint presentation based on a Word document or analyse or format Excel data.

In addition to document creation, Microsoft 365 users can summon Copilot to provide information on an upcoming Microsoft Teams meeting, preparing people with updates on related projects, organisational changes like recent hires, and even updates on co-workers who might have returned from vacation. In Microsoft Teams, the Copilot feature can transcribe meetings, remind you of things you might have missed if you joined late, or even summarise action items throughout a meeting.

Microsoft 365 Copilot is powered by the Copilot system, which combines Microsoft 365 apps like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint with the Microsoft Graph of data and intelligence and GPT-4. Copilot uses grounding to improve the quality of the prompts it's given. If you ask Word to create a document based on your data, Copilot will send that prompt to the Microsoft Graph to retrieve the context and data before modifying the prompt and sending it to the GPT-4 large language model. The response then gets sent to the Microsoft Graph for additional grounding, security, and compliance checks, before sending the response and commands back to Microsoft 365 apps.

Microsoft also plans to launch a Business Chat feature that works across all Microsoft 365 data and apps. It uses the Microsoft Graph to bring together documents, presentations, emails, notes, and contacts into a single chat interface in Microsoft Teams that can generate summaries, planning overviews, and more.

While this AI-powered vision for Office apps is certainly moving quickly, there are concerns around the accuracy of the AI models, particularly when Microsoft 365 users may well be using them with business data in the months ahead. Microsoft's AI principles note that they make it clear how the system makes decisions by noting limitations, linking to sources, and prompting users to review, fact-check and adjust content based on subject-matter expertise.

Bottom Line

Overall, Copilot is an exciting development in the world of AI-powered software, bringing a new level of efficiency and productivity to the Microsoft 365 suite of apps and services. While concerns around accuracy and ethics must be considered, it's clear that Microsoft is committed to responsible innovation as it continues to push the boundaries of what's possible with AI. We look forward to seeing how Copilot evolves in the coming months and years. Visit Global Host Centre for more details.