Understanding Microsoft 356 Copilot: The AI-powered future of work

Microsoft this week announced its latest product, a new AI-powered Microsoft 356 Copilot for its office apps and services dubbing it the future of work. The product is designed to assist users with generating documents, emails, presentations, and much more. Powered by GPT-4 from OpenAI, Copilot will work alongside Microsoft 365 apps much like an assistant (reminiscent of Clippy), appearing in the sidebar as a chatbot that allows Office users to call upon it to generate text in documents, create PowerPoint presentations based on Word documents, or even help use features like PivotTables in Excel.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella unveiled this new AI Microsoft 356 Copilot. After bringing an AI-powered chatbot to Bing recently, Microsoft is moving quickly toward the integration of OpenAI’s large language models into its Microsoft 365 suite. Microsoft’s announcement comes just days after Google announced similar AI features for Google Workspace, including AI-assisted text generation in Gmail, Docs, and more.

Office users will be able to summon Microsoft 356 Copilot to provide information on an upcoming Teams meeting, preparing people with updates on related projects, organizational changes like recent hires, and even updates on co-workers who might have returned from vacation.

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Microsoft 356 Copilot can also be summoned throughout the firm’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 analyze or format Excel data.

That means Excel users can use Microsoft 356 Copilot to instantly create a SWOT analysis or a PivotTable based on data. In Teams, the AI feature can transcribe meetings, remind you of things you might have missed if you joined late, or even summarize action items throughout a meeting.

The company knows that Microsoft 356 Copilot won’t always be correct, though. Sometimes AI will get it right, other times it will be usefully wrong, giving you an idea that’s not perfect but still gives you a head start.

Microsoft 356 Copilot will also exist in Outlook, so you can spend less time deleting emails and responding. Email threads can be summarized, and it can even create draft responses with toggles to adapt the tone or length of an email.

To build Microsoft 356 Copilot, the company didn’t just connect ChatGPT to Microsoft 365. This system combines Office apps like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint with the Microsoft Graph of data and intelligence and GPT-4.

Microsoft 356 Copilot uses grounding to improve the quality of the prompts its given. If you ask Word to create a document based on your data, the AI 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 the Office apps.

Microsoft is also planning 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.

Microsoft says it’s testing its Microsoft 365 Copilot with 20 customers right now and will be expanding the preview in the coming months. “We will share more about pricing and details in the coming months,” says Microsoft in a blog post today.

While Microsoft is certainly moving quickly with its AI-powered vision for Office apps, there will certainly be concerns around this speed of innovation and the accuracy of its AI models, particularly when Microsoft 365 users may well be using them with business data in the months ahead.

“We 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,” says Microsoft said in a blog post, noting the company’s AI principles.