Microsoft 365 Copilot’s AI tools don’t seem particularly surprising for the company behind Clippy’s helper bot. But applying AI and natural language to Microsoft Office looks like a profound, fundamental shift that could completely transform the way you work.
Microsoft 365 Copilot essentially injects AI into the various Office applications. You’ll still interact with them as you normally would, but Copilot will also live in the toolbar above those apps, and you’ll interact with it in a sidebar. If you’ve ever brought a co-worker in and said, “Show me how,” you’ll understand what Microsoft 365 Copilot can do. Except actually, you know, TO DO he.
It really is the next generation of AI chatbots: not bots that talk to you like Bing Chat, but assistants that take control.
Jared Spataro, corporate vice president of modern work and enterprise apps at Microsoft, probably explained the potential best in a blog post Microsoft published on Thursday. “Copilot makes you better at what you’re good at and lets you quickly master what you haven’t learned yet,” he writes. “The average person only uses a handful of commands, such as ‘animate a slide’ or ‘insert a table’, out of the thousands available in Microsoft 365. Now all of these rich features are unlocked using only natural language . And that’s just the beginning. “
Microsoft
Microsoft 365 Copilot will roll out over the next few months to all Microsoft Office apps, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, Viva, Power Platform and others. It’s currently being tested with 20 customers, including eight Fortune 500 companies. You’ll need to subscribe to Microsoft 365 to access it.
What Microsoft 365 Copilot can do for you
Let’s put this in context. It’s still hard to believe that Bing Chat debuted in February, navigated through a series of “strange” interactions, and has now arrived as a business tool to help workers and executives at big corporations. But Copilot is not designed to tell stories and jokes. Its power is to unlock some of the deepest capabilities of Microsoft’s apps – perhaps even behind the scenes – and free you from the drudgery of everyday work life. Presumably, it uses OpenAI’s GPT-4 technology, although Microsoft has not confirmed this.
Microsoft 365 Copilot is designed to help you in different ways in different applications. In general, however, expect to see a “Copilot” button that will allow you to enter natural language prompts. Microsoft has suggested a few prompts you could use in Copilot, below:
- In Word, for example, an example might be: “Write a two-page project proposal based on data from (a document) and (a spreadsheet),” SO “Make the third paragraph more concise. Change the tone of the document to make it more casual.“
- In Excel: “Give a breakdown of sales by type and by channel. Insert a table.“
- In PowerPoint: “Create a five-slide presentation based on a Word document and include relevant stock photos.“
- In Outlook: “Write a response thanking them and asking for more details on their second and third points; shorten this draft and make it sound professional.“
- In teams: “Summarize what I missed in the meeting. What points have been raised so far? Where do we disagree on this subject?“
Take Excel, for example. Excel is, almost by design, esoteric. For some, it is almost impenetrable! It largely caters to a certain type of mindset that likes to interact with columns of numbers, apply rules and logic, and turn them into useful information via charts and graphs.
What Copilot could potentially do is simply make Excel a tool for non-Excels. It’s a huge change in the way people work. Being able to have Excel identify key trends in sales data and report them in natural language – which could be sent up the chain of command to an executive, for example – would be a huge time saver for many people, and would allow you to look smarter too. Ask Copilot to actually create that email in seconds… well, you should get the idea. We’ve already covered how Excel Formulator and ExcelFormulaBot can use natural language to turn your ideas into Excel formulas via AI, but that could go far beyond what these tools offer.
As a writer, however, Copilot seems less helpful. I asked Edge Copilot’s content creation tool to summarize a press release and write an article with the voice of PCWorld. There is simply no comparison to what I or my colleagues write. Right now I was spending so much time rewriting the copy that it would almost save time starting from scratch. But to an accountant who lacks writing skills? Copilot in Word could be the tool that helps him reach customers he wouldn’t otherwise connect with.
Microsoft
The usefulness of Copilot then might lie in the fact that it allows workers who are not as proficient in Excel, for example, to up their game at a more fundamental skill level, And know enough about what you’re working on through Microsoft 365 Apps to help with tracking steps across apps. It is deeply useful here.
Of course, there is a more serious concern. What Microsoft is promising — and, okay, what the workforce will have to test collectively — is whether the company’s AI can actually understand what data is relative, And Accurately gather, contextualize and analyze this data in a consistent format. This is going to be a big deal for a huge number of highly paid people.
Microsoft’s Spataro claimed that sometimes Copilot can be “helpfully wrong”, giving you an idea that isn’t perfect but could trigger something more useful. Of course, that sounds good. But that won’t be enough for someone who literally bets on the accuracy of their data.
Copilot’s Business Chat seems a bit more uncertain
Business Chat seems a little less defined. In concept, it’s similar to what Slack is doing with its own AI chatbot: a conversational tool you can interact with in the privacy of a Teams channel. Ask the Copilot bot what you need to prepare for your next meeting, and hopefully it will summarize your previous customer interactions, correlate related news, summarize relevant emails, and more. You will also be able to address Copilot in Outlook, the same way you would add a colleague.
Microsoft
Microsoft has listed a few example prompts, including What is the next step for (project). Have any risks been identified? Help me list some potential mitigation measures. This all sounds very promising, but I still doubt that Microsoft will be able to gather and correlate all of this data, in any meaningful way, in the near future. Still, putting these documents together might at least get you started on the right foot.
Incidentally, Copilot also looks a lot like the tool that can get people to dictate again. Remember how everyone felt uncomfortable talking to their PC? But for those who work from home, in a private office, interact with their computer via natural language… It certainly seems like the easiest way to direct Copilot may be by voice, rather than typing “enlarge text and color it purple” or something like that.
The future has arrived in a hurry
It is certainly important to realize that we are in the “the future is here!!!1” mode of AI tools. As Microsoft 365 Copilot rolls out into the workforce, employees, managers, and society as a whole will begin to consider what Copilot can and cannot do, and whether or not it will change our daily working life. It is certainly possible that it will not turn out to be so useful, initially. (Microsoft’s metaverse ambitions weren’t that far off, after all.)
Yet Microsoft today painted a deep and ambitious AI-enhanced future. The co-pilot might just be the start.