An article posted by Tom Warren on The Verge webpage mid-March announces that Microsoft has released a new AI-powered Copilot for its Microsoft 365 apps and services, designed to assist people with generating documents, emails, presentation and much more. The Copilot, powered by GPT-4 from OpenAI, will sit alongside Microsoft 365 apps much like 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.

“It works alongside you, embedded in the apps millions of people use every day: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams and more,” said Microsoft 365 head Jared Spataro. “Copilot is a whole new way of working.”

Microsoft 365 users will be able to summon Copilot to provide information on an upcoming Microsoft 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.

Copilot can also 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 analyze or format Excel data.

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

He noted that Spataro was quick to point out that Copilot won’t always be correct, though. “Sometimes Copilot 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.”

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

According to Warren, “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.”

For much more, see Microsoft announces Copilot: the AI-powered future of Office documents - The Verge.