Introducing Microsoft 365 Copilot

16 March 2023 - Microsoft announces Microsoft 365 Copilot

This is a significant milestone for generational AI and, more importantly, for the world of work. - BBC News

Microsoft 365 Copilot transforms the world of work, on the one hand, Copilot works alongside people by integrating into the Microsoft 365 apps that are used every day - Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams and others - to unleash creativity, increase productivity and improve skills; on the other hand, it has been integrated into a completely new experience: Business Chat. Business Chat works by combining LLM, Microsoft 365 apps and data - from calendar, email, chat, documents, meetings and contacts - to perform tasks that people were previously unable to do. One example: with natural language prompts such as 'explain to my team how we have updated our product strategy', Business Chat will generate a status update based on morning meetings, emails and various chat conversations.

Microsoft is bringing the technology behind the artificial intelligence (AI) language model ChatGPT to more and more products.?

Microsoft has formed an alliance with Open AI, the producer of ChatGPT. Microsoft already unveiled a new version of its Bing search engine with AI functionality in February. In this new version of Bing, as well as now in the new Copilot service, GPT-4, the latest version of Open AI's language model, is used. Copilot is more than just an integration of OpenAI's ChatGPT into Microsoft 365. It is a sophisticated processing engine working behind the scenes to combine the power of LLMs with Microsoft 365 apps and business data in the Microsoft Graph, now accessible to everyone through natural language:

• Based on corporate data
• Built on Microsoft's approach to security, compliance and privacy: Copilot is integrated into Microsoft 365 and automatically inherits all of your company's security, compliance and privacy policies and processes. Two-factor authentication, compliance limits, privacy protections and more make Copilot the Artificial Intelligence solution you can trust
• Designed to protect tenant, group and individual data
• Integrated into the apps that millions of people use every day
• Designed for learning new skills: the core competencies of Microsoft 365 Copilot are a productivity breakthrough: it is already capable of creating, summarising, analysing, collaborating and automating using specific content and business contexts. But it doesn't stop there. Copilot knows how to command apps and work between apps, translating a Word document into a PowerPoint presentation. Copilot is designed to learn new skills. For example, with Viva Sales, Copilot can learn to connect to CRM systems to incorporate customer data, such as interactions and order history, into communications. As Copilot learns new domains and processes, it will be able to perform even more sophisticated tasks and queries.

Next generation of AI will unlock a new wave of productivity growth with powerful co-pilots designed to remove the drudgery from our daily tasks and jobs. - Satya Nadella