Microsoft Copilot

As soon as Satya mentioned Vannevar Bush - I was hooked. But let me dive right in - I would like to share with you a new way of working that I’ve been experimenting with: Microsoft 365 Copilot. Copilot is a powerful AI tool that works with me in the Microsoft 365 apps I use every day, such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams. It helps me turn my words into actions and enhance my productivity and creativity.

For example, when I need to create a presentation for a client meeting, I just provide Copilot with some bullet points or ideas and it turns them into a professional slide deck with relevant data and visuals. When I need to write an email to follow up on a project status, I just ask Copilot to “tell me how we updated the product strategy” and it generates a concise summary based on my calendar, emails, chats and documents. When I need to analyze some data or create a chart in Excel, I just tell Copilot what I want to do and it does it for me.

Copilot is not only smart but also secure. It respects my privacy and complies with my company’s policies. It only uses the data that I have access to and never stores or shares it without my permission. It also learns from my feedback and preferences to improve over time.

Microsoft 365 Copilot is not just a better way of doing the same things. It’s a new way of working that frees me from the drudgery of work and lets me focus on what matters most. If you’re interested in learning more about Copilot, check out the original blog post or the microsite I referenced earlier.

You can also watch some videos on YouTube that show how Copilot works in different scenarios:

• Introducing Microsoft 365 Copilot | Your Copilot for Work
• Explaining the Microsoft 365 Copilot System
• Microsoft 365 Copilot in Outlook, PowerPoint, Excel and OneNote

Of course, Copilot isn't live yet for most folks. Once it does go live, Microsoft appropriately puts the creator in control of the words, images and data - Copilot is great at generating early drafts of content, and streamlining tasks that might take hours into minutes.

Did I use the new Bing with Chat to generate this article? You bet I did. And just like some interactions with Copilot, the initial draft was a little too breezy. I asked Bing to make it more professional, and to add some links to videos on YouTube. Instead of asking an assistant to help me, this reduced the time greatly - I still had to check for errors (and yes, there were some, including a faulty url and an oddly spaced period) - but what normally takes me an hour was reduced to 10 minutes of editing and tweaking.

That's the heart of how Copilot can be "usefully wrong" - that head start reduces make work in an incredibly useful way. But Copilot is better than Bing with Chat, because it not only has access to a large language model, but also the Microsoft 365 Graph - that gives it an unparalleled ability to look at work product I've already generated to help me make the next presentation, email or press release even more quickly.