Introducing Copilot: Creating AI-Powered Assistants for Microsoft 365 for Small and Large Enterprises (Part 1 of the Copilot Press Release)
Microsoft is promising that its Office apps will change way documents are created and edited. The Copilot, powered by GPT-4 from OpenAI, will sit alongside Microsoft 365 apps much like an assistant, appearing in a sidebar as a chatbot. It will also be available to summon inline, allowing users to generate text in documents, create PowerPoint presentations based on Word documents, or even help use features like PivotTables in Excel.
Microsoft is unlocking the doors for all businesses to get access to its AI-powered Office features. Microsoft’s Copilot for Microsoft 365 launched in November with enterprise customers having to commit to at least 300 users and pick up the phone to get on the list. That was an additional $9,000 cost minimum for businesses, but now Microsoft’s AI-powered assistant is generally available for all businesses large and small with no minimum amount of users.
Most of the features that have been available to businesses for the past couple of months will be available to consumers, with the big exception of being able to summon Copilot to generate a PowerPoint deck based on a Word document. The consumer version is powered by a different technology than Microsoft Graph, and this isn’t currently available.
If you want to summarize a meeting that you didn’t attend or one that you arrived late, Copilot is available in Teams. Email threads in Outlook can also be summarized, and Copilot can create draft email responses with a variety of tones or lengths.