Microsoft introduces an AI-powered “co-pilot” for Word, Outlook and more

Only one month after the announcement integration of artificial intelligence with its Bing search engine and the Edge browser, Microsoft introduces Microsoft 365 Copilot, a tool that will work with you across its collection of apps, including Excel, PowerPoint, Word, and more. In a blog post on Thursday, Microsoft said the new AI tool will increase creativity and productivity.

“Copilot gives you a first draft to edit and iterate over – saving you hours of writing, research and editing time. Sometimes Copilot will be right, other times helpfully wrong – but it will make you always moving forward,” Microsoft Executive Vice President Jared Spataro explained how the tool will work in Word.

It can create PowerPoint presentations and Excel data visualization with a prompt, Spataro wrote. Microsoft 365 Copilot will also compose email replies and summarize long threads in Outlook.

The Microsoft 365 co-pilot is currently being tested by 20 partners, although it will be available “more widely in the coming months,” Microsoft said in a separate blog post.

The tech giant also announced Business Chat, which uses AI in your Microsoft apps to aggregate information and return it in response to a written prompt.

When it unveiled the new Bing in February, Microsoft promised to integrate AI into more of its products. The company is among a number of companies working to bring new AI capabilities to its services. Google earlier this week said it was add AI tools to their Workspace applications, including generative writing features in Gmail and Docs. Facebook parent Meta is experimenting with AI-powered chat on WhatsApp and Messenger, and Grammar launches artificial intelligence functionality to create emails, social media posts and more.

The ability to use AI to summarize or synthesize in commonly used applications could have significant impacts on workflow, Forrester analyst Rowan Curran said in an email to CNET.

“Having the ability to generate a summary of a white paper in a blog post and the ability to do so in your main productivity application reduces the friction of integrating these tools into workflows. , because the user doesn’t need access to another tool to use them,” he wrote.

On Tuesday, Microsoft confirmed that Bing uses OpenAI’s GPT-4 technology.

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