Microsoft 365 Copilot has been described by the company as “your copilot for work”. It combines large language models (LLMs) with user data in the Microsoft Graph and the Microsoft 365 apps to “turn your words into the most powerful productivity tool on the planet”.
ChatGPT was publicly released in December by OpenAI. In recent months, it has caught international attention with its ability to provide responses to complicated or abstract questions.
The functions of Copilot include: summarising the key discussion points of a conversation held on meeting software and providing recaps for someone who joins late or misses the whole event, creating PowerPoint presentations from prompts, drafting emails, analysing long email threads and documents, and creating summaries and graphs of data on Excel spreadsheets.
Microsoft has also said the Copilot system can “deliver enterprise-ready AI”, adding this is “more than OpenAI’s ChatGPT embedded into Microsoft 365”. The processing and orchestration engine can work behind the scenes to combine the power of LLMs, including GPT-4, with the Microsoft 365 apps and business data in the Microsoft Graph.
Satya Nadella, chairman and CEO, Microsoft, explained, “Today marks the next major step in the evolution of how we interact with computing, which will fundamentally change the way we work and unlock a new wave of productivity growth.
“With our new copilot for work, we’re giving people more agency and making technology more accessible through the most universal interface — natural language.”
Jared Spataro, corporate vice president, modern work and business applications, Microsoft, added, “Copilot is integrated into Microsoft 365 in two ways. It works alongside you, embedded in the Microsoft 365 apps you use every day — Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams and more — to unleash creativity, unlock productivity and uplevel skills.
“We’re also announcing an entirely new experience: Business Chat. Business Chat works across the LLM, the Microsoft 365 apps, and your data — your calendar, emails, chats, documents, meetings and contacts — to do things you’ve never been able to do before. You can give it natural language prompts like “Tell my team how we updated the product strategy,” and it will generate a status update based on the morning’s meetings, emails and chat threads.”