If you haven’t noticed it yet, you will soon: Microsoft is integrating its Copilot generative artificial intelligence (AI) tool into every nook and cranny of its ecosystem that it can.
Copilot is already built into Windows 11 and the Microsoft Edge browser, and it’s available as a standalone chatbot app online and on mobile. Microsoft Designer even offers AI image generation. All of this is for free, but all of it is separate from where most people do most of their work – Microsoft’s productivity suite.
That’s why Microsoft’s most significant move yet may be its recent launch of Copilot for Microsoft 365. This infuses the AI assistant across your suite of applications, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, and OneNote. Subscribers to Microsoft 365 Business Standard or Business Premium can sign up at a cost of $30 per user per month.
Whether you’re already a keen adopter of generative AI tools like ChatGPT or still skeptical, it’s a trend worth at least tracking. Copilot could dramatically change forever how you and your team use these standard-issue business productivity tools.
How Copilot Works with Microsoft 365
To start, don’t think of Copilot as a chatbot. Although it has the same underlying model as ChatGPT, and you interact with it by typing in natural language (known as “prompts”), Copilot for Microsoft 365 builds in capabilities more seamlessly.
Consider how it works with Word: Start a new document and a “Draft with Copilot” box will appear. Or on each new line of text, you can click a Copilot icon to have it start writing for you. Up on the ribbon bar next to “Editor”, a “Copilot” button opens a sidebar to work with the current document. Finally, you can also right-click on some portion of text and select Copilot > Rewrite with Copilot in the context menu. That is all quite different from opening a browser tab and copying/pasting text.
This works similarly in each of the core Microsoft 365 apps. (Note that Copilot does not support the locally installed versions of Office 2021/2019/2016 and earlier.) Most importantly, it works its magic with enterprise-level security – without sharing company data in public AI tools – and provides answers and responses in context to your specific business.
Common Use Cases
So, what can you do with Copilot?
- Help write – When asked, Copilot will suggest relevant phrases, correct grammar, and generate entire sentences. In Outlook, Copilot can compose concise and effective emails, suggesting subject lines and body text, and it will remind you to attach files.
- Create or revise documents and presentations – Copilot can help draft contracts, proposals, or marketing materials, either creating something new or making changes to an existing document. The same goes for presentations, too. You can ask it to quickly change the formatting or style, for instance, or suggest visual elements, including generate AI images.
- Analyze data – In Excel, Copilot can aid with formulas, data analysis, and create charts.
- Summarize information – Copilot will review text, whether Word documents or Teams meeting transcripts, and pull out the highlights for you. (Open a PDF in Microsoft Edge to ask questions about it.)
- Boost collaboration – Inside Teams chats and meetings, Copilot assist project planning, brainstorming, or team updates. It helps draft messages, schedule appointments, and stay organized.
- Fulfill quick requests – As a chat companion, Copilot will answer questions, provide context, search for documents and help with organizational tasks.
Again, all of this is in context with your business. You can imagine how quickly much of the necessary but often frustrating busy work that occupies our days – pinging colleagues for information, searching for files, producing polished reports – starts to fall away.
Connecting it all
Another important distinction with Copilot for Microsoft 365 versus the multiple free versions available is that by hooking into all your business data, it can cross-reference multiple sources of information. That means it could write a Word document based on an email, or you can request insights that might draw from several reports.
Similarly, you can connect data from third-party apps using Copilot Studio, so pulling sales figures or analyzing customer feedback becomes much easier.
It achieves this by creating a semantic index of your organizational data, applying security and policies so queries are always within the context of a user’s access controls – only content that a user can access is shown to them.
New skills for a new era
Notably, Copilot for Microsoft 365 is built on GPT-4, not the free public version of ChatGPT (GPT-3.5). That means faster and more accurate responses, longer prompts, greater creativity, the abilities to solve complex problems and understand nuance, and deliver fewer biased responses and hallucinations.
That doesn’t mean it will nail every task on the first go. Like learning any new application, working with Copilot takes a bit of practice. It performs better with more detailed instructions, iterations, and having it work on small tedious tasks. A one-sentence prompt probably won’t create a business-ready document. But you train Copilot by using it, and it gradually improves to match your style and expectations.
In the process, you will also train yourself and your organization in how to most effectively work with AI assistants. Remember, there was a time when some businesspeople didn’t know how to use a PC or create a Word doc. Now that’s a basic skill.
There will come a time, possibly not far in the future, when the status quo will be to use AI assistants to get work done more quickly. To stay competitive, consider experimenting now with how AI can help your productivity and that of your team.