Microsoft is planning to add generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to some of its most popular business tools, such as Outlook, PowerPoint, Excel and Word.
The new system called Copilot would “fundamentally change the way we work”, according to Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella.
The technology is built upon an AI software known as a large language model, or LLM, which has been significantly improved over the years to engage with text.
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Copilot will be able to summarise key discussion points for Teams or Skype meetings and provide recaps, create PowerPoint presentations based on prompts, draft and analyse emails, as well summarise and create graphs of data in Excel.
The company highlighted, however, that Copilot is more than simply “OpenAI’s ChatGPT embedded into Microsoft 365”. Its Word feature will give people a “first draft to edit and iterate on — saving hours in writing, sourcing and editing time.”
Additionally, Microsoft is rolling out Business Chat, which will analyse a user’s Microsoft 365 data. It can be tasked to do various things, such as provide report summaries or drafting emails.
“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,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in a statement. “With our new copilot for work, we’re giving people more agency and making technology more accessible through the most universal interface — natural language.”
Despite the excitement that comes along with the news, Microsoft pointed out that “sometimes Copilot will be right, other times usefully wrong”. The company’s ChatGPT-incorporated Bing chat tool, for example, has been recorded giving inaccurate or unnerving responses.
The news come days after OpenAI revealed its latest artificial intelligence (AI) model GPT-4, which is supposed to be far less likely to respond to requests for disallowed content, display bias, or share inaccurate facts.
