IA: Microsoft 365 Copilot, the most powerful productivity tool on the planet?

Microsoft has unveiled its brand new AI-inflated productivity assistant, Copilot, which integrates with all Galaxy 365 applications. Clubic gives you a complete presentation.

By integrating GPT-4 into Bing for everyone and free of charge, Microsoft gave the impression of having a head start on the competition, but that was without counting on the presentation of its latest innovation. On Thursday, March 16, the company unveiled “Microsoft 365 Copilot”, presented, as its name suggests, as ” your co-pilot for work “, an AI-enhanced assistant who, in his presentation, impresses. Microsoft goes even further and compares this new artificial intelligence to ” the world’s most powerful productivity tool “, just that. So we’ll see what he has in store for us.

The Copilot tool, which draws on the power of the largest language models (including GPT-4) and Microsoft Graph (for the content that accompanies the requests), integrates with Microsoft 365 by following you in the tools that you sometimes use daily. Let’s mention Word, Outlook, Teams, Excel, or even PowerPoint.

You will (again) love PowerPoint

It is undoubtedly on this application that Copilot is the most visually impressive. Imagine: with a simple small command summarized in one, two or three sentences, the AI ​​generates a complete presentation based on a previous content or document that you can submit to it. And the possibilities are immense: you can also ask your Copilot to add transitions, slides, modify them, embed another image in place of the one initially chosen. In short, the word “assistant” takes on its full meaning here.

Copilot summarizes, writes and edits in Word, at your request

If you’re suddenly hit with the insufferable blank page syndrome, fine. You can request Microsoft’s Copilot tool, which will open a small window on your page “Create content with Copilot” which invites you to formulate your request. You can add a document to it, to better guide the AI ​​which will take care of writing a text, a summary, a poem in order to save you long minutes… or hours.

Faster-than-ever data visualization in Excel

Here, you can directly analyze trends and create some pretty stunning data visualizations, all within seconds.

Order a draft email on Outlook and adjust it according to your moods

Have you ever really taken the time to properly clean and empty your Outlook inbox and your thousands, even your tens of thousands of e-mails? Hmm, very good. Ask Copilot to take care of it. The process, which might have taken several hours before, here would only take a few minutes. And if you want to create a draft response, that’s also within the scope of Copilot. The draft can then be modified as you wish: shorter, longer, more professional, friendlier or more neutral.

Get meeting summaries on Teams

The productivity tool also finds its place in Microsoft’s videoconferencing software. Summarizing (and noting) what has just been said is part of his skills. But we can go further, for example by pushing him to identify the moments when the participants agreed and those when they did not. And all this in real time, during the meeting.

You can let your Copilot do it, but YOU will decide

Like all artificial intelligences, Copilot can be wrong and make mistakes. Microsoft insists on this and aligns itself with what OpenAI says for GPT-4. When it comes to what tasks you can ask the AI ​​to do, you have the final say.

Once Copilot has delivered the expected text, presentation or data to you, you can totally decide to throw everything in the trash, keep everything, and you are free to modify it or even ask the assistant to make you a new offer.

The modification is quite life-saving. From what Microsoft shows us, you can take advantage of the incredible work of Copilot to personalize a PowerPoint presentation to the extreme, as we explained above, and thus loop content that would be closest to what you could imagine.

Business Chat, is it new and what is it?

In addition to Copilot, Microsoft has also unveiled a new application more intended for professional use, called Business Chat. This takes the form of a conversational robot that relies on Microsoft Graph to gather the data, appointments, presentations, e-mails, documents, contacts or notes that you may request from it.

From a wealth of data and multiple sources, Business Chat can surface the ideas or information you may need, again saving considerable time, especially if you need to prepare for a meeting or a meeting. The tool is accessible from the Microsoft 365 online platform, Bing, your professional account, and of course by connecting to Teams.

How does Microsoft 365 Copilot technology work?

The Microsoft 365 Copilot engine leverages three technologies: Microsoft 365 apps, Microsoft Graph (which aggregates your content like emails, meetings, calendar, etc.) and large language models (LLM). Your request, sent from a 365 application, is first processed by Microsoft Graph, which collects a relevant and usable response based on your content.

The command, modified and improved, is then sent to the LLM which delivers its response, in a third stage post-processed by Microsoft Graph. This is when content security and compliance come into play to limit abuses, even if not everything can be avoided. Then the user receives the final answer.

” The average person only uses a handful of commands, such as “animate a slide” or “insert a table”, out of the thousands available in Microsoft 365. Now all of these rich features are unlocked using only natural language. And that’s just the beginning “, explains the company.

Copilot is already capable of creating, analyzing, collaborating, summarizing and automating from content and context. But one of his other strengths is his ability to work across multiple applications, such as when translating a Word document and a PowerPoint presentation. And that’s just the beginning, promises Microsoft, which obviously touts the scalable capabilities of an assistant who will learn new skills fairly quickly.

The AI ​​tool should be available in the coming months on all Microsoft 365 productivity applications, which are now used by more than 400 million subscribers.