Microsoft has announced a second wave of Copilot features for Microsoft 365, which include the release of Copilot Pages, Copilot in Microsoft 365 apps, and Copilot agents.
The latest additions to Copilot, Microsoft’s AI-powered automation tool for work, combine web, work, and Pages into a new support for knowledge work.
The US-based tech giant asserts that it has created the “world’s best AI feedback loop” with Copilot.
Microsoft explains in a press release how these changes were inspired by customer feedback: “We’re excited to share these updates with our customers around the world. From enterprises to small businesses, they help Copilot get better every day.
“Nearly 1,000 customers have given us feedback on how they’re using Copilot, where it is having the biggest impact, and where it needs to be better.
“Based on that feedback, we have made more than 700 product updates and shipped over 150 new features this year.
The results are in: “Now with GPT-4o and enhanced orchestration, we’ve dramatically improved performance.
“Copilot responses are more than two times faster on average, and response satisfaction has improved by nearly three times.
Copilot Pages
Copilot Pages is a dynamic and persistent canvas for multiplayer AI collaboration, which Microsoft calls the ‘first new digital artifact for the AI age’.
Pages allows users to edit, add, and share AI-generated content with others.
This means that teams can work on the same a page in real-time, using Copilot like another team member to add content from data, files, and the web.
Pages began rolling out to Microsoft 365 Copilot customers from September 17th and it will become generally available later this month.
Microsoft revealed that it will make Copilot Pages available to over 400 million people who have signed up with a Microsoft Entra account to access a free version of Copilot.
Copilot in Microsoft 365 Apps
Copilot in Excel is now generally available, with new skills to enable users to power up their experience within the app, such as support for formulas, conditional formatting, and creating charts, PivotTables, and other visualisations to suit your needs. It can also now assist with text data, as well as numerical.
Microsoft has also launched Copilot in Excel with Python in public preview, which brings the powerful programming language into Excel to help with forecasting, risk analysis, machine learning, and complex data.
Copilot in PowerPoint has a narrative builder, now generally available, to help build first drafts of presentations in minutes. It also has a brand manager to ensure presentations are ‘on-brand’.
Copilot in Teams can assist with the meeting transcript and the meeting chat, allowing users to ask questions relating to either for rapid assessment of the content. For example, you could ask ‘Did I miss any questions in the meeting today?’, and Copilot will scan and surface any questions it finds. This feature will be made available this month.
Copilot in Outlook applies generative AI to your inbox, such as producing email highlights and summaries to save you time reading through lengthy messages. It is also gaining the ability for users to teach it specific words, topics, or people that are particularly relevant to you, thereby helping it to determine which emails to prioritise.
Copilot in Word will be updated later this month to allow users to quickly reference web data and work data like Word, PowerPoint, PDFs, encrypted documents, plus email and meeting data. The upgrade will also include suggest prompts and collaborative capabilities with Copilot inline.
Copilot in OneDrive can reason over your files to draw out the relevant information to you in the form of insights, summaries, and files comparisons. The latest version of Copilot in OneDrive has already started rolling out and it will become generally available at the end of the month.
Copilot Agents
Now generally available, Copilot Agents are AI assistants that can automate business processes, acting either as prompt-and-response agents, agents that replace repetitive tasks, or fully autonomous agents.
The agents work in the background, managed by Copilot, and are simple and secure to use.
Microsoft assures that they adhere to its Responsible AI practices and your data will never leave Microsoft 365.
Earlier this month, AI Today’s Rebekah Carter explored the partnership between Microsoft and OpenAI.
