Since its launch, Microsoft Copilot has proven to be a worthy competitor to ChatGPT, even occasionally outperforming OpenAI’s offering. However, while ChatGPT continued to make progress, Copilot lagged behind. Until now.
At an event called “Microsoft 365 Copilot: Wave 2” held yesterday, the publisher unveiled a series of improvements to its artificial intelligence (AI) assistant, both for businesses and individuals.
The upgrades are significant, including deeper integration with Microsoft 365 apps and collaborative ways to use AI, whether as a group or as a family.
Copilot Pages
When you sign in to Copilot with your business or organization account, there’s a tab option to switch between work and web. The Work tab is what Microsoft calls BizChat, a workflow in Copilot that can pull responses from work data in Microsoft 365 apps. BizChat is evolving with a new feature called Pages.
Pages allows you to add, edit, and share content generated by Copilot. Copilot Pages is a dynamic canvas that takes the ephemeral content created by Copilot, to make it accessible over time and modifiable at any time by the user, his team or Copilot himself. “, explains Microsoft.
Photo credit: Microsoft Copilot Pages
Pages look like any other editable document and are accessible via a shareable and editable link.
The feature places an emphasis on multiplayer AI, a trend seen in recent offerings from other AI companies, such as You.com’s collaborative AI assistants and Salesforce’s Agentforce, a suite of autonomous and collaborative AI agents.
Pages will be rolling out to Microsoft 365 Copilot customers starting today and will be available to free Microsoft Copilot users signed in with their Microsoft Entra account in the coming weeks.
Copilot in Microsoft 365 apps
Microsoft has taken customer feedback into account to deepen Copilot support across Microsoft 365 apps and improve accessibility.
For starters, Copilot in Excel is now available to all users and supports formulas, data visualization, conditional formatting, and more.
Additionally, Microsoft announced Copilot in Excel with Python in public preview, which allows users to work with Python in Excel using only natural language. This means users can leverage Python in Excel to perform advanced analytics, such as forecasting and risk analysis, without typing any code.
Photo credit: Microsoft
Narrative Builder in PowerPoint lets you create the first draft of a presentation in minutes: just enter a topic and Builder will produce an outline.
Copilot in Teams will be able to synthesize both the content of a meeting and what was sent in the chat to create a summary of the whole. For example, if a user asks Copilot what they missed in the meeting, the response will also include the content of the chat. This feature will be available next month.
Copilot in Outlook is getting a “Prioritize My Inbox” feature that scans the inbox and flags the most important emails while providing a summary of them and why they were prioritized. Microsoft says that “soon” users will even be able to tell Copilot what topics or keywords it should search for to mark as high priority.
These features aren’t available right now, but Microsoft says they’ll be in public preview starting in late 2024.
Copilot in Word will introduce a new feature later this month that will allow users to quickly reference web and business data, including emails, PDFs, PowerPoints, and more.
Copilot in Word is also getting a new feature that allows users to collaborate with Copilot online as they work on sections of their document.
Finally, Copilot in OneDrive helps you quickly find information by analyzing files. It allows you to summarize and compare up to five files, providing a summary, without having to open the files themselves.
Copilot agents
Microsoft introduced Copilot agents, AI assistants that can perform specific tasks with as little or as much human intervention as the user may need. For example, Microsoft says some agents can operate completely autonomously while others are simpler agents. For example, a Copilot agent can automate sending weekly reports, manage appointments in a calendar, or analyze data to provide useful insights. ” explains the publisher.
Users can create Copilot agents in BizChat or Sharepoint. These agents can then be invoked in 365 apps by using the “@” to call them.
Copilot Agents and Agent Builder in BizChat are available today and will roll out to all customers in the coming weeks. Copilot Agents and Agent Builder in SharePoint will enter public preview in early October.
Bonus: LLM confirmation in Copilot
In May, OpenAI unveiled GPT-4o, its most advanced model with GPT-4-level intelligence and multimodal capabilities. It then integrated this model into ChatGPT for both free and paid users to enjoy.
Microsoft confirms that Copilot uses GPT-4o, with responses more than twice as fast on average.
Additionally, Microsoft assured that it will continue to bring the latest models to Copilot, including OpenAI’s new o1, which was introduced last week and has the most advanced reasoning of OpenAI models to date.
