Microsoft 365 CoPilot basically puts AI capabilities into various desktop applications. The way Office is managed is the same as before, but Co-Pilot is created in the toolbar at the top of the app and can be managed in the sidebar. You use Microsoft 365 CoPilot the same way you would ask the colleague next to you to “tell me how”. The difference is that Co-Pilot actually tells you.
It is not a talking bot like Bing Chat, but it can be said to be a true next-gen AI chatbot in terms of an assistant that works by taking commands.
“CoPilot lets you do what you’re good at, better, and quickly master what you haven’t yet learned,” said Jerodo Spataro, vice president of Modern Work and Business Applications at Microsoft, in a blog post. by Microsoft on Thursday. The average person only uses commands such as “animate slides” and “insert table”, but there are thousands of commands in Microsoft 365. Natural language allows you to take advantage of all these rich features. This is just the beginning,” he said.
Microsoft 365 CoPilot will be integrated with all Microsoft Office applications over the next few months, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, Viva and Power Platform. Currently, 20 customers are testing Co-Pilot, including eight Fortune 500 companies. Access requires a Microsoft 365 subscription.
Features of Microsoft 365 CoPilot
Let us first summarize the current situation. It’s always a surprise that Bing Chat first appeared in February and, after a series of “one-time” steps, is now available as a business tool to help employees and managers of large companies. But Co-Pilot is not a tool designed to tell stories or tell jokes. The power of Co-Pilot is that it brings out the deep capabilities of Microsoft applications (sometimes behind the scenes) and allows you to escape the daily grind of business. Although there is no official confirmation, Co-Pilot is believed to use OpenAI’s GPT-4 technology.
Microsoft 365 Co-Pilot is designed to help users in different ways in different apps, but generally sees it as being able to input natural language prompts through the Co-Pilot button. Here is an example of a prompt that can be used in CoPilot presented by Microsoft.
- For example in Word: “[문서]And [스프레드시트]”Create a preliminary two-page project proposal based on data from Change the tone of the document to make it more comfortable.
- From Excel: “View sales details by type and channel. Insert ticket.
- From PowerPoint: “Create a 5-slide presentation based on a Word document with associated stock photos.”
- From Outlook: “Write a reply saying thank you and ask for more information on points 2 and 3. Shorten the length of the draft and change it to a more professional style.
- From Teams: “Summarize what I missed in the meeting. What are the main points raised so far? How do we disagree on this topic?”
Take Excel as an example. In fact, Excel is inherently difficult, and to the person, it feels like a hard wall to pass. It’s a tool specific to a particular type of mindset, which likes to play with numbers, apply rules and logic, and turn them into useful information through charts and graphs.
Co-Pilot can connect people remote from Excel with Excel. It’s a huge change in the way we work. If you can identify key trends in your sales data, have Excel report them in natural language, and report them to management, you’ll save a lot of time and look more competent. You can even have CoPilot compose an email in seconds. We’ve already covered how Excel Formulator and ExcelFormulaBot use AI to turn ideas into Excel formulas using natural language, but CoPilot’s capabilities go far beyond these tools.
However, the function of co-pilot as a writer is somewhat inferior. I asked Edge CoPilot’s content creation tool to write an article summarizing the press release in PCWorld style. It was incomparable to what I and my colleagues wrote. There is no difference between the time it takes to proofread a piece written by a copilot or the time it takes to write it yourself from scratch. But if you’re an accountant with limited writing skills, Ward’s Co-Pilot could be a tool to help you acquire new clients.
The usefulness of Co-Pilot is that, for example, it allows workers who are not proficient in Excel to increase their level of basic professional competence, and it understands what users are doing in Microsoft 365 applications, so that tracking steps are seamless across different apps. He will be on the side to help you do that.
Of course, there are serious concerns. It’s about whether Microsoft’s AI truly understands what data is relevant and can accurately collect, contextualize, and analyze that data in a consistent format. Of course, Microsoft promises it, but collective testing is necessary. This will be a major problem for many high-level personnel.
Microsoft’s Spataro says Co-Pilot can sometimes “mistake in beneficial ways” and that while it’s not perfect, it can trigger something more useful. Right word. But that doesn’t work for those who rely on data accuracy above all else.
Business chat is no longer lacking
Business Chat does not seem to be clearly defined yet. The concept is similar to what Slack is doing with its own AI chatbot, a conversational tool that lets you interact privately in Teams channels. For example, if you ask the CoPilot bot what to prepare for your next meeting, it can summarize previous customer interactions, link relevant news, summarize related emails, and more. You can also assign co-pilots in Outlook in the same way as adding colleagues.
An example of a prompt from Microsoft is “What’s next for the project?” Are there identified risks? Help me make a list of possible solutions” and so on. This all sounds promising, but it’s still doubtful that Microsoft will be able to collect and correlate all of this data in a meaningful way in the near future. Either way, simply gathering materials like this can get you started.
By the way, Co-Pilot can be a tool that encourages people to practice verbal instructions. Remember when everyone was uncomfortable talking to the PC? But for people who work from home and in private offices, speaking in natural language is the easiest way to instruct Co-Pilot rather than typing, say, “Enlarge text and turn it purple” on a keyboard.
the future is fast approaching
It is certainly important to recognize that AI tools represent the future. As Microsoft 365 CoPilot rolls out into the enterprise workforce, workers, managers, and society as a whole will begin to think about what CoPilot can and cannot do, and whether it will make a difference in their daily working life. Of course, there’s a good chance it won’t be as useful as you initially expected. (It’s now bankrupt, but not too long ago Microsoft had big ambitions in the metaverse.)
After all, Microsoft is painting a picture of a deep, ambitious, AI-enhanced future today. The co-pilots may just be the start.
editor@itworld.co.kr
