On 16 March, Microsoft announced the addition of an AI assistant called ‘Copilot’ to its Microsoft 365 suite of applications, including Office.

In a demonstration last Thursday, the company showed how the new technology – powered by OpenAI language models in combination with data from Microsoft Graph – will be embedded into its most popular products, including Word, Excel, Outlook, Teams, and PowerPoint.

Microsoft envisages that this tool will be effective in improving productivity, creativity, and collaboration. Sitting in the toolbar within the Office applications, Copilot will act as an AI assistant, generating text or graphs, or summarising and analysing in response to commands and prompts. It is also designed to learn new skills; the more it is used, the more its ability to perform complex tasks and processes specific to your organisation’s context will increase.

In the announcement on their blog, Microsoft seemed keen to emphasise that Copilot would act as a “jump-start” on the creative process, giving you “a first draft to edit and iterate on,” rather than the finished article. It also stated that “sometimes Copilot will be right, other times usefully wrong” to remind potential users of the pitfalls of solely relying on AI-produced content. Rather than acting as a replacement or substitute for our work, Copilot is intended to reduce the time workers spend on “busywork that bogs us down” (perhaps to alleviate some peoples’ concerns regarding the ethics of AI use).

Following the wide-spread use and popularity of OpenAI’s generative AI models and their latest launch of GTP-4 (which will power Copilot), this announcement by Microsoft cements them with a leading position in the market and the race to commercialise this swiftly emerging technology. Microsoft has offered Copilot as part of GitHub (which it acquired in 2018) since summer 2021, as an AI assistant for programmers.

Google has announced the launch of AI enhancements to its Google Workspace suite – we’ll post more details on these soon.

Copilot for Microsoft 356 is currently being trialled by some organisations and will roll out to more customers in the months ahead, although the exact timescale is as yet unclear. So far, the focus has been on the tool’s usefulness rather than the details: for example, licensing/pricing of the product is yet to be announced. We will keep you updated when Microsoft provides further information.