Built on OpenAI’s generative AI technology and one of the largest datasets comprising trillions of data points, Copilot can write emails, business proposals and meeting minutes

On Thursday, Microsoft announced a natural language-based AI tool called Copilot that will be embedded across its Office suite of applications such as Word, Teams, Excel, Outlook and PowerPoint. The tool is currently being tested and has been rolled out to 20 select enterprise users, the company said.
Copilot combines large language models with Microsoft Graph, a dataset of human workplace activity that includes trillions of data points collected from the suite of Microsoft applications. Microsoft also plans to make the AI capabilities available to its billions of users through a separate application called Business Chat, a chatbot that can provide information from sources like the user’s calendar, email, documents and meetings. Although Microsoft has not yet disclosed specific pricing for Copilot, it plans to charge extra for the tool, which will be bundled with other services that are part of Microsoft 365.
With Copilot, Microsoft hopes to make working easier for users of their apps. For example, in Excel the tool could be used to identify trends or make visualizations. In Outlook, it could help users organize email in their inbox to find what they’re looking for more quickly and compose replies to emails. In Word, Microsoft says that Copilot can brainstorm and generate drafts that a user can then edit or adjust based on tone or length. In PowerPoint, the tool can create slides and automatically add transitions to them. Within Teams, Copilot can create summaries of the meeting for someone who missed a part of the meeting and generate action items based on conversations.
The announcement comes a day after OpenAI rolled out GPT-4, the latest iteration of its viral chatbot ChatGPT. OpenAI, whose technology Microsoft has an exclusive license to use and charge customers for, claims that GPT-4 is safer, more restricted in its responses and can perform more advanced tasks like doing taxes or pass the bar exam.