Humans are innately driven to dream, create, and innovate, seeking work that provides purpose and fulfilment, whether it involves writing, discovery, community-building, or caregiving. Unfortunately, the modern workplace often becomes a source of monotony, depleting our time, creativity, and vitality. To rekindle the true essence of our work, a mere improvement won’t suffice; a complete paradigm shift is essential.
Microsoft 365 Copilot enters the scene, harnessing the potential of advanced AI. This personalised work companion combines the power of large language models (LLMs) with your data from Microsoft Graph and Microsoft 365 apps, transforming your words into an unparalleled tool for boosting productivity and efficiency.
Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s Chairman and CEO, hails this as a momentous milestone in human-computer interaction, revolutionising how we approach work and ushering in a new era of heightened productivity. Through our copilot for work, we empower individuals, providing them with greater autonomy and easy access to technology through the most intuitive interface—natural language.
Copilot seamlessly integrates into Microsoft 365 in two distinct ways. Firstly, it becomes your invaluable companion within the familiar Microsoft 365 apps you use daily, such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams, empowering you to unleash creativity, enhance productivity, and elevate your skill set. Additionally, introducing Business Chat, a novel experience leveraging the large language model (LLM), Microsoft 365 apps, and your data—calendar, emails, chats, documents, meetings, and contacts—enables you to accomplish previously unattainable tasks. With Copilot, you retain complete control, determining what to keep, modify, or discard, fostering newfound empowerment in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams, allowing you to be more creative, analytical, expressive, productive, and collaborative.
Microsoft 365 Copilot revolutionises work in three transformative ways:
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Unleash Creativity
Copilot becomes your creative partner in Word, eliminating the blank page syndrome. It offers you a first draft to build upon, saving valuable time spent on writing, sourcing, and editing. While Copilot’s suggestions may occasionally be spot-on, it also embraces constructive mistakes, always propelling you forward. As the author, you retain complete control, guiding Copilot to refine, rewrite, or provide feedback. In PowerPoint, Copilot simplifies presentation creation by incorporating relevant content from your previous documents, whether they were crafted weeks or years ago. You can swiftly analyse trends and generate professional-looking data visualisations in Excel in seconds.
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Unlock Productivity
Copilot is the ultimate productivity booster, streamlining our focus on the critical 20% of work while efficiently handling the overwhelming 80% of mundane tasks. In Outlook, Copilot excels at summarising lengthy email threads and suggesting quick replies, enabling users to clear their inboxes swiftly. In Teams, every meeting turns into a productive session, with Copilot adeptly summarising discussions, identifying points of alignment and disagreement, and proposing actionable items in real-time during the meeting. Furthermore, Copilot extends its prowess to Power Platform, empowering anyone to automate repetitive tasks, create chatbots, and develop functional applications in minutes.
GitHub data reveals Copilot’s significant impact on productivity, as 88% of developers who use it report increased productivity, 74% can focus on more satisfying work, and 77% reduce time spent searching for information or examples. Not limited to individual performance, Copilot establishes a revolutionary knowledge model for organisations by tapping into vast, untapped reservoirs of data and insights. Through Business Chat, Copilot works seamlessly across all business data and applications, delivering the precise information and insights needed, fostering knowledge-sharing across the organisation, and saving valuable time spent on information hunting. Accessible through Microsoft 365.com, Bing with a work account, or Teams, Copilot brings forth a new era of productivity and collaboration.
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Uplevel Skills
Copilot enhances your strengths and accelerates your mastery of new skills. Typically, people use only a few specific commands among the vast array available in Microsoft 365, such as “animate a slide” or “insert a table.” With Copilot, you can unlock the full richness of functionalities using simple natural language prompts. And this is just the start.
Copilot represents a transformative shift in how people collaborate with AI and how AI collaborates with them. Embracing this novel approach might involve a learning curve, but those who adopt it will swiftly gain a competitive advantage in their work.
The Copilot System: AI for Enterprises
Microsoft brings a distinct advantage in delivering enterprise-ready AI through the Copilot System. Unlike OpenAI’s ChatGPT, merely integrated into Microsoft 365, Copilot is a sophisticated processing and orchestration engine that operates behind the scenes. It seamlessly combines the capabilities of LLMs, including the advanced GPT-4, with Microsoft 365 apps and your business data from the Microsoft Graph. Accessible to everyone through natural language, Copilot opens up a world of possibilities.
Grounded in your business data, Microsoft 365 Copilot leverages AI-powered LLMs, connecting them securely to your business data in the Microsoft Graph. By accessing real-time content and context, Copilot delivers accurate, relevant, contextual responses anchored in your documents, emails, calendar, chats, meetings, and more.
Built on Microsoft’s robust security, compliance, and privacy approach, Copilot automatically inherits your company’s valuable policies and processes, ensuring a trustworthy AI solution. With a focus on safeguarding tenant, group, and individual data, Copilot uses a time-tested permissions model to prevent data leakage.
Integrated seamlessly into Microsoft 365’s popular productivity apps, Copilot becomes an intuitive and consistent user experience across Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, and more, with a shared design language for prompts, refinements, and commands.
Designed for continuous improvement, Copilot’s foundational skills enable it to create, summarise, analyse, collaborate, and automate using your specific business content and context. Moreover, it can command and work across apps, even learning new skills. Copilot will perform increasingly sophisticated tasks and queries as it expands its knowledge in various domains, making it a true game-changer for productivity.
Committed to Responsible AI
Microsoft prioritises responsible AI principles and our Responsible AI Standard, backed by decades of AI research, grounding, and privacy-preserving machine learning. Our diverse team of researchers, engineers, and policy experts rigorously reviews AI systems for potential harms and takes measures to address them. This includes refining training data, filtering to limit harmful content, and applying technologies like InterpretML and Fairlearn to detect and correct data bias. We are transparent in how Copilot makes decisions, noting limitations, providing source links, encouraging user review, fact-checking, and content adjustment based on subject-matter expertise.
Boldly Learning and Growing
In the coming months, we will integrate Copilot into all our productivity apps, spanning Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, Viva, Power Platform, and more. Additional details on pricing and licensing will be shared soon. Dynamics 365 Copilot, the world’s first AI Copilot in CRM and ERP, will also revolutionise every line of business.
Aiding Purposeful Work
Our commitment to meeting customers’ unmet needs drives us to move swiftly and responsibly with Copilot’s development, learning and improvement as we progress. For more insights on how AI will shape a brighter future of work for all, contact us and explore Qamba’s expert perspectives.
