Netizens have expressed their excitement about Microsoft 365 Copilot, a new AI assistant that combines the power of large language models with business data and Microsoft 365 apps, saying that it would be a game changer for their work lives.
Microsoft announced last week that it’s testing Copilot with select commercial users across 20 companies and it would bring the feature to all its productivity apps, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook, in coming months.
Customers are expected to work with Copilot in two ways, whether directly through their productivity apps or through the newly introduced Business Chat. While people could use Copilot embedded in Word to draft or generate documents, they could also order it to do various things, from composing emails to summarise conversations, through natural language prompts with Business Chat.
“Copilot will be the new starting screen for any knowledge work,” said Pete Huang, writer of the AI newsletter The Neuron.
Microsoft claimed that Copilot brought a whole new way to work while still giving control to the users. Copilot, it said, would allow customers to be “more creative in Word, more analytical in Excel, more expressive in PowerPoint, more productive in Outlook and more collaborative in Teams”.
Mason M. Darabi, the venture partner at Candou Ventures, said: “This will be a game changer for everything we do in life.”
Microsoft announcement came just days after Google said it’s introducing generative AI features for its Workspace apps, including Gmail and Google Docs. Google would test the new features with a limited set of testers in coming weeks, promising that it would make “the process of writing even easier” in those apps.
Steven Tey, a senior developer advocate at Vercel, the platform for frontend developers, said people were witnessing “an AI Space Race” between tech titans.
“Yesterday, Google announced generative AI features across Google Workspace (Docs, Sheets, Slides). Today, Microsoft responded with Copilot for Microsoft 365 (Word, Excel, Powerpoint),” said Tey. “[It’s about] time Google had some competition.”