Microsoft has unveiled Copilot, a new AI-powered tool designed to make it easier for you to do your job. This ChatGPT powered system will upgrade the existing suite of Microsoft 365 applications.
Can’t make it to your next Teams meeting? An AI can take your place. It won’t make suggestions on your behalf, but it will take notes and can give you a summary of what was discussed later.
Or, if you need help creating a report, Copilot can help draft the piece and convert data from other files for use in the report. It even helps to make everything look nice, with graphics and pops of color.
Copilot also sounds like it has the potential to revolutionize more than just business processes. It can also help us at home.
The most obvious are school projects. While we don’t recommend letting an AI do all the work for you, there are ways it can help you without cheating. It can provide clues that help inspire your essays – although you still need to write. You might have some ideas about where to start and how to expand your work.
If you’ve created a Powerpoint presentation, you can ask Copilot to spice it up with images and animations. The content is yours, but the AI tool has given it a fresh coat of paint.
Another great personal use case is party planning, and this was showcased during Microsoft’s presentation. Copilot can help you create invitations based on the directions you provide, including party details and even the tone of the invitation. You can then quickly edit and send to your guests.
You can then use Word and more prompts to help you prepare an eye-catching speech, or rely on AI-powered Excel to make sure you don’t blow your entire budget on a huge cake before you factor in decorations and party favors.
We’re flying alone for a while
Unfortunately, it sounds like we won’t be getting a consumer-facing version of copilot for a while. During the presentation, Microsft’s Chief Scientist, Jaime Teevan, explained that the Copilot rollout “starts with a small number of customers.” Pricing and licensing details aren’t yet public, but it sounds like only a handful of companies will be able to access Copilot at launch, so it’s unlikely regular people will be able to take advantage of the new AI.s.
That said, we expect Copilot to reach more Microsoft systems in the not-too-distant future. These AI capabilities could give Microsoft’s 365 applications a huge boost over rivals like Google Workspace apps (Drive, Docs, Gmail, etc.) and Apple’s roster of apps (Pages, Mail, Keynote, etc.) . Microsoft will probably want to make them widely available to convince people to use its services at home and at work.
When Copilot or a similar service is rolled out to a wider audience, we’ll be sure to keep you posted. Until then, check out this way to skip the Bing Chat queue, or try these great ChatGPT alternatives that let you use AI tools in different ways.