Microsoft announced its plans to incorporate AI into some of its most well-known productivity tools, such as Outlook, PowerPoint, Excel, and Word. This has the potential to revolutionize the way millions of people complete their daily tasks.
Microsoft announced that its 365 subscribers will soon have access to an artificial intelligence (AI) “Co-pilot” that can assist with tasks such as summarization, creation, comparison, and document editing. These new capabilities are far more robust than its wide-eyed, paperclip-shaped forerunner.
The new capabilities will allow users to quickly convert a Word document into a PowerPoint presentation, transcribe meeting notes during a Skype call, summarize lengthy email threads to quickly draft suggested replies, request the creation of a specific chart in Excel, and more.
Business Chat, a new concept introduced by Microsoft, is essentially an agent that follows the user around as they work to decipher and make sense of their Microsoft 365 data.
The company claims that the agent will be aware of the user’s email and calendar for the day, as well as the user’s documents, presentations, meeting attendees, and Teams chats.
Users can then ask Business Chat to do things like draught an email updating their team on the project’s status after summarizing all of the relevant documents from across platforms.
This announcement from Microsoft comes a month after the company added AI-powered features to Bing and amid a renewed arms race in the tech industry to develop and deploy AI tools that can transform the ways in which people perform their jobs, make purchases, and generate new ideas.
This week, Google, a competitor, announced that it, too, would incorporate AI into its suite of productivity apps like Gmail, Sheets, and Docs.
