Microsoft has recently unveiled a range of new features that will be added to the Copilot artificial intelligence extension for Microsoft 365 productivity tools. Over the past year, there has been a growing interest among companies in leveraging AI to enhance employee efficiency following the introduction of the widely popular ChatGPT virtual assistant by Microsoft-backed OpenAI. Other tech giants like Adobe, Google, and Salesforce have also introduced similar AI tools in response to this trend.
The pricing of Copilot for Microsoft 365, set at $30 per month, has sparked debates among economists. Despite initial expectations of a lower rate when Microsoft announced the pricing in July, the company has decided to enhance the feature set while maintaining the same cost.
Copilot has been designed to assist users in various tasks such as creating PowerPoint presentations, visualizing data in Word documents, analyzing data in Excel, and providing personalized insights from missed meetings in Outlook. The upcoming Copilot Studio service will enable corporate users to integrate data from platforms like ServiceNow and Workday, further enhancing its capabilities.
Some of the upcoming enhancements for Copilot users include the ability to answer questions about meetings in Teams, take notes during meetings, modify the voice of Teams chat messages, generate visual representations during Teams conferences, assist in meeting planning in Outlook, create AI-generated images in PowerPoint using Microsoft Designer, and incorporate coding and style preferences in Word and PowerPoint.
Microsoft executives, discussing these updates at the Ignite conference in Seattle, highlighted the positive feedback from early Copilot users, including Rajat Taneja, the president of technology at Visa. Taneja praised Copilot for its editing capabilities and its usefulness in various tasks like summarizing presentations and assisting in writing speeches and messages. Visa plans to expand Copilot usage among its employees based on the positive response received from initial users.
In a recent conference call, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella emphasized the indispensable nature of Copilot, stating that customers find it hard to imagine working without this innovative AI tool.
