If you are looking for a way to boost your productivity, creativity, and collaboration, you might want to check out Microsoft 365 Copilot.
Copilot is a new feature that integrates artificial intelligence (AI) into the Microsoft 365 apps you use every day. Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams all stand to benefit from the seemingly limitless power of AI.
Here’s what you need to know.
What is Microsoft 365 Copilot?
Microsoft 365 Copilot is a powerful tool that uses large language models (LLMs) to generate content, suggestions, and insights based on your data in the Microsoft Graph.
The Microsoft Graph is a network of your calendar, emails, chats, documents, meetings, and contacts that connect your work across Microsoft 365.
Copilot leverages this data and the Microsoft 365 apps to help you do more with less effort. It works alongside you in the apps you already use, helping you to enhance creativity, unlock productivity, and level up your skills for getting things done.
How Does Copilot Integrate With Office?
In Word, Copilot can help you write, edit, summarize, and create documents with just a few words or sentences as a prompt. Copilot can also adjust the tone of your writing to suit different audiences and purposes.
Are you more of a spreadsheet fan?
In Excel, Copilot will help you analyze data, create charts, and perform calculations for you with natural language commands. Copilot can also suggest formulas, functions, and data sources to improve your spreadsheets.
PowerPoint aficionados will be able to use Copilot to design beautiful presentations with relevant content from your documents or other online sources.
It can add animations, transitions, and themes to make your slides more engaging. Copilot can even take a Word document and turn it into a PowerPoint, and vice versa.
But what about email? Can Copilot save you from an out of control inbox? In Outlook, it will help you manage your emails, schedule meetings, and send messages with natural language prompts.
Copilot will also summarize long emails, draft replies, and suggest actions based on your messages.
Then there is Teams. I’m not a big Teams user, but for those who are, Copilot will help you collaborate with your colleagues, share files and documents, and chat with natural language prompts.
Copilot will also generate meeting notes, action items, and follow-ups based on conversations you have in Teams.
What About Security and Privacy?
Microsoft 365 Copilot has been designed to respect your security and privacy while providing you with the best possible experience.
Copilot only accesses your data in the Microsoft Graph with your consent and permission. You can control what data Copilot can use, and how it can use it, from the Settings menu.
Copilot follows Microsoft’s responsible AI principles and practices. This means that all work on AI is reviewed for potential harms and mitigations by a team of researchers, engineers, and policy experts.
Microsoft also uses the Azure Content Moderation Stack across its services to monitor and filter harmful content, while technologies like InterpretML and Fairlearn help to detect and correct data bias.
Microsoft has had problems with this in the past, so let’s hope it has learned its lesson here.
Is Copilot Just Clippy 2.0?
Those of us who are old enough to remember Microsoft’s much meme’d Office assistant from the early 2000s, will surely see some parallels with what Microsoft is doing in 2023.
However, Copilot is more advanced, it’s available in more apps, and it will continue to evolve and improve over time.
Will it always be useful? Probably not. In fact, Microsoft has admitted that it won’t always deliver the results that you want. However, it could give you a head start on a project that you no longer need to create from scratch.
How Can I Use Microsoft 365 Copilot?
Microsoft is currently testing Copilot with 20 customers, including eight Fortune 500 companies. In the coming months, they hope to expand these previews to other customers and make Copilot more widely available.
To learn more about Microsoft 365 Copilot, visit: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/copilot.
