Microsoft’s new Copilot tool navigates new era of computing
The biggest news of the week – sorry for the EFF after its failed so-called shutdown – was that Microsoft launched powerful new artificial intelligence (AI) tools in its major apps.
This is powered by OpenAI’s ChatGPT software, in which Microsoft is a significant investor. The next-generation GPT-4 version was also launched this month and is a massive leap for the generative AI software.
Arguably the biggest application of this increasing use of AI is how Microsoft has integrated these tools into its Microsoft 365 apps. It has infused its Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Teams and Outlook apps with a new AI tool called Copilot, which has been available for several years through software repository GitHub.
“We are moving from autopilot to Copilot,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella described it at the launch on 16 March. “We believe this next generation of AI will unlock a new wave of productivity growth, with powerful copilots designed to remove the drudgery from our daily tasks and jobs, freeing us to rediscover the joy of creation.”
The examples he showed, streamed via LinkedIn, were impressive. Meetings held via Teams, which has been offering AI-generated transcripts for years, can be scanned and the main points and action items summarised. Ask Copilot to prepare you for a meeting and it will scan your email, notes and documents related to the meeting, and prepare an agenda with a surprising number of details. You can specify which documents or other sources to work from for creating proposals, budgets, presentations and even personal projects using your photos stored in Microsoft’s OneDrive cloud storage.
Microsoft says it will roll out these features – officially called Microsoft 365 Copilot – in the coming months. Already the excitement from the industry and commentators is palpable. This is noteworthy, given that Microsoft’s early Office Assistant, an animated paperclip called Clippy, was the butt of jokes for a decade. But that was a long time ago and Microsoft is now a muchchanged company that has been dabbling in better and better enhancements to its apps.
The examples and first-person reviews seem to point to that. Think of the “drudgery” of compiling proposals or doing a SWOT analysis, which often requires a lot of research. Imagine asking Copilot to do that for you. I expect to be reading many press releases and proposals for coverage generated that way.
One of the most useful features will be showing people how Copilot did something so that you can learn more features in Office. I can’t see myself doing much of that in Word, which I have been using since Windows 95 and am pretty proficient at. But in Excel, that kind of functionality would be very useful to me – and vice versa for accountants who want similar help with word processing.
As Sumit Chauhan, corporate vice president of the Office product group at Microsoft, pointed out: “The average person uses less than 10% of what PowerPoint can do. Copilot unlocks the other 90%.”
Then there is the problem that ChatGPT has made up things, seemingly when it can’t find what it needs. Microsoft has admitted that AI “hallucinates” such things. Office will warn you that “AI-generated content may be incorrect”, while PowerPoint is more stern: “Content is generated by AI and might contain inaccuracies for sensitive material. Be sure to verify information.”
As Microsoft corporate vice president of modern work and business applications Jared Spataro acknowledged, “Sometimes Copilot will get it right. Other times it will be usefully wrong.”
It does feel like a massive sea change in how we interact with computers.