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by rick richardson
microsoft copilot has been a competitive alternative to chatgpt since its inception, sometimes surpassing openai’s product. but copilot has trailed behind chatgpt’s advancements – until now.
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in a live event called “microsoft 365 copilot: wave 2,” microsoft revealed all the next improvements to its ai assistant, which will benefit both business and individual users.
the enhancements were striking. they included cooperative methods to use ai as a team, group or family and further interaction with microsoft 365 apps.
copilot pages. you should see a tab option to switch from work to web if you log into copilot using your work or organization’s account. what microsoft calls the “work” tab is bizchat, a copilot workflow that retrieves responses from your work data in microsoft 365 apps. a new feature called pages has been added to bizchat in an update.
using pages, you may update and add insights that copilot generated for you based on your business data, then share them with your team so that you can work together. pages are accessible via a shareable, editable link, much like any other document type.
this section highlights multiplayer ai, a trend observed in recent releases from various ai businesses, including salesforce’s agentforce, a suite of collaborative and autonomous ai agents, and you.com’s collaborative ai assistants.
the pages can be accessed by customers of microsoft 365 copilot. in the upcoming weeks, free microsoft copilot users who are logged in with their microsoft entra account will also be able to access them.
copilot in the microsoft 365 apps. one of microsoft copilot’s greatest benefits is its ability to assist users within the microsoft 365 apps, which have grown to be a reliable mainstay of many people’s workflows. microsoft is leveraging user feedback in wave 2 to enhance user accessibility and expand its copilot support within the applications.
to begin with, copilot in excel is widely accessible to all users and offers support for conditional formatting, data visualization, calculations and more.
microsoft also revealed the public preview of copilot in excel with python, which enables users to interact with python in excel only through natural language. this implies that users don’t need to know how to write code to perform sophisticated analysis in excel using python, such as risk and forecasting analysis.
microsoft released narrative builder for powerpoint to all users. with the help of this function, you can quickly create an outline for your presentation by simply typing in a topic.
now, copilot in teams can combine the information shared in the chat window with the contents of a real meeting to summarize the entire meeting. for instance, everything from the chat will be included in the response if a user asks copilot what they missed during the meeting.
copilot in outlook was too important to ignore: the tool that allows you to “prioritize my inbox” now includes an analysis of your inbox and a flag for the most critical emails, along with a synopsis and the rationale for the flag. according to microsoft, users will “soon” direct copilot on what subjects or phrases to prioritize.
microsoft states these capabilities will be accessible to all users in late 2024, although they are not currently available.
microsoft is releasing a new feature that will enable users to reference web and work material quickly, including emails, pdfs, powerpoints and more, because users frequently access external resources when working in microsoft word. another update for copilot in word is the “on-canvas start experience,” which lets users work together in real time while editing different text areas. these two word features are currently accessible to most users.
finally, microsoft introduced copilot in onedrive, enabling users to search for items in their onedrive repository, get summaries and even perform file comparisons. onedrive’s copilot feature began trickling out to users and will soon be available to the public.
copilot agents. microsoft unveiled copilot agents, artificial intelligence (ai) assistants that can complete activities with as little or as much help from a user as needed. microsoft, for instance, reports that while some agents are more basic “prompt-and-response” agents, others can operate independently.
using the new agent builder, powered by copilot studio and enabling users to create agents in sharepoint or bizchat, users may create copilot agents. then, just like any other teammate, these agents can be called upon via the “@” symbol in the 365 applications.
the agent builder in bizchat and copilot agents are accessible now and will be available to all clients in the upcoming weeks. microsoft said the public preview of copilot agents and the agent builder in sharepoint would begin in october.