Microsoft Adds 365 Copilot to Bring AI to Word, Outlook, Excel, and More

Microsoft has just announced a new suite of AI-enhanced tools for various apps like Teams, Word, Excel, and more. 

They are calling the artificial intelligence (AI) toolset Copilot, and for good reason. These tools bring the magic of AI to the company’s business and creativity-focused apps to automate certain tasks. For instance, Copilot can automatically generate a ten-slide PowerPoint presentation based on data collected during a Teams meeting or from an Excel or Word document. 

Just like its ancestor Clippy, Copilot sits alongside all of the various Microsoft 365 apps. It appears as a chatbot on the sidebar. Just summon it to generate text in documents, create PivotTables in Excel, and generate accurate meeting notes, and that's only the beginning. 

Copilot also integrates with an entire office or organization simultaneously, so you can ask it about recent hires, who is on vacation, and just about anything else. It also works with Outlook, so you can spend less time batch-deleting spam emails and issuing rote responses. The AI can handle both, in addition to summarizing longer email threads.

"It works alongside you, embedded in the apps millions of people use every day: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, and more," said Microsoft 365 head Jared Spataro during a video presentation. 

The system is in a closed preview mode right now, though Microsoft says the user base will expand in the coming months. As this is specifically tailored for business users, a fee will likely be involved to get set up with a large group of people, and the company says pricing details are also coming soon. 

Microsoft’s announcement follows this week’s news from Google, in which the search giant unveiled its own set of AI enhancements to Workspace Apps.