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Microsoft is to roll out Microsoft 365 Copilot to its first 600 customers, as workers around the world struggle with workloads and meetings.
The company announced an Early Access Program for Copilot yesterday, on the same day as it published its latest Work Trend Index.
Copilot, which uses the same underlying technology behind ChatGPT, has been tested with 20 enterprise customers since March, including Goodyear, General Motors, The Walsh Group and Avanade.
“They point to how it is a game changer for meetings and can jump-start creativity,” said Colette Stallbaumer, general manager of Microsoft 365 and the Future of Work in a Microsoft blog post.
Copilot in Teams has proved useful by offering the ability to ask questions during a meeting and issue action item lists and meeting summaries. But early testers have also identified areas in which Microsoft can do more to help people work in a new way, such as facilitating conversational, multi-turn interactions.
According to research which appears in Microsoft’s Work Trend Index, 70% of people say they would delegate as much work as they can to AI to lessen their workloads. And more than 60% say they struggle with having enough time and energy to do their job, as the number of meetings Microsoft Teams users attend has trebled in three years.
This year’s Work Trend Index report asks whether AI will fix work. It says we are all carrying digital debt – an inflow of data, emails, meetings and notifications that has outpaced humans’ ability to process it all. It shares what is said to be an unexpected insight: workers are more eager for AI to lift the weight of work than they are afraid of losing their jobs to AI. And it says every employee needs a new aptitude for working with AI.
Also announced yesterday were new capabilities for Copilot. Prominent among them is the ability to use Copilot with Microsoft Whiteboard to make Teams meetings more creative and effective. Users can ask Copilot to generate ideas, organise ideas into themes, create original images with Microsoft Designer that bring ideas to life, and summarise whiteboard content, all with natural language prompts. Creations can also be shared with Microsoft Loop components.
PowerPoint will also benefit from the Copilot treatment. Microsoft is integrating OpenAI’s image generator, DALL-E into PowerPoint, so that users can create custom images to go with the presentations. Rewrite with Copilot is another feature that will improve a PowerPoint presentation’s text, turning bullet points into paragraphs or vice versa, make text more concise and creating original titles for slides. The feature will even rephrase original text to ensure it flows well.
New Copilot capabilities in Outlook will also make it easer to communicate with impact. Copilot in Outlook will offer coaching tips and suggestions on clarity and tone to help you compose more effective emails quickly.
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