It features the Microsoft logo displayed on a phone screen and the copilot displayed on a screen. , [+]
Microsoft is adding Microsoft 365 Copilot to its Office productivity applications. Who doesn’t remember Mr. Scott in Star Trek 4: Voyager Home sitting in front of a computer trying to talk it through to come up with the transparent aluminum formula. OK, we’re not quite there yet, but momentum is definitely going in that direction. As I mentioned earlier, Microsoft is well on its way to turn its daily users into power users, while also giving them more skills to improve productivity at a more rapid pace.
Generative AI promises to change the way we work at almost every level, saving time but also expanding what we can build on our own. Co-Pilot for Microsoft 365 is embedded directly into 365 apps like Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and Outlook, making generative AI for GPT-4 and Large Language Models (LLMs) intuitive and easy to use. Let’s take a brief look at the infusion of Copilot into Microsoft’s Office suite.
Microsoft 365 Copilot in Excel
For lack of better words, Microsoft Excel with Microsoft CoPilot is exactly what Microsoft Excel should be for the mainstream corporate world. Not every user is the quantitative type who knows the ins and outs of formulas. In fact, for those who have worked in the corporate world for many years, they know that there have always been a handful of gurus (or super users) throughout the company that you can call (you owe them several lunches). How to do some calculations for some analysis to show your data in a presentation that you are doing with perfect graphs.
One of my favorite quotes is from Albert Einstein. “Genius is making complex ideas simple, not making simple ideas complicated.” In our view, Microsoft 365 Copilot in Excel is the embodiment of that idea and the proverbial Sherpa helps you collect and analyze complex data and turns it into more child’s play where you can interpret, unlock creativity And can spend more time coming up with more inventive solutions. , Why do we think so? Well, a great example that Microsoft illustrated with Microsoft Copilot was taking a table of data and basically turning it into a pivot table, so you could ask it to do different kinds of analysis. , who was calculating everything and graphing it for you. , Also, you can ask him more about the color to see what has changed.
Basically, you have your business analyst or operational math sherpa sitting next to you – Scotty would be proud.
Microsoft 365 Co-Pilot in Word
To further unlock productivity, Microsoft added Copilot to Word as well. This tool can automatically write, summarize and edit with a simple gesture. By using the commands, “Write a two-page draft based on the following outline,” or “Make the introductory paragraph more casual,” CoPilot can write entire documents for you, saving an incredible amount of time and (as you write depending on how much you enjoy) ) stress. In short, Microsoft 365 Copilot in Microsoft Word is acting like an editor, market researcher, and strategic marketer even while you’re editing a document that’s incredible.
Microsoft 365 Co-Pilot in PowerPoint
Going a step further, Copilot in PowerPoint will take information from your Word document or your Excel sheet and create a presentation. An expert designer to accompany you on your Excel MBA. Simple pointers to generate powerful presentations – that can potentially save hours of tedious work. These advancements will help employees get more done and get done faster – a win-win. Here’s a quick demo of last week’s launch.
Quest for “Copilot Future”
It is abundantly clear what the power of artificial intelligence or large language models (LLM) can do. To me, this is the time AI gets exciting, and I love seeing Microsoft (and the industry at large) make so many leaps in the past month alone to bring these new capabilities to market. The news comes shortly after Microsoft announced its continued partnership with OpenAI, the makers of the trending AI chatbot ChatGPT that was recently added to Microsoft’s Bing search engine. It will be interesting to see how these advances make a difference to the way we work, but what is certain is that they will make us more productive.
We think we’re in the “very early innings” (we need to underline very early) of how Microsoft plans to weave artificial intelligence into its enterprise and office productivity applications. And you can rest assured that Google, Salesforce, Amazon and others will follow suit with an “infuse generative AI into everything” approach. In addition, what this latest set of capabilities does is turn novice users into power users at a more rapid pace to help organizations accelerate productivity and do more with less. And while it’s certain that in some applications the suggestions won’t be completely accurate from the start, the answers will be “usefully wrong” as Microsoft put it, helping employees move projects forward regardless. Continued use and reinforcement learning will eventually turn them from fatally wrong to merely useful.
Based on what I’m seeing, it makes sense that Microsoft will continue to profile and innovate at the division (e.g., marketing, purchasing, finance, etc.) and job function levels, looking at day-to-day activities and critical metrics . and figuring out ways to optimize and improve them. We are at the beginning of a very fast paced generative AI revolution and it is only going to get more useful from here. And yes, we’re all trying to juggle the impact of overcrowding and the impact at work, and there will be some discomfort before it’s all said and done. But the bottom line is that you can’t put the genie back in the bottle. Generative AI will become increasingly widespread, and businesses that adopt the technology will become materially more productive. Workers will also become more productive. And the more everyday office workers can leverage the power of generative AI, the better.
