Since its launch, Microsoft Copilot has proved a worthy ChatGPT competitor, even often lapping OpenAI’s providing. Nonetheless, as ChatGPT continued to advance, Copilot lagged — till now. 

On Monday, Microsoft held a live-streamed occasion titled “Microsoft 365 Copilot: Wave 2,” throughout which it unveiled the entire upgrades coming to its synthetic intelligence (AI) assistant, each for enterprise and private customers. 

The upgrades had been spectacular, together with additional integration with Microsoft 365 purposes and collaborative methods to make use of AI as a staff, group, or household. To see the entire bulletins, hold studying under. 

Copilot Pages

For those who signal into Copilot along with your work or group’s account, you’ll seemingly discover a tab choice to modify from Work to Net. The Work tab is what Microsoft refers to as BizChat, a workflow inside Copilot that may pull solutions out of your work knowledge within the Microsoft 365 purposes. BizChat has now been upgraded with a brand new Pages characteristic. 

With Pages, you’ll be able to take the insights Copilot discovered for you — that are rooted in your small business knowledge — edit them, add them to a Web page, and share them along with your staff to collaborate. Pages are very like some other editable doc and will be accessed by a shareable and editable hyperlink. 

This characteristic emphasizes multiplayer AI, a development seen in different AI corporations’ latest choices, akin to You.com’s collaborative AI assistants and Salesforce’s Agentforce, a collection of autonomous and collaborative AI brokers. 

Pages will start rolling out to Microsoft 365 Copilot clients as we speak and can be obtainable to free Microsoft Copilot customers who’re signed in with their Microsoft ENtra account within the coming weeks. 

Copilot within the Microsoft 365 apps 

Considered one of Microsoft Copilot’s largest benefits is its capacity to assist customers inside the Microsoft 365 apps, which have turn into a gradual cornerstone of many individuals’s workflows. With Wave 2, Microsoft is utilizing buyer suggestions to additional its Copilot help within the purposes and enhance person accessibility. 

For starters, Copilot in Excel is usually obtainable for all customers and gives assist for formulation, knowledge visualization, conditional formatting, and extra. 

Moreover, Microsoft introduced Copilot in Excel with Python in public preview, which permits customers to work with Python in Excel utilizing solely pure language. This implies customers can leverage Python in Excel to conduct superior evaluation, akin to forecasting and danger evaluation, with out getting into any code. 

Microsoft additionally made Narrative Builder in PowerPoint usually obtainable. This characteristic builds you the primary draft of your presentation in minutes — simply kind in a subject, and the Builder will produce a top level view. 

Copilot in Groups can now synthesize each the contents of an precise assembly and what was despatched within the chat to create a abstract of the whole assembly. For instance, if a person asks Copoilot what they missed within the assembly, the response can even embody content material from the chat. This characteristic can be usually obtainable subsequent month. 

Copilot in Outlook could not be left behind: It now has a “Prioritize my inbox” characteristic that, because the title implies, analyzes your inbox and flags an important emails whereas offering a abstract of it and the rationale it was prioritized. Microsoft shares that customers will even “quickly” have the ability to instruct Copilot on the matters or key phrases it ought to search for to mark as excessive precedence. 

These options are unavailable now, however Microsoft says they are going to be in public preview beginning in late 2024.  

Since customers typically pull on exterior sources when writing in Microsoft Phrase, Microsoft is introducing a brand new characteristic later this month that enables customers to shortly reference net and work knowledge, together with emails, PDFs, PowerPoints, and extra. Copilot in Phrase additionally bought a brand new “on-canvas begin expertise, ” permitting customers to collaborate with Copilot inline as they work on sections of their doc. Each these Phrase options are actually usually obtainable. 

Lastly, Microsoft unveiled Copilot in OneDrive, permitting customers to shortly leverage the assistant to seek out information of their OneDrive repository, get summaries, and even evaluate information. Copilot in OneDrive is rolling out to customers beginning as we speak and can be usually obtainable this month.  

Copilot brokers 

Microsoft launched Copilot brokers, AI assistants that may perform particular duties with as little or as a lot human intervention as a person may have. For instance, Microsoft shares that some brokers can carry out totally autonomously whereas others are extra easy “prompt-and-response” brokers. 

Customers can construct Copilot brokers utilizing the brand new agent builder, an expertise powered by Copilot Studio that enables customers to construct an agent in BizChat or Sharepoint. These brokers can then be summoned within the 365 purposes like some other teammate, utilizing the “@” to name on it. 

Copilot brokers and the agent builder in BizChat are usually obtainable beginning as we speak and can be rolled out to all clients within the coming weeks. Nonetheless, Copilot brokers and agent builder in SharePoint will enter public preview in early October, in response to Microsoft. 

Bonus: Affirmation of LLM in Copilot 

In Could, OpenAI unveiled GPT-4o, its most superior mannequin with GPT-4-level intelligence and multimodal capabilities. It then infused ChatGPT with this mannequin for each free and paid ChatGPT customers to take pleasure in. Since then, there was a lot hypothesis on whether or not Copilot would observe go well with, upgrading its AI chatbot to the most recent model. 

Within the occasion weblog publish on Monday, Microsoft confirmed that Copilot makes use of GPT-4o, which, in response to Microsoft, has dramatically improved efficiency with responses which can be greater than two occasions quicker on common. 

Moreover, Microsoft mentioned it could proceed to convey the most recent fashions to Copilot, together with OpenAI’s o1, which was launched final week and has essentially the most superior reasoning of OpenAI fashions to this point.