Microsoft held a quick live stream event to discuss a handful of new features coming to its Microsoft 365 Copilot platform dubbed Copilot: Wave 2.
Microsoft’s next big feature push for its pre-generative large language model skin of OpenAI’s LLM will now include natural language AI scripting in Excel, sharable Copilot pages, Python support, synthesized content for Office 365 apps, and more.
Copilot Pages
Microsoft introduced a new working concept called Components when it began rolling out its task managing app Microsoft Loop and today, company CEO Satya Nadella unveiled a similar project for its artificial intelligence platform Copilot. While it’s not called a ‘Component’, the new Copilot Pages acts in a very similar manner, allowing Microsoft 365 users to pull Copilot infused insights (BizChat) into sharable and collaborative pages with their teams.
The new Copilot Pages can be shared and edited amongst a group of collaborators via Office 365 links similar to OneNote, Excel, or PowerPoint projects. While Copilot Pages act like most other shareable docs within Microsoft 365, it should be noted the multiplayer AI aspect of this new function is on par with other enterprise focused offerings from industry competitors such as Salesforces Agentforce feature, or You.com’s collaborative AI agents.
To start accessing Copilot Pages, Microsoft 365 Copilot customers need to sign into their accounts through their Microsoft ENtra account login credentials over the next few weeks.
Microsoft 365 apps infused with Copilot
Microsoft continues to stuff every inch of its software and services portfolio with its new AI platform and its Office 365 apps are not being spared.
The company announced some new ways Copilot with be integrated into Justice League of productivity apps that includes support for Python in Excel, a Narrative Builder in PowerPoint, synthesizing content in Teams, priority inboxing in Outlook, expanded search in Microsoft Word, and repository search in OneDrive file management.
The updated Copilot experience in Excel will now have support for Python rolling out in public preview for a while. The support for Python will allow users to perform much more extensive data analysis using natural language to craft forecasting or risk analysis reports instead of needing a coding degree or asking ‘weird-Scott’ down in development for a script.
The new Narrative Builder for PowerPoint brings a new text-to-presentation draft experience to users. With just a few words, users can whip up an outline of a presentation they can then adjust with images, copy and video to their desired outcome.
Teams’ users can now save hours of summarizing meetings with a new synthesize feature hosted by Copilot that sums up the content in meetings as well as in chats that may have been used outside of the meeting to organize or debrief.
Outlook users will get yet another way to sort through email via Copilot where they can ask the AI assistant to ‘Prioritize my inbox’. Summoning the “Prioritize my inbox” command should result in a filtering of emails that the AI assistant designates as flaggable content that it will then further summarize. Fear not, there is some logic behind how Copilot picks and chooses priority messages, and it will offer its reasoning right alongside its summarizations. Ideally, the new inbox prioritization will be a customizable feature going forward where maybe a thumbs up or down points Copilot in the right direction when picking which emails to show users in the future.
Microsoft Word will now have support for both web and expanded local content when implementing references. The expanded local content that can now be pulled into Copilot for Word includes PDFs, PowerPoint presentations, Excel workbooks, and more. For the less introverted worker, a new ‘On-Canvas start experience’ now drafts up a Word template designed for real-time multi-user collaborations with designated user sections in a single document.
Copilot for OneDrive adds a new repository support platform that allows users to search their OneDrive repository’s as well as get summaries of their files.
Most of these features are either being rolled out or planned in upcoming releases over the next few weeks.
Copilot Agents
Lastly, Microsoft unveiled a new feature called Copilot Agents which does pretty much what it sounds like. A Copilot Agent is a potentially fully autonomous AI assistant that can be deployed for specific or broad tasks. Users are free to deploy Copilot Agents as either prompt-and-response clients or fully automated assistants via the new agent builder experience in the Copilot Studio via BizChat or Sharepoint.
Copilot Agents won’t be running amok until early October where they will be introduced in public preview.
Microsoft’s enterprise Copilot platform is definitely beginning to showcase its reason for existence, now we’ll have to see if its consumer counterpart can do the same.
