It’s been a long time since Microsoft invented Clippy, the clip-like mascot that made suggestions about what you could do with Office applications like Words. Today, the Redmond company has announced the integration of something much more powerful, an artificial intelligence model within its office suite. The company’s CEO, Satya Nadella, has presented Copilot, which integrates AI within the office suite to automate tasks so that applications even interact with each other. His announcement seems important: “we are at the beginning of a new era of computing.”
Microsoft Copilot is integrated into Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams applications, among others. A second functionality coming to Microsoft products is Business Chat, which can be tasked with tasks based on morning meetings, emails and chat threads, including summaries of discussions taking place in video conferences. .
In Word, Copilot can write, edit, summarize, and create text; in PowerPoint you can generate presentations from data and files from other apps; in Excel it is able to analyze results, add new ones and propose changes to transform future results. In Outlook, you can help manage your email, with an inbox management wizard and the actions to take to dispatch it.
Microsoft Corporate Vice President of Modern Work and Business Applications Jared Spataro said, “By drawing on the content and context of each business, Copilot delivers results that are relevant and actionable. It’s ready for the enterprise, with Microsoft’s comprehensive focus on security, compliance, privacy, and responsible AI.” “Copilot -has assured- marks a new era of computing that will fundamentally transform the way we work.”
Spataro explained that in the construction of Copilot they have not limited themselves to connecting ChatGPT to Microsoft 365. The system combines Microsoft 365 apps such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint with the Microsoft Graph data system and the GPT-4 language model of Open AI. When an app asks Copilot for a task that requires data, it sends a request to Graph to retrieve the context and data before modifying the request and sending it GPT-4. The response is returned to t Graph, which performs checks before serving the result in the app.
The Microsoft executive has also admitted that Copilot does not always offer correct results: “Sometimes Copilot will be right, other times it will be usefully wrong, giving you an idea that is not perfect but that gives you an advantage.” For now, Microsoft says it is testing Copilot with 20 customers and has announced that it will expand its launch (and pricing) over the next few months.
The review will not be limited to bugs, but to potentially harmful AI behavior. “When the system goes wrong, is biased, or is misused, we have measures in place to mitigate it,” said Jamie Teevan, Microsoft’s chief scientist. “We are addressing the long-term implications and new risks like jailbreaks -hacking of protections-. We are going to make mistakes, but when we do we will address them quickly.”
