Microsoft’s Copilot is becoming more of a team player – Business
Microsoft Corp. is expanding its family of generative artificial intelligence-powered Copilots, introducing new virtual assistants in its Teams and SharePoint collaboration platforms, and announcing updates to the existing Microsoft Copilot in Azure.
Today’s updates, announced at Microsoft Build 2024, are aimed at accelerating the company’s mission to bring its generative AI virtual assistant experience to every user. Microsoft Copilot was first launched last year in Microsoft 365, which is the company’s flagship productivity suite, and in its Bing search engine, and it has rapidly expanded to cover a growing range of the company’s tools and services.
Copilot is powered by OpenAI’s advanced large language models, such as GPT-4 Turbo, which are combined with the company’s search capabilities to provide chat and collaborative experience for users across a variety of platforms. Microsoft’s end goal is to bring its chatbots to everywhere its customers are, be it the web, the cloud, their personal computers and the multitude of productivity applications they use to get work done.
The company has spent the last year building out its Copilot capabilities, integrating them with platforms including Office, Dynamics 365 and Windows, as well as productivity tools used by finance teams. But until recently, the AI assistant has been notably absent from one of Microsoft’s most important enterprise tools – Microsoft Teams.
That changes with the coming launch of Team Copilot, which will become available in preview later this year. It’s intended to expand the role of Copilot from a simple, behind-the-scenes assistant to that of a “valuable new team member” that can improve collaboration and project management experiences. According to the company, Team Copilot will take on the role of a new team member, with users able to assign various tasks and responsibilities to it, freeing themselves to focus on more productive work.
Besides Microsoft Teams, Team Copilot will also be integrated directly within Microsoft’s Loop and Planner tools, and will be able to perform work such as facilitating meetings, managing the agenda and taking notes to ensure user’s discussions are more productive, the company said. It will also be able to serve as a group collaborator, helping team members to get more out of their chats. It’ll do this by summarizing what’s said in each chat thread, and helping users to surface important information, keep track of action items and address unresolved problems.
Further, Team Copilot can assume the duties of a Project Manager, Microsoft said. When assigned to manage a project, it will act like the boss, creating and assigning tasks to different team members, keeping track of deadlines and notifying individuals as and when their input is needed.
SharePoint Copilots
Copilot is all about collaboration and so it makes sense to bring the technology to SharePoint, which is an enterprise-focused platform that’s somewhat similar to Google Drive. Not only is it a shared file repository, but it also provides a venue for team members to communicate, exchange data, create blogs, manage web content and even build an intranet platform for their organizations.
Given its capabilities, SharePoint is a logical candidate for AI-powered assistance, and Microsoft said today it will soon deliver that with a new Copilot experience within the platform.
Copilot in SharePoint is said to provide a self-service-style experience for workers, enabling them to search for knowledge in shared documents and files hosted on SharePoint sites. In addition to searching for files, it can also answer employees’ questions based on the information within them. Microsoft said users will be able to create SharePoint Copilots with just a few clicks when they become available in early access later this year.
Copilot in Microsoft Azure
Microsoft’s Copilot experience for Microsoft Azure is a customized virtual assistant that can aid engineers and developers in setting up and maintaining the cloud-based infrastructure that supports a multitude of business applications and services.
It was previously available to select users in early access and is now launching in preview for every Azure customer. In addition to the wider rollout, users are getting more autonomy with the ability to disable Copilot in Azure in specific tenants, the company said. In addition, users will now be able to grant Copilot in Azure access to specific users within a tenant. According to Microsoft, the new features help to provide a more flexible and secure environment for cloud customers that aligns with their organization’s operating standards.
The update doesn’t just bring greater access controls, but also enhanced functionality. For instance, Copilot in Azure gains the ability to troubleshoot applications with performance issues simply by asking what’s up with them. It also gains the ability to query the Azure SQL Database service in natural language to support more efficient management of SQL-dependent applications.
Copilot Extensions
Finally, Microsoft said it’s unifying its Copilot extensibility concepts, including connectors and plugins, into a single construct that’s called Copilot Extensions.
With these, users will be able to enhance the capabilities of various Copilots by specifying new actions they can perform and authorizing which knowledge bases they can access. This will support the creation of more customized chatbots that can better perform the tasks they’re dedicated to.
The company said developers can set up Copilot extensions within the Microsoft Copilot Studio platform or by using the Microsoft Teams Toolkit for Visual Studio Code. A number of extensions for popular applications are being made available from today, including extensions for Jira, Mural and Priority Matrix, with many more to come in future.
Developers will be able to integrate plugins with their Copilot extensions to further refine their functionality and performance, initializing new experiences such as handoffs to other AI assistants.