While it's unclear if mainstream PC users are actually using Microsoft's Copilot AI, the company claims that businesses using MS 365 Copilot are seeing plenty of benefits. According to a Microsoft survey, Copilot users at Honeywell save up to 92 minutes per week, while customer service agents at Teladoc are saving up to five hours a week by using the AI tool to draft responses to questions. Now that we're a year beyond the MS 365 Copilot launch (at a costly $30 per seat), Microsoft is eager to throw more AI features at corporate drones.
Most intriguingly, Microsoft is upgrading its Business Chat app, which so far has been a way to interact with Copilot's across your emails, calendar entries and other data, alongside data from your organization. Now it's getting better collaboration with the addition of Copilot Pages, which will serve as a sort of "multiplayer" way to share AI generated content with your coworkers.
"With Pages, all the data in your organization — whether created by humans or AI — is persistent, accessible and valuable," Microsoft CVP Jared Spataro wrote in a blog post. "Pages takes ephemeral AI-generated content and makes it durable, so you can edit it, add to it, and share it with others… This is an entirely new work pattern — multiplayer, human to AI to human collaboration."
It's surprising that it took a year for Microsoft to bring better collaboration to the Business Chat app, as that's an expected feature of every workplace app these days. Having a place for employees to share their existing Copilot queries simply makes sense: Coworkers may want access to the same information, and it's also environmentally wasteful to have people running the same Copilot search multiple times. (Generative AI queries are far more costly for the environment than simple web searches.)
Microsoft says Pages will be available today to MS 365 Copilot users, and it'll also be coming to free Copilot customers with Microsoft Entra accounts "in the coming weeks."
In general, Microsoft says Copilot queries are more than two times faster now compared to launch, because it's relying on the newer GPT4o model. The company is also upgrading AI capabilities across the suite of MS 365 apps: Excel is getting Python support for more complex queries; PowerPoint's Narrative builder capability is widely available, allowing you to craft the story of your presentations with AI help; and Teams can now scan across meeting transcripts and their accompanying chats.
The other Office apps aren't left out either. Outlook will soon let you choose topics, people and keywords to highlight for the "Prioritize my inbox" feature. You'll also be able to reference meetings and emails directly within Word documents, one OneDrive will let you summarize and compare files without opening them using Copilot.
And if you need even more Copilot AI help, business can also create Copilot Agents directly within Business Chat and SharePoint. They're like chatbots that can peer within your corporate files, and you can also tag them in comments like a typical cooworker. While we still need to see these Agents in action to determine if they're actually useful, at the very least, you can feel less guilty about assigning them some menial information processing at the end of the work day.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/microsoft-365-copilot-users-can-collaborate-with-ai-and-each-other-in-bizchat-pages-150042326.html?src=rss
