Microsoft Office Harness AI Magic to Transform Meetings from Painful to Productive

December 4, 2023
Microsoft Office Harness AI Magic to Transform Meetings from Painful to Productive
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Microsoft Office Harness AI Magic to Transform Meetings from Painful to Productive

Microsoft announced on Wednesday that the Copilot artificial intelligence add-on for its Microsoft 365 productivity apps will be getting a great deal of new features. Companies have shown interest in how AI might increase employee efficiency since the year Microsoft-backed OpenAI debuted the popular ChatGPT virtual assistant. Many other software makers, such as Adobe, Google, and Salesforce, have also come out with tools. Whether Copilot for Microsoft 365 is worth $30 per person per month is a matter of debate. When Microsoft made its announcement in July, a lot of analysts anticipated a lower price. Microsoft is now reacting by keeping the price the same but expanding the feature set. 

Up until this point, Copilot could create draft PowerPoint presentations, Word documents with information illustrated, Outlook with personalized action items from missed meetings, and Excel files with forecasts based on current data. Using internal organizational data, a chat feature could highlight documents, suggest file modifications, and compile a summary of unread emails. Corporate staff will have a simple means of increasing CoPilot’s knowledge with recently integrated data from business software such as Workday and ServiceNow through a new service called CoPilot Studio. According to Microsoft corporate vice president Jared Spataro, Copilot Studio “is slotted into the $30 price point, so it really drives the value”, he said in an interview with CNBC. Further enhancements for those with Copilot licenses include the following:

  • Even though Copilot doesn’t produce a transcription or recording, it will be able to respond to inquiries about meetings as they take place in Teams. AI-generated content during meetings will require copying and saving to another location.
  • Copilot can record notes in real-time during a Teams meeting if at least one participant is licensed. Participants can instruct the Copilot to do tasks. 
  • Copilot will have the ability to create messages for Teams chat and modify their tone.
  • The Whiteboard tool can automatically visualize ideas that are discussed during Team meetings.
  • The Copilot in Outlook can assist with scheduling meetings by suggesting participants, agendas, and lists of suggested documents to distribute to attendees.
  • With the aid of the Microsoft Designer app, Copilot will be able to produce PowerPoint slides that feature AI-generated images based on brand assets.
  • For the assistant’s Word and PowerPoint output, users will be able to specify formatting and style preferences.

Before this week’s updates, which Microsoft executives are talking about at the company’s Ignite conference in Seattle, some early users of Copilot were already happy with what it could do. Visa has been granted permission by Microsoft to provide a limited number of licenses through a preview, according to Rajat Taneja, the president of the payments company’s technology division. The majority of employees will soon have access to Copilot. Taneja was one of the first workers at Visa to use Copilot. He stated,  that It works incredibly well for editing stuff you’ve already written or for drafting communications, like speeches and messages.

Currently, several hundred Visa workers possess copilot licenses. According to Taneja, when the group was surveyed by the company, the majority of participants expressed disappointment at losing access. Visa’s viewpoint aligns with the way Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella described the welcome to Copilot in late October. In a conference call with analysts, he stated that customers told him that once they use Copilot, they cannot even imagine working without it.

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