While it’s unclear whether mainstream PC users are actually using Microsoft’s Copilot AI, the company claims that businesses using MS 365 Copilot are seeing many benefits. According to a Microsoft survey, Copilot users at Honeywell save up to 92 minutes a week, while customer service agents at Teladoc save up to five hours a week by using the AI tool to prepare answers to questions. We are now one year away from the release of the MS 365 Copilot (at it costs $30 per seat), Microsoft is eager to throw more AI features into corporate drones.
Most interestingly, Microsoft is improving Business Chat, a way for you to interact with Copilot on your emails, calendar entries and other information, in addition to the data in your organization so far. It now collaborates better with the addition of Copilot Pages, which will serve as a sort of “multiplayer” for sharing AI-generated content with your colleagues.
“With Pages, all the data in your organization—whether it’s generated by humans or AI—is persistent, accessible, and valuable,” Microsoft CVP Jared Spataro said in a blog post. “Pages takes ephemeral AI-generated content and makes it persistent, so you can edit it, add to it, and share it with others… It’s a whole new business model—multiplayer, human-to-AI human collaboration.”
It’s surprising that it took Microsoft a year to bring better collaboration to Business Chat, as it’s an expected feature in every workplace app these days. It just makes sense for employees to have a place to share existing Copilot queries: Colleagues may want to access the same information, and it’s environmentally wasteful for people to run the same Copilot search multiple times. (Generative AI queries cost more to the environment rather than simple web searches.)
Pages will be available today for MS 365 Copilot users, and it will also come to free Copilot customers with Microsoft Entra accounts “in the coming weeks,” Microsoft says.
Overall, Microsoft says that Copilot queries are now more than twice as fast as when it launched because it’s based on the newer GPT4o model. The company is also improving AI capabilities across the MS 365 suite of applications: Excel is getting Python support for more complex queries; PowerPoint’s Story Builder capability is widely available, allowing you to storyboard your presentations with the help of artificial intelligence; and Teams can now scan meeting transcripts and accompanying conversations.
Other Office programs are not neglected either. Outlook will soon let you select topics, people, and keywords to highlight for the “Prioritize My Inbox” feature. You’ll also be able to reference meetings and emails directly in Word documents, using OneDrive Copilot to allow you to summarize and compare files without opening them.
If you need more Copilot AI help, businesses can create Copilot Agents directly within Business Chat and SharePoint. They’re like chatbots that can look at your corporate files, and you can tag them in comments like a regular co-worker. We’ve yet to see these Agents in action to determine if they’re really useful, but at least you can feel less guilty about assigning them some minor data processing at the end of the workday.
