Microsoft announces 365 Copilot

Microsoft announced 365 Copilot, an assistant built into Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams that combined large language models — including GPT-4 — with a user’s own documents, emails, calendar and contacts, accessed through Microsoft Graph. A companion feature, “Business Chat,” let users query across all of a person’s Microsoft 365 data and apps in natural language rather than working within one program at a time.

The pitch was concrete rather than conceptual: draft a first version of a document in Word from a prompt and a linked file, turn a Word document into a PowerPoint deck, summarise an email thread, or ask Business Chat to produce a status update by pulling from recent meetings, emails and chats on a topic. Chief executive Satya Nadella framed it as a shift in interface — “the most universal interface — natural language” — layered on top of applications used daily by hundreds of millions of people.

Microsoft gave no pricing or general-availability date at announcement, saying only that it was testing the product with a small group of corporate customers and would expand access as it improved the underlying models. That is a common pattern for major platform announcements — capability demonstrated well ahead of a shipped, priced product — and it meant 365 Copilot functioned initially as a statement of intent for where Microsoft’s roughly $10 billion investment in OpenAI would show up in its own products, rather than something most users could try.

The announcement came two days after OpenAI released GPT-4 and set the template Microsoft, Google and others followed through 2023: generative features layered onto existing productivity suites, aimed less at novelty use than at the everyday tasks of drafting, summarising and searching that make up the bulk of office work.