Humans are hard-wired to dream, to create, and innovate. Each of us seeks to do work that gives us purpose — to write a great novel, to make a discovery, to build strong communities, to care for the sick. The urge to connect to the core of our work lives in all of us. But today, we spend too much time consumed by the drudgery of work on tasks that zap our time, creativity, and energy. To reconnect to the soul of our work, we don’t just need a better way of doing the same things. We need a whole new way to work.
Today, we are bringing the power of next-generation AI to work. Introducing Microsoft 365 Copilot — your copilot for work. It combines the power of large language models (LLMs) with your data in the Microsoft Graph and the Microsoft 365. This turns your words into the most powerful productivity tool on the planet.
A Revolution in Productivity
“Today marks the next major step in the evolution of how we interact with computing, which will fundamentally change the way we work and unlock a new wave of productivity growth,” said Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO of Microsoft. “With our new copilot for work, we’re giving people more agency and making technology more accessible through the most universal interface — natural language.”
Copilot is integrated into Microsoft 365 in two ways. It works alongside you, embedded in the Microsoft 365 apps you use every day to unleash creativity and unlock productivity. Today, we’re also announcing an entirely new experience: Business Chat. Business Chat works across the LLM, the Microsoft 365 apps, and your data — your calendar, emails, chats, documents, meetings, and contacts — to do things you’ve never been able to do before. You can give it natural language prompts like “Tell my team how we updated the product strategy.” It will then generate a status update based on the morning’s meetings, emails, and chat threads.
With Copilot, you’re always in control. You decide what to keep, modify, or discard. Now, you can be more creative in Word, more analytical in Excel, more expressive in PowerPoint, more productive in Outlook, and more collaborative in Teams.
Transforming Work in Three Ways
1. Unleash Creativity:
With Copilot in Word, you can jump-start the creative process so you never start with a blank slate again. Copilot gives you a first draft to edit and iterate on — saving hours in writing, sourcing, and editing time. Sometimes Copilot will be right, other times usefully wrong — but it will always put you further ahead. You’re always in control as the author, driving your unique ideas forward, prompting Copilot to shorten, rewrite, or give feedback. Copilot in PowerPoint helps you create beautiful presentations with a simple prompt, adding relevant content from a document you made last week or last year. And with Copilot in Excel, you can analyze trends and create professional-looking data visualizations in seconds.
2. Unlock Productivity:
We all want to focus on the 20% of our work that really matters, but 80% of our time is consumed with busywork that slows us down. Copilot lightens the load. From summarizing long email threads to quickly drafting suggested replies, Copilot in Outlook helps you clear your inbox in minutes, not hours. And every meeting is a productive meeting with Copilot in Teams. Copilot summarizes key discussion points — including who said what and where people are aligned and where they disagree — and suggest action items, all in real time during a meeting. And with Copilot in Power Platform, anyone can automate repetitive tasks, create chatbots, and go from idea to working app in minutes.
3. Uplevel Skills:
Copilot makes you better at what you’re good at and lets you quickly master what you’ve yet to learn. The average person uses only a handful of commands — such as “animate a slide” or “insert a table” — from the thousands available across Microsoft 365. Now, all that rich functionality is unlocked using just natural language. And this is only the beginning.
The Copilot System: Enterprise-Ready AI
Microsoft is uniquely positioned to deliver enterprise-ready AI with the Copilot System. Copilot is more than OpenAI’s ChatGPT embedded into Microsoft 365. It’s a sophisticated processing and orchestration engine working behind the scenes to combine the power of LLMs, including GPT-4, with the Microsoft 365 apps and your business data in the Microsoft Graph — now accessible to everyone through natural language.
Grounded in Your Business Data:
The key to unlocking productivity in business lies in connecting LLMs to your business data — in a secure, compliant, privacy-preserving way. Microsoft 365 Copilot has real-time access to both your content and context in the Microsoft Graph. This means it generates answers anchored in your business content — your documents, emails, calendar, chats, meetings, contacts, and other business data — and combines them with your working context — the meeting you’re in now, the email exchanges you’ve had on a topic, the chat conversations you had last week — to deliver accurate, relevant, contextual responses.
Built on Microsoft’s Comprehensive Approach to Security, Compliance, and Privacy:
Copilot is integrated into Microsoft 365 and automatically inherits all your company’s valuable security, compliance, and privacy policies and processes. Two-factor authentication, compliance boundaries, privacy protections, and more make Copilot the AI solution you can trust.
Integrated into the Apps Millions Use Every Day:
Microsoft 365 Copilot is integrated into the productivity apps millions of people use and rely on every day for work and life — Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, and more. An intuitive and consistent user experience ensures it looks, feels, and behaves the same way in Teams as it does in Outlook, with a shared design language for prompts, refinements, and commands.
Designed to Learn New Skills:
Microsoft 365 Copilot’s foundational skills are a game changer for productivity: It can already create, summarize, analyze, collaborate, and automate using your specific business content and context. But it doesn’t stop there. Copilot knows how to command apps (e.g., “animate this slide”) and work across apps. This can include translating a Word document into a PowerPoint presentation. Copilot is designed to learn new skills. For example, with Viva Sales, Copilot can learn how to connect to CRM systems to pull customer data into communications. As Copilot learns about new domains and processes, it will be able to perform even more sophisticated tasks and queries.
Moving Boldly
In the months ahead, Micrososft is bringing Copilot to all productivity apps. This includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, Viva, Power Platform, and more. We’ll share more on pricing and licensing soon. Earlier this month, Microsoft announced Dynamics 365 Copilot as the world’s first AI Copilot in both CRM and ERP. Copilot will bring the next-generation AI to every line of business.
Everyone deserves to find purpose and meaning in their work — and Microsoft 365 Copilot can help. To serve the unmet needs of our customers, we must move quickly and responsibly, learning as we go.
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The future of work is here, and with Microsoft 365 Copilot! We are empowering everyone to achieve more by reconnecting with the true essence of their work.
VISTECH is here to help you make the most of all of your technology, productively and securely. Give us a call at 860.251.8003 to learn more about what we can do.
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