Microsoft Office will now use AI to make meetings less painful

Microsoft Microsoft on Wednesday announced several new capabilities coming to the Copilot artificial intelligence add-on for its Microsoft 365 productivity applications.

In the year since Microsoft-backed OpenAI introduced the popular ChatGate virtual assistant, companies have expressed interest in how AI can make their employees more efficient, and many other software makers have expressed interest in it as well. Adobe, Google And sales forceHave also brought equipment.

There are concerns about whether Copilot is worth the $30 per person per month for Microsoft 365. When Microsoft announced its decision in July, many analysts expected a lower price. Now Microsoft is responding by expanding the feature list while keeping the price intact.

Up to this point, CoPilot could show individual action items from missed meetings in Outlook, draft PowerPoint presentations, create diagrams of information in Word documents, and create forecasts based on existing data in Excel files. . A chat feature informed by internal organizational data can summarize unread email messages, recommend changes to files and come up with highlights for documents.

A new Copilot Studio service will provide corporate employees an easy way to enrich Copilot’s knowledge with newly integrated data from business software such as service now And working day, Copilot Studio “is slotted into the $30 price point, so it really drives the value,” Jared Spataro, Microsoft’s corporate vice president, told CNBC in an interview.

Here are some other enhancements coming for those with a CoPilot license:

• In Teams, Copilot will be able to answer questions about meetings as they happen, even if he doesn’t create transcriptions or recordings. Those who want to save AI-generated content during a meeting will have to copy it and save it somewhere else.
• If at least one person in a Teams meeting has a license, CoPilot can record notes live, and participants will be able to ask it to follow instructions, like, “Write down what Dana said as a quote. “
• Co-Pilot will be able to create team chat messages and change the tone.
• During teams meetings, whiteboard tools can automatically create visualizations of the ideas people discuss.
• In Outlook, Co-Pilot can help plan meetings, proposing a list of attendees, agenda, and recommended documents to share with participants.
• In PowerPoint, Copilot will be able to create slides with the help of the Microsoft Designer app that will include AI-generated images based on brand assets.
• People will be able to enter formatting and style preferences for the Assistant’s output in Word and PowerPoint.

Some early users of Copilot were already satisfied with what it can do before this week’s update, which Microsoft executives are discussing at the company’s Ignite conference in Seattle.

Microsoft allowed visa to offer a small number of licenses through preview, and soon it will roll out CoPilot to most employees, said Rajat Taneja, president of technology at the payments company. Taneja was among the first Visa employees to try Copilot. He is using it continuously. It summarizes PowerPoint presentations and other documents on their behalf.

“You can use it to draft a communication – a speech, a message – or to edit something you’ve already written, and it does a great job of doing that,” he said.

A few hundred Visa employees now hold copilot licenses. The company surveyed the group and most respondents said they would be disappointed to lose access, Taneja said.

Visa’s perspective is consistent with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s portrayal of Copilot’s welcome in late October.

“Customers tell us that once they use CoPilot, they can’t imagine working without it,” he said on a conference call with analysts.

Watch: Plexo’s Lou Tony previews Microsoft’s expected AI developments ahead of ‘Ignite’ conference