While it’s not clear whether mainstream PC users are actually using Microsoft’s Copilot ai, the company claims that businesses using MS 365 Copilot are seeing plenty of benefits. According to a Microsoft survey, Copilot users at Honeywell save up to 92 minutes per week, while Teladoc customer support agents save up to five hours per week by using the ai tool to compose responses to questions. Now that it’s been a year since MS 365 Copilot launched (at a cost of $30 per seat), Microsoft is eager to bring more ai capabilities to corporate drones.
Most interestingly, Microsoft is updating its Business Chat app, which until now has been a way to interact with Copilot via emails, calendar entries, and other data, along with your organization's data. Now it's improving collaboration with the addition of Copilot Pages, which will serve as a sort of “multiplayer” way to share ai-generated content with your coworkers.
“With Pages, all of your organization's data — whether created by humans or ai — is persistent, accessible, and valuable,” Microsoft executive vice president Jared Spataro wrote in a blog post. “Pages takes ephemeral ai-generated content and makes it durable, so you can edit it, add to it, and share it with others… This is a whole new pattern of work: collaboration between multiple players, between humans and ai and humans.”
It’s surprising that it took Microsoft a year to build better collaboration into the Business Chat app, as that’s an expected feature of all workplace apps these days. Having a place for employees to share their existing queries in Copilot just makes sense — coworkers may want access to the same information, and it’s also environmentally wasteful to have people running the same search in Copilot multiple times.ai-poised-to-drive-160-increase-in-power-demand” rel=”nofollow noopener” target=”_blank” data-ylk=”slk:Generative ai queries are far more costly for the environment;cpos:2;pos:1;elm:context_link;itc:0;sec:content-canvas” class=”link “>Generative ai queries are much more costly to the environment than simple web searches.)
Microsoft says Pages will be available today for MS 365 Copilot users, and will also be coming to free Copilot customers with Microsoft Sign In accounts “in the coming weeks.”
Overall, Microsoft claims that Copilot queries are more than twice as fast now compared to launch, because it’s based on the newer GPT4o model. The company is also updating ai capabilities across the MS 365 suite: Excel is getting Python support for more complex queries; PowerPoint’s narrative-building capability is widely available, allowing you to build the story of your presentations with the help of ai; and Teams can now scan meeting transcripts and the accompanying chats.
The other Office apps aren't far behind either. Outlook will soon let you choose topics, people, and keywords to highlight in the “Prioritize my inbox” feature. You'll also be able to reference meetings and emails directly within Word documents, and OneDrive will let you summarize and compare files without opening them with Copilot.
And if you need even more help from Copilot ai, the company can also create Copilot agents directly in Business Chat and SharePoint. They’re like chatbots that can see inside your corporate files, and you can also tag them in comments like a typical coworker. While we still need to see these agents in action to determine if they’re actually helpful, at the very least, you can feel less guilty about assigning them some menial information processing at the end of the workday.
