Microsoft adds Business Chat and five other great features to its AI Copilot chatbot

March 17, 2023

Source: Microsoft

Overnight Microsoft officially announced its further push into the AI space: Microsoft 365 Copilot. It’s powered by the recently-released GPT-4 by OpenAI and promises to revolutionise the Office experience. Here are some of the best features for businesses, including a dedicated Business Chat.

It’s worth noting that at the time of writing, 365 Copilot is still in the testing phase with about 20 businesses. However, Microsoft said it — and its pricing — will be announced in the coming months.

We’re also yet to actually see this in action outside of Microsoft’s own video and controlled testing environments. There will certainly be some learning curves, bugs and issues — like with any product — once it gets out of beta.

We’ve certainly seen this recently with Bing and other AI offerings that are entering the market.

Copilot Business Chat

One of the most interesting new features that Copilot is bringing to Microsoft 365 is Business Chat.

This chatbot experience lets you get a summary of information that is pulled from other apps in the suite, such as calendars, meeting transcripts, slides, emails, chats and more.

Microsoft has said that it is able to respond to natural language prompts from this data. So let’s say you’re away for a day and need an update on a client, you can ask the chatbot what happened when you were gone.

Here are some examples that Microsoft provided;

Summarise the chats, emails, and documents about the [customer] escalation that happened last night.
What is the next milestone on [project]? Were there any risks identified? Help me brainstorm a list of some potential mitigations.
Write a new planning overview in the style of [filename A] that contains the planning timeline from [filename B] and incorporates the project list in the email from [person].

Copilot presentation creation

Microsoft also showed off Copilot creating Powerpoint presentations based on information in other apps, such as Word. You can also prompt it to add animations and style across the slides for you

Meeting preparation

If you’re running short on time before a meeting — or just extremely interested in utilising this technology to its full potential (we absolutely believe you), Copilot can apparently step in here too.

The launch video shows Copilot being asked “prepared me for my upcoming meeting” and the chatbot spits out a number of talking points without any additional information. You’ll probably have to be a touch more specific though if you have a lot of meetings.

Data analysis

This is one for the Excel jockeys. If you’re in spreadsheet hell and need some summaries, it can analyse the data and provide answers for you.

The example Microsoft gives is, ‘Which products were most profitable this quarter?’.

A step further, it can do things like budget proposals, visualisations, trend identification, and timelines for launches based on this data.

It’s also able to suggest new formulas for your spreadsheets based on the questions you ask it.

Copilot email responses

You can also use the chatbot to draft email responses, but with specific parameters in place. For example, “Draft a response with my approval, but highlight key risks.”

It’s also able to summarise emails so you don’t miss anything important. For example, if you’re away on holiday and return to 500+ emails that make your eye twitch just thinking about it.

Meeting summaries

If you’ve missed a meeting, or are a ‘this should have been an email’ truther’, Copilot can scan the transcript and provide a summary of key points and actionable items.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tegan Jones

Senior Technology Journalist

Tegan Jones is a senior technology journalist at SmartCompany. A multi-award-winning journalist, she has been reporting on technology, telecommunications and gaming for the past 10 years. She regularly appears on mainstream media channels as an expert tech commentator. Her previous roles include editor of Gizmodo Australia and global reviews editor at Finder. She has also served as a reporter and editor across Business Insider, Lifehacker and Kotaku Australia. Tegan was the co-host of one of the top technology podcasts in Australia, Queens of the Drone Age. You can find her on Twitter @Tegan_Writes.