Despite our protestations, Microsoft is determined to make AI tools in the workplace accessible and appealing with a raft of new improvements across its Microsoft 365 (M365) suite of productivity tools.
In an announcement on the M365 blog, the tech giant announced ‘wave 2’, rolling out (mostly) in September 2024, which includes Copilot Pages, “a dynamic, persistent canvas” for AI-powered collaboration. It also announced that Copilot would be seeing increased functionality in a number of key applications, such as data analysis in Excel and inbox management in Outlook.
While the company is stressing the importance of its AI tool for small to medium businesses who may have a need to manage costs, it is also keen to highlight that Business Chat (or ‘BizChat’, as it insists on calling it), the content-sensitive portion of Copilot, requires a subscription. The standard Copilot chat is free, but only searches the internet.
The net positives of “wave 2”
It seems like the integration of company content into content that’s AI-generated has been around for a while now, but Microsoft is claiming wave 2 will bring with it ‘reasoning’ for Copilot Business Chat – helping it make more contextual decisions and answer more contextual questions. For example, with Microsoft Teams, “you can ask Copilot if there were any questions that you missed in a meeting, and it will quickly scan across what was said, and what was typed in the chat, to see if anything was left unanswered.”
So, Copilot Business Chat is better now, in nebulous small ways. It can draw more on company-specific data, while Word specifically now supports quick reviews of all of it in-app, alongside additional writing prompts from the blank page.
Microsoft also says that “dynamic storytelling” is now available in PowerPoint, helping users build out a structure for their presentations. It will also pull in company branding to keep business presentations stylish and on brand. It also claims that Copilot will “soon” be able to draw from “approved” images in Sharepoint libraries.
Copilot is making the scourge of customer service, AI chatbots, easier to create, and able to be tailored towards specific “business processes” to “work with or for humans”. An agent builder in Business Chat will be in general availability “over the coming weeks” to facilitate this, according to the company.
Microsoft Excel gets possibly the most interesting development, albeit only in public preview for now, as its natural language prompts are being equipped with programming language Python to make advanced data analysis as easy as ever, with Microsoft promising to enable advanced data analysis, “[with] no coding required.”
Copilot Business Chat, marketing speak, and you
There are BizChat deniers in the Microsoft cell, however, resisting the very notion that it even exists. User HalSclater on Microsoft’s Small and Medium business blog writes: “BizChat?? Suddenly this is everywhere and yet it isn’t a product. Please stop!”
Microsoft should hire him to write their copy, because “BizChat” isn’t the only bit of strenuous marketing coming from Microsoft on this. The concrete thing here seems to be Copilot Pages, which puts “ephemeral AI-generated content” into a collaborative edit space.
Please ignore that insisting on calling this concept “multiplayer” and “a completely new work pattern” is somewhat egregious given what Google are up to in implementing its Gemini AI into Google Workspace. And it’s not just “a dynamic persistent canvas”, but one “designed for multiplayer AI collaboration”, going so far as to say that “it’s the first new digital artifact for the AI age”. The harried copywriter over there who’s just brazenly free associating words and expecting them to mean things has my undying respect, but at the same time, “please stop!”
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luke.hughes@futurenet.com (Luke Hughes)
