Microsoft 365 Copilot Announced

The Large Language Models (LLM) and GPT capabilities are coming to the Microsoft 365 suite of products. These new AI capabilities will be called Microsoft 365 Copilot are combine the LLM capabilities with the Microsoft Graph and Microsoft 365 apps to create entirely new types of services and capabilities. For example, natural language could be used to request a summary of a large Word document. Or, natural language could be used to automatically create a PowerPoint presentation based on contents in another document or images/templates from another file. Natural language can be used to explore data in Excel, automatically create the charts and visuals, and execute what if scenarios. Or natural language can be used to review hundreds of emails focusing on immediate actions needed. Finally, natural language could be used to review a meeting in-progress, catch-up on missed portions of the meeting, identify sentiment, open tasks, or action items. Microsoft 365 Copilot is now in very limited private preview and will be released later this year. More information on Microsoft 365 Copilot can be found here. 

Why This Matters

• Copilot is the single largest advancement to ever come to the Microsoft 365 suite and will have significant impacts on how people work in the coming years.
• Tasks like building PowerPoint decks based on something like an RFP response document might now take minutes where it would have taken days before. 
• Customers that want to use these capabilities will need at least a Microsoft 365 E3 or E5 license foundation. Additional licensing may be required but it has not yet been announced. Standalone Office 365 licenses will not be able to use these new capabilities once launched.