Microsoft is improving Office 365 with generative AI technology similar to ChatGPT

Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft Corp. , speaking during the opening session at Microsoft Developer Day in Singapore, on Friday, May 27, 2016. Microsoft has given up on the smartphone game. The company said on Wednesday it would cut up to 1,850 jobs, many of them in Finland – the main base of the mobile business that Microsoft acquired two years ago from Nokia Oyj. Photographer: Charles Pertwee/Bloomberg via Getty Images

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Microsoft brings generative AI technologies such as the popular chat application ChatGPT to the Microsoft 365 suite of business software.

The enterprise technology giant said Thursday that its new artificial intelligence features, dubbed Copilot, will be available in some of the company’s most popular business applications such as Word, PowerPoint and Excel.

Copilot’s technology is built on a type of artificial intelligence software known as a large language model, or LLM. Researchers have improved the capabilities of LLM in recent years to make it better able to understand and respond to text.

The tech industry has captivated the rise of generative AI technologies, best exemplified by LLMs that can do tasks like creating images based on written prompts and having extended conversations with people via chat interfaces.

“Today marks the next major step in the evolution of how we interact with computing, which will fundamentally change the way we work and spark a new wave of productivity growth,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in a statement. “With our new co-pilot at work, we are giving people more agency and making technology more accessible through the most universal interface – natural language.”

In an announcement, the company said Microsoft is touting Copilot’s features as more powerful than just “OpenAI’s Chat GPT built into Microsoft 365.” The company said that Word’s new Copilot feature will give people a “first draft to edit and iterate on — saving hours on writing, sourcing, and editing time.”

However, Microsoft added that “sometimes the copilot is right, and sometimes it’s usefully wrong,” acknowledging that current LLM technology can produce inaccurate responses. For example, the company’s recent rollout of a new AI-powered Bing chat tool has resulted in responses with factual inaccuracies and sometimes bizarre dialogue.

Microsoft executives demonstrated some of the capabilities of its Copilot tool Thursday during an online presentation.

Family members can create celebration plans faster and create companion PowerPoint slides that use photos stored from someone’s Microsoft OneDrive storage account for compelling visuals. Microsoft said business leaders can easily compose emails and send business proposals using the new tools.

Jared Spataro, Microsoft’s vice president of modern business and business applications, said Copilot is able to scan and take action based on all data from the Microsoft Graph, which stores content such as emails, files meetings, conversations, and calendar notes. This Microsoft Graph data helps make Copilot’s underlying large language model produce more specific and optimized responses that are tailored to the individual.

Microsoft didn’t say specifically when the new AI copilot features would appear and what the price would be, only to say that “in the coming months, we’ll be making Copilot available to all of our productivity apps — Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, Viva, Power Platform, and more.”

The company added that it is testing Copilot “with a small group of customers to get feedback and improve our models as we scale,” but did not disclose the name of the customers who are testing the software. A Microsoft spokesperson added in an email that the company is “testing Copilot with 20 customers, including eight in the Fortune 500.”

Jaime Tevan, chief scientist and technical fellow at Microsoft, said Copilot has passed numerous privacy checks and has “mitigation procedures” in the event of “software bugs, biases or abuse”.

“We will make mistakes, but when we do, we will deal with them quickly,” said Tiffan.

Much of the excitement around generative AI is due to the apparent overnight success of the ChatGPT tool, released by Microsoft-backed AI firm OpenAI in late November.

Microsoft said in January that it would provide OpenAI with a multi-year, multi-billion dollar investment, but did not disclose the exact number.

In February, Microsoft launched a new version of its Bing search engine that included a chatbot powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4 language technology.

OpenAI publicly unveiled its GPT-4 software earlier this week, touting the technology as a significant improvement over its predecessor, GPT-3, that can produce more creative and accurate text responses.

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