Hey there! Have you heard the latest news from Microsoft? They’re bringing artificial intelligence to the workplace to eliminate boring, repetitive tasks. At their “Future of Work” event, Microsoft unveiled their AI-powered Microsoft 365 Copilot, which can create content in Office apps with just a simple text request. You can ask PowerPoint to create a presentation based on a Word document and apply animations or styles across all your slides – pretty neat, right?
And that’s not all! Word, Excel, Outlook, and Teams all have similar AI-powered features that can create proposals, change the tone of reports, predict the effect of a variable change, summarize emails, and even recap meetings. Microsoft is also introducing a new Business Chat tool that brings in information from multiple apps to help deal with project developments, customer incidents, and planning.
This new technology is running on the same OpenAI GPT-4 model that powers the upgraded Bing search. It’s more factual, has higher performance, and is less likely to venture out of accepted boundaries than its predecessor, GPT-3.5, which is currently used to power ChatGPT.
Microsoft is currently testing 365 Copilot with 20 business customers and plans to expand access in the coming months. The company will also share details of IT administrator controls to help deploy the technology, and pricing and other details will be available in the months ahead.
This comes just days after Google announced their plans to bring generative AI to its Gmail and Workspace apps. The feature will only be available to English-language US users by the end of March, but it should reach more languages and countries in the future.
It’s clear that both Microsoft and Google are racing to incorporate AI into their products. Microsoft is using AI to gain an edge in search, video chat, and other common productivity tasks, while Google is treating AI as a defensive tool to protect its core search business against competitors. Regardless of who wins the race, it’s safe to say that AI is becoming more of a mainstay in the working world.
So, are you excited about these new AI-powered features? We certainly are! Don’t forget to follow us on Facebook and Instagram at @techmonquay to stay up-to-date on the latest tech news.
