FILE PHOTO:Microsoft announced a new AI-powered Copilot powered by GPT-4 for all its Microsoft 365 apps and services.
| Photo Credit: Reuters
In March this year, Microsoft announced a new AI-powered Copilot powered by GPT-4 for all its Microsoft 365 apps and services like Word, Outlook, Excel, Teams and others. Copilot is a digital assistant that you can help complete tasks for you – like making a PowerPoint presentation based on a Word document, analysing data in an Excel sheet, or summarising a meeting that were late to in Teams. The chatbot is embedded within these apps and appears as a sidebar. While making the announcement, Microsoft 365 head Jared Spataro promised Copilot would be “a whole new way of working.”
Here’s everything that Copilot can help you with on every application:
- Word: The tool can help you summarise, draft and revise documents on Word. You can also ask Copilot for suggestions to improve your writing or even to brainstorm new ideas to get over a writer’s block.
- Excel: On Excel, Copilot can analyse numbers and give new insights, create quick data visualisations, detect patterns as well as create Python workflows.
- PowerPoint: Copilot can make entire presentations out of an idea given in natural language instructions. You can also give more context using specific content from an older document. It can also summarise long presentations.
- Outlook: Copilot can also help organise and clear your inbox in a matter of minutes. It can also summarise conversations and give suggestions on what to do next.
- Business Chat: Microsoft also introduced another new feature called Business Chat which runs works across the LLM and scans through all the apps giving summaries of meetings, pull entries from your calendar, check if you’ve had recent contact with a client and make work plans. The responses from Business Chat feel very similar to Bing chat’s responses.
The Microsoft 365 toolkit is now generally available to all users for $30 per month for users of the Microsoft 365 E3, E5, Business Standard and Business Premium packages. Aside from being on a subscription plan, other prerequisites that you need to have include:
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- Accounts for all Apps: Users should obviously have an account on all apps like Teams, Outlook or Microsoft Loop.
- Microsoft Entra IDs: All users must have a Microsoft Entra or Azure Active Directory ID configured by the Microsoft 365 Admin Center.
- OneDrive accounts: To be able to access all features of Copilot, like tools for sharing and saving files, users should have a OneDrive account.
Users should also be on the ‘Current’ or ‘Monthly Enterprise Channel’ to access Copilot in Microsoft 365.
Assigning Licenses for Copilot Microsoft 365
Once you have checked off all the prerequisites, you can assign licenses to users and add them as Microsoft Admins.
Go to the ‘Assign product licenses’ pane for every user and choose the appropriate license. You can also expand the ‘apps’ section to access Copilot. The Microsoft Admins can then assign licenses to select employees at any point of time from the ‘Active users’ page.
How to access Copilot on Microsoft 365
Copilot has already been integrated into Microsoft 365 apps for some users but in case you aren’t able to access the features yet, you should update your Microsoft apps. Once updated, you can look for the Copilot icon which is usually present in the ribbon menu of the app. For some apps, Copilot will launch automatically like with Word or Excel the dialogue box will offer suggestions on its own.
Microsoft also suggests users to enable the ‘feedback features’ within Copilot to understand more about their experience. Plus, you can get a Microsoft 365 usage report for an overview of the user adoption, retention and engagement. The full reports can be accessed from the Microsoft 365 admin center via the ‘Reports’ and ‘Usage’ options.
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