Abhijay Raj Vaish, Pune
Microsoft announced a series of AI features to be integrated across all the Microsoft 365 products in the Copilot Wave 2 event held on September 16. The live-streamed event unveiled a total of 700 product updates with 150 of them already embedded in the software. The integration of these new features is said to drastically optimize performance while also making a move towards the GPT-40 model.
As part of the Copilot Wave 2 project, recent AI developments like Copilot pages and autonomous AI agents would now serve as virtual AI assistants with capabilities ranging from extracting key data points from the data to monitoring inbox for recent mails. The prioritise my inbox feature would be launched later this year that will assist users to determine priority emails based on the content and sender. The features are enabled through Bizchat, a graph-based feature in the Copilot sphere. The virtual event also unveiled updates to Microsoft 365 apps like Copilot assistance in Excel with Python, Narrative builder in powerpoint among other additions to Outlook and OneDrive.
The event live-streamed on LinkedIn and on Microsoft’s official website was hosted by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and the tech giant’s Vice-president of AI Jared Spataro. The updates are aimed at automating mundane tasks and easing workflows for employees. Satya Nadella called these developments as UI for AI alleging a transformative workflow for more than 400 million Microsoft 365 users. Since the company launched Microsoft Copilot 18 months ago, around 60 percent of the Fortune 500 companies have adopted the software for their businesses. The future prospects of the Copilot have been said to evolve in three major ways. The integration of web, work and pages is the first major development that would allow any information to be converted into a multilayered AI canvas. Secondly, the integration of Copilot with the several applications under the Microsoft 365 suite. The third would be the introduction of the Copilot agents for smoother experience.
Several companies such as Vodafone, Honeywell, Cognizant, Lumen Technologies, Bank of Queensland among others have adopted the software for increasing efficiency.