Microsoft’s year of AI continues with tentative March announcements

Microsoft is gearing up for another artificial intelligence led announcement tentatively scheduled for next month where it will showcase more OpenAI influenced technologies for its productivity suite.

During its Bing + ChatGPT announcement earlier this week, Microsoft alluded to the difference between the publicly available ChatGPT experience and a seemingly beefier version that leverages its Prometheus Model in Bing.

According to The Verge, Microsoft’s Prometheus Model powered version of ChatGPT will be in more than just Bing as the company plans to share details in March of its push into productivity with OpenAI’s language AI technologies.

It should be noted that Microsoft has already implemented OpenAI technologies into many of its productivity and enterprise tools such as Azure, Microsoft Viva Sales, Word and Outlook. The integration has been subtle until now with OpenAI powering the suggested reply function in compositions for Outlook and Word.

However, it looks like Microsoft plans to expand the current Bing sidebar integrated tools that appear alongside Office web apps into dedicated apps which could span both desktop and mobile use.

Based on The Verge reporting, Microsoft is looking to bolster its templates, suggested graphics, graphs and other visualizations in apps such as Excel and PowerPoint with more details leveraged from OpenI language models.

Microsoft appears to be stepping on the gas as a way for the company to get out ahead of similar announcements it believes Google will have in the coming months as well.

Sources tell The Verge that Microsoft was originally planning to launch its new Bing AI in late February, but pushed the date forward to this week just as Google was preparing its own announcements. Google then announced its ChatGPT rival Bard a day ahead of Microsoft’s event.

Contrary to the neck and neck pace of announcements and perceived competition, a number of Microsoft executives believe they’re ahead of Google’s development in this particular market, and that their competition may come from lesser-known rivals in the sector.

Microsoft is currently enjoying a bump in media attention and a slightly renewed interest in Bing as it saw more than 1 million sign ups for the Bing +ChatGPT waitlist and its own Bing app rank as the third most popular app in Apple’s App Store in the US this week.