Microsoft debuts the Microsoft 365 Copilot early access program

Back in March, Microsoft unveiled Microsoft 365 Copilot, a new AI-powered assistant for its Microsoft 365 apps and services. Essentially, the tool’s designed to help people with generating emails, documents, and more. The tool is powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4 and ships with Copilot for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, and the Power Platform.

And now, as more organizations begin to embrace and inject AI into their services and products, there’s a growing need to help them learn how to leverage AI capabilities to reshape work and ultimately promote creativity as well as productivity.

Microsoft 365 Copilot Early Access Program

As such, Microsoft has announced the launch of the Microsoft 365 Copilot Early Access Program. It’s an invitation-only, paid preview program that’s set to roll out to only 600 clients across the globe at first.

The company has received overwhelming feedback from the clients it’s been testing the tool with indicating that the tool can be leveraged to transform and reshape work. The organizations further added that the Copilot can be used to make meetings more impactful and better overall. What’s more, it can be used to help boost creativity.

Semantic Index for Copilot

Additionally, Microsoft has also announced that it’s set to start rolling out Semantic Index for Copilot, a new capability in Microsoft 365 E3 and E5. The tool will present users with a detailed report highlighting company data alongside the user. The company further added that it makes use of conceptual understanding so that it’s possible to meet your needs and wants.

Aside from the Copilot early access program, Microsoft has also made several announcements highlighting new capabilities coming to Microsoft 365 Copilot. Here’s everything you need to know:

Copilot in Whiteboard

Microsoft is bringing significant changes to Copilot in Whiteboard such that users will now be able to leverage its capabilities to make their Microsoft Teams meetings more interactive and impactful. In that, they can make use of the tool to come up with creative ideas, and designs that bring ideas to life, and even use it to organize ideas into themes.

The company further added that:

And with the power of Microsoft Designer, Copilot in Whiteboard can turn your ideas into original images that complement and enhance your text.

Copilot in PowerPoint

The company also indicated that it will be incorporating Dall-E, OpenAI’s image generator into PowerPoint. As such, users can ask Copilot to generate custom images that will make their presentations better.

What’s more, with these new changes, users will now also have the capability to refresh the content in their presentations by either turning bullet points into paragraphs or vice versa. Additionally, they’ll also be able to change the tone of the text in the presentation and even make it more contextual.

Copilot in Outlook

If you struggle with composing emails, Copilot is getting a new update that will make the process easier for you. All you need to do is to draft an email and the AI assistant will do the rest for you which includes providing tips and suggestions that will help you improve on clarity as well as tone,

Copilot in OneNote

In April, we got a slight glimpse of how Microsoft intends AI Copilot to work in OneNote. The company stated that the tool leverages “the power of large language models (LLMs) with your data from the Microsoft Graph—notes, calendars, emails, chats, documents, meetings, and more—and the Microsoft 365 apps to turn your words into a powerful productivity tool.”

And now, Microsoft has detailed that users can enhance and redesign their notebooks on OneNote using just their words. It further added that users can use it to reorganize content, change format, and even highlight key points.

Copilot in Loop

Loop components provide multiple users collaborating on a project with a centralized location where they can share, exchange, and create ideas. And while this is quite helpful, over time the space begins to get cluttered making it impossible for some users to keep up with new changes and information coming in.

But luckily with the new update, users can ask the Copilot to summarize all the content on the Loop content thus making it easier to catch up with everything. What’s more, it’s possible to edit the summaries generated by the Copilot, add additional details, and even send out the summaries to other users as Loop components.

Copilot in Viva

Microsoft is bringing Copilot to Microsoft Viva, The tool will help employees curate their own learning experiences including designing upskilling paths,
discovering relevant learning resources, and scheduling time for assigned training.

The company has also announced that academies in Viva Learning has finally shipped to general availability. This means that organizations can now create role and line-of-business-specific experiences, thus providing employees with great learning opportunities.

What are your thoughts on the Copilot expansion? Let us know in the comments.

Featured image via Bing Image Creator