Microsoft officially launches Microsoft 365 Copilot: AI fully embedded in Office

On the evening of 16 March, Microsoft officially announced the launch of Microsoft 365 Copilot. Copilot means co-pilot in civil aviation, and although the Chinese name has not yet been announced, it can actually be understood as an AI assistant, or ChatGPT for Office.

You can let Copilot help you fix Word documents, analyse Excel spreadsheets, quickly generate PPT slides, write an Outlook weekly work report and more through text commands and interaction.

Microsoft says it is currently testing the Copilot feature with customers through both Microsoft 365 and Business Chat, but has not set a specific go-live date.

Practical roles include

• Word: support for authoring, summarising, collaborating
• PowerPoint: Natural language PPT content creation, also supports referencing documents to create PPTs
• Excel: View insights, trend analysis and create visual charts
• Outlook: help manage your inbox and save on communication costs
• Teams: Real-time summaries and action items in a conversational environment to make meetings more productive
• Power Platform: Helps developers accelerate and simplify their code work
• Business Chat: brings together data from documents, presentations, emails, calendars, notes and contacts to help summarise chats, compose emails, find key dates and even create plans based on other project documents.

Microsoft has announced pricing and licensing options for Microsoft 365 Copilot, which will be available to the public soon.