Microsoft 365 Copilot Announced: AI Assistant Integrated into Word, Excel, and Teams
On March 16, 2023, Microsoft announced “Microsoft 365 Copilot,” embedding an AI assistant across its entire suite of Microsoft 365 apps, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams. Combining large language models with data from a user’s calendar, email, and documents via the Microsoft Graph, it drew attention as a move to bring the lessons learned from GitHub Copilot to the entire suite of office software.
Details
- Integrated apps: Built into Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, and Viva Engage — assisting with drafting documents, analyzing data in Excel, and automatically generating PowerPoint presentations
- Business Chat: A new feature that lets users ask questions spanning multiple apps and data sources, responding to natural-language requests like “summarize the status of this customer based on this morning’s meeting, email, and chat”
- Testing phase: At the time of announcement, 20 customers including Fortune 500 companies were testing the product, with plans to expand the preview over the following months
- Pricing: Pricing had not yet been decided at announcement, with details promised to be “shared in the coming months”
- Supporting data: The announcement cited a GitHub Copilot user survey, noting that 88% reported a boost in productivity and 77% reported spending less time searching for information
What happened next
Just one week after this announcement, on March 22, GitHub Copilot X was also unveiled, rapidly accelerating the AI assistant push across both Microsoft and GitHub. Microsoft 365 Copilot went on to announce plans for general availability in September 2023, with enterprise general availability officially beginning on November 1 of that year.