Microsoft
on Wednesday announced a slew of new capabilities coming to the Copilot artificial intelligence add-on for its Microsoft 365 productivity applications.
In the year since Microsoft-backed OpenAI introduced the popular ChatGPT virtual assistant, companies have expressed interest in how AI might make their workers more efficient, and several other software makers, including Adobe
, Google
and Salesforce
, have also come out with tools.
There are concerns about whether Copilot for Microsoft 365 is worth $30 per person per month. Many analysts expected a lower price when Microsoft announced its decision in July. Now Microsoft is responding by extending the feature list while maintaining the price.
Until this point, Copilot could show personalized action items from missed meetings in Outlook, prepare draft PowerPoint presentations, create illustrations of information in Word documents and generate forecasts based on existing data in Excel files. A chat feature informed by internal organizational data could summarize unread email messages, recommend changes to files and come up with highlights for documents.
A new Copilot Studio service will give corporate workers an easy way to enrich Copilot’s knowledge with newly integrated data from business software such as ServiceNow
and Workday
. Copilot Studio is “tucked into the $30 price point, so it really bolsters the value,” said Jared Spataro, a Microsoft corporate vice president, told CNBC in an interview.
Here are some of the other enhancements coming for those with Copilot licenses: