Microsoft has announced a new AI-powered assistant to help increase productivity in Microsoft 365 apps, which is currently being tested by select commercial customers.

Known as Copilot, the new AI feature helps create and manage documents, presentations and spreadsheets, as well as sort and respond to emails.

Copilot is coming to all Microsoft 365 apps, from Word, Excel, power point, Outlookand Teams to Microsoft Viva and Power Platform.

It uses the large GPT-4 multimodal model behind the new Bing Chat and works like a chatbot, allowing users to generate content based on prompts exchanged through a chatbot interface.

According to OpenAI“although less capable than humans in many real-world scenarios, exhibits human-level performance on various professional and academic benchmarks.”

It harnesses the power of large language models (LLM) with user data in Microsoft Graph and Microsoft 365 to increase productivity.

“Copilot combines the power of big language models with your data and applications to turn your words into the most powerful productivity tool on the planet,” said Jared Spataro, Microsoft vice president for modern work and business apps.

“Based on the content and context of your business, Copilot delivers relevant and actionable results. Copilot marks a new era of computing that will fundamentally transform the way we work.”

It’s designed to make writing, editing, and summarizing documents in Word less tedious, and it’ll work alongside you, generating drafts that can be further customized and edited to include more detail.

Copilot in PowerPoint can create presentations with the click of a mouse, allowing users to import content from other documents and use natural language commands to describe the ideas that should be included in each slide.

When it comes to Excel data analysis, Copilot makes data visualization super-fast and will also make it easy to discover meaningful insights and trends.

Copilot can also revolutionize email management in Outlook, allowing users to spend less time sorting through their inboxes and more time communicating more effectively.

“It can already create, summarize, analyze, collaborate, and automate using your company’s specific content and context. But it doesn’t stop there,” Spataro said. added.

“Copilot knows how to order applications (eg, “animate this slide”) and work across multiple applications, translating a Word document into a PowerPoint presentation.”