Artificial intelligence appears on the Microsoft suite

2023-11-06 23:20:00

Since everyone is getting involved, the most important office suite in the world is not going to shy away from this pleasure; Microsoft is getting into artificial intelligence with a new solution called “Copilot”. Word, PowerPoint, Excel and other tools of the bunch will be equipped with a conversational robot capable of creating or working for you.

For the moment, it is not intended for the general public, but for large companies. As reported The Parisian last November 2, the solution Microsoft 365 Copilot has been available since November 1 in France, for the modest sum of 30 euros per month per user, in addition to a premium subscription to Microsoft 365.

The idea is to have “a real impact on the time-consuming and boring tasks” of the company in order to save time. “There will be the possibility of asking questions in a natural way to documents and finding precise answers in data scattered throughout the company,” underlines Nicolas Gaudemet, executive director in charge of AI at Onepoint.

Concretely, how could this translate? The robot integrated into Word can write for you, summarize a document or extract specific data. In Excel, it could go through an entire series of tables to make a specific graph, or simply a calculation that you asked it to do. On PowerPoint, he would imagine different slides to make a presentation more attractive, or take care of placing your company logo in the top right corner of all your slides.

“In one request, Copilot’s AI will, for example, summarize the last five emails exchanged with a customer, this will save time and efficiency, because it will perform tasks that the we don’t do it or no longer do it due to lack of time”, adds Stéphane Roder, CEO of AI Builders.

Despite everything, as with many of its robotic friends, Copilot will not be perfect. The results, while impressively rapid, are not excellent in terms of quality. “This will clearly not eliminate jobs straight away, but will help to concentrate on tasks with higher added value,” summarizes Nicolas Gaudemet.

So the Copilot suite will take its first steps in business before trickling out to the public, if it works and is popular. In the meantime, a smaller version of this AI should appear on Windows 11 shortly.