Microsoft introduces AI office copilot in fast-moving race with Google By CIOTechOutlook Team

Microsoft introduces AI office copilot in fast-moving race with Google

CIOTechOutlook Team | Friday, 17 March 2023, 05:12 IST

Microsoft Corp. bragged about its most recent initiatives to make artificial intelligence more accessible to people in response to a flurry of announcements made this week by its rival Google with updates to its own widely used office software.

An updated AI "copilot" was previewed by the tech corporation for Microsoft 365, a collection of Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, and Outlook emails. AI will provide a draught in these applications, Microsoft claimed, first available to a small number of commercial clients for testing, speeding up content creation and freeing up workers' time.

The Redmond, Washington-based company demonstrated a new "business chat" experience that can collect data and execute activities across applications in response to a user's textual demand, outperforming competitors through investments in OpenAI, the company that created ChatGPT.

"We believe this next generation of AI will unlock a new wave of productivity growth," Satya Nadella, Microsoft's chief executive, said in a livestreamed presentation.

The barrage of news this week, which includes new funding for AI company Adept, shows how big and small businesses are engaged in a tight rivalry to introduce software that may change the way people work.

The two main players are Microsoft and Alphabet Inc., the owner of Google, which on Tuesday promoted AI capabilities for Gmail and a "magic wand" for writing in its own word processor. Both Microsoft and Google demonstrated similar capabilities.

With the release of ChatGPT last year, the chatbot sensation that made the world aware of the possibilities of so-called large language models, the rush to invest in and create new products got underway.

That technology powers Microsoft's new copilot alongside other business and application data, learning from past data how to create content anew. This kind of AI is also developing quickly. The chatbot in Microsoft's upgraded Bing search engine uses a more potent version known as GPT-4, which was just this week started to be released by OpenAI.

Similar to the live notes by AI that Google showed to reporters this week, Microsoft also claimed that AI can summarise email chains and online meetings as they happen in its Teams collaboration programme.

According to the company, Microsoft's new business chat feature can respond to queries like "explain my team how we revised the product plan" by drawing insights from a morning's worth of emails, meetings, and chat threads.