Microsoft Copilot, the new artificial intelligence that will help in daily tasks

The corporate war on artificial intelligence (AI) continues, where brands seek to develop technology that complements daily and professional activities, which inspired the recent presentation of Copilot by Microsoft.

This initiative came out in march under the copilot for work slogan while in May it was reported that a preview version with new features had been made available, to be used by some users.

According to the entity, the AI ​​has been tested with 20 enterprise customers and in their feedback they indicate that it can transform the way meetings are run and creativity is unleashed as noted by Sherry Neubert, vice president and chief information officer at The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company.

—The ability to ask questions during a meeting is excellent, while the activity list and meeting summaries are very useful features. Although Copilot is still in the early stages of its development cycle, we are excited about what lies ahead.

Given the constant appearance of new names in the field of artificial intelligence, it is important to know what it is and how it works.

As explained to La Tercera by José Miguel Tobar, director of innovation and artificial intelligence at Wird, the concept can be defined as follows:

From a technical point of view, it is a probability-generating machine with extremely high processing capacity . Each time the AI ​​types a word, it is the result of a probabilistic calculation that defines which word is most likely to be correct. For example: if we say ‘Hello, how are you?’ The probability algorithm gives zero (or nearly zero) probability to all non-Spanish words. Then do the same with all the words that have to do with saying goodbye, since what matches is a greeting. Thus, in a few seconds, it generates hundreds of thousands of probabilistic calculations for each word.

For its functionality, Copilot integrates with everyday Microsoft apps to help people in their work, as in the following examples:

• word to edit and summarize, among other options.
• power point to create presentations.
• Excel where it helps identify information or create data visualizations.
• Outlook to manage the email inbox.
• teams where summaries can be generated in real time.
• business cat where data from documents, presentations, emails, calendar, notes and contacts are gathered.

Among the new features is the integration of OpenAI’s DALL-E image generator with PowerPoint, where the application can be prompted to generate custom images for presentations, among other options.

When discussing the subject of artificial intelligence, it is inevitable to think and make comparisons with the name of the moment, ChatGPT. Cristián Sepúlveda, expert in artificial intelligence and founder of ubiqq.ai clarifies the inevitable comparison that can arise:

—Copilot is not a competitor of ChatGPT, since it uses precisely this technology to improve the capabilities of its tools. . Additionally, Microsoft has a Partnership with OpenAI since 2019, where Microsoft provides the supercomputing infrastructure for training and operating these large language models and in return receives exclusivity to be its sole supplier clouds which provides services of its GPT technology.

In this line, Microsoft makes its commercial appearance in the model, according to Tobar.

—Like Facebook, which turned its entire strategy into a metaverse, Microsoft took a different route and focused on artificial intelligence. Therefore, he invested capital in the business OpenAI.com creator of ChatGPT, which means that Microsoft is a co-owner of ChatGPT . Microsoft’s model is not only to make your investment profitable based on the business capacity that OpenAI generates, but it is also achieve full integration of AI models in all its products, becoming a differentiator against the competition . They called this integration strategy Copilot and it is expected that every Microsoft product or service will have a built-in copilot. Years ago they already tried it with the Office assistant, Clippy. Do you remember?

And in practice when integrating this initiative into working with applications? The expert explains that the user will be able to give indications to Copilot and that it will execute them. “For example, in Excel you can give the indication how you intend to process the data and Copilot creates the formulas and performs the calculations thanks to this, we will all be advanced users of Excel”, he anticipates.

According to Sepúlveda’s vision for professional tasks, he suggests that it will have wide applications, with particular emphasis on the world of work.

— The main thing about these capabilities is that they are not limited to a single task, because it is possible to write the instruction in natural language and thanks to the large language models, I can get an answer to my question. This means that the tool can be used in thousands of different ways depending on the company, it’s like a swiss army knife for the job .

Everything seems to indicate that the Microsoft co-driver will be an important addition to the functions that have accompanied office work for years, but can it be used now?

For now, Microsoft has enabled Office Copilot for some business users it is therefore expected that in the coming months it will be tested by more people.

Although the offer aimed at companies seems to be the main objective for the creation of Copilot, Cristián Sepúlveda foresees that this artificial intelligence will also benefit the user in their personal tasks.

—Anyone using the Office365 suite will be able to use these features, as they will be integrated directly into the tools, no external service is required. Although primarily aimed at businesses, these features are useful for individuals, students, and others. . In the end, what the tool does is that it allows us to focus on the 20% that are important and the rest of the tasks that consume time and are not the focus of the work, rely on generative artificial intelligence.

Faced with the generalization of AI, the company announced the program Early access to Microsoft 365 Copilot (early access to Microsoft 365), Preliminary payment model which will be for the exclusive use of guests estimating an initial group of 600 customers worldwide.