Microsoft introduced “Wave 2” of its Copilot AI assistant, bringing a bunch of latest features designed to remodel how individuals and businesses interact with AI of their every day workflows.
At the core of Wave 2 is Copilot Pages, a novel digital workspace that Microsoft describes as “the primary latest digital artifact for the AI age.”
In essence, the brand new Copilot announcements offer a totally AI-embedded workspace for media and content production, mixing OpenAI’s GPT-4o model right into a coherent digital workspace.
It allows teams to collaborate in real-time with AI assistance, turning AI-generated content into editable, shareable documents.
The goal? To save business time and enhance productivity while driving paid adoption of AI tools. Wave 2 indicates Microsoft’s attempts to show its multi-billion dollar OpenAI investment into revenue.
By promoting Copilot’s business appeal, the corporate goals to convert more corporations into paying customers for its premium AI tools.
Jared Spataro, Microsoft’s Corporate VP for AI at Work, explains the brand new Copilot concept: “Pages takes ephemeral AI-generated content and makes it durable, so you’ll be able to edit it, add to it, and share it with others. You and your team can work collaboratively in a page with Copilot, seeing everyone’s work in real time and iterating with Copilot like a partner.”
The rollout of those features varies, with some immediately available and others predicted to roll out in the approaching weeks or months.
Here’s a round-up of the whole lot Microsoft announced at their live event:
Copilot Pages
Copilot Pages is the centerpiece of Microsoft’s Wave 2 update, offering a thoroughly AI-embedded approach to collaborative work. It works by transforming Copilot’s AI-generated responses from fleeting chat messages into lasting, editable documents.
To use it, you choose an “Edit in Pages” button next to a Copilot response, opening a brand new window alongside the unique chat thread. Users can work inside that window to refine and construct upon the AI’s output together.
Pages integrates with BizChat, Microsoft’s hub for combining web, corporate, and business data.
Like most of those features, Pages is currently exclusive to paid Copilot for Microsoft 365 subscribers.
PowerPoint powered by AI
The latest PowerPoint Narrative Builder goals to streamline the presentation creation process. Users can input a subject, and the AI will generate an overview in minutes.
Microsoft can also be introducing a Brand Manager feature to make sure presentations align with company guidelines and maintain consistency across different channels.
That’s one other business-centric feature designed to drive greater uptake amongst enterprise users.
In Microsoft’s words, “Accelerating every business process with Copilot—to grow revenue and reduce costs—is the very best technique to gain competitive advantage within the age of AI.”
Supporting businesses is a central theme here. Microsoft is pushing businesses to opt into its growing AI ecosystem, converting them into paying customers – customers who pays way more than the typical ChatGPT Plus subscriber at $20 a month.
Smarter meetings with Teams
Copilot in Teams now offers more comprehensive meeting summaries by analyzing each spoken conversations and chat messages.
As Microsoft puts it, “Now with Copilot in Teams, no doubt, idea, or contribution is left behind.”
Ending email overload in Outlook
Addressing the perennial challenge of email management, Microsoft introduces “Prioritize my inbox” for Outlook.
This feature uses AI to discover necessary emails, provide concise summaries, and explain why certain messages were flagged as priorities. In the longer term, users will find a way to show Copilot their personal priorities to refine this feature.
Copilot Agents
Perhaps probably the most intriguing addition is Copilot agents – customizable AI assistants that may perform specific tasks with various degrees of autonomy.
Microsoft can also be launching an agent builder, which can make it easier for users to create and deploy AI helpers for various tasks, somewhat much like Custom GPTs inside ChatGPT.
Again, Agents are geared toward business users. In Microsoft’s words, “We’re introducing Copilot agents, making it easier and faster than ever to automate and execute business processes in your behalf—enabling you to scale your team like never before.
Excel evolves with Python integration
Copilot in Excel now includes Python integration, designed to speed up data evaluation.
Users can perform advanced tasks like forecasting and risk evaluation using natural language prompts without having to jot down code.
Microsoft’s AI productivity revolution kicks up a notch
Copilot Wave 2 represents a giant jump forward for AI integration into the Microsoft ecosystem.
However, amidst the deluge of announcements, some critical areas appear to have flown under the radar.
For one, security and privacy concerns are rife since a lot of these tools will interact with sensitive personal and business data. While Microsoft asserts that Pages has Enterprise Data Protection, details on how this works in practice are scarce.
Other features, similar to the flexibility to investigate files without opening them, could also be convenient, but additionally they mean Copilot has relatively everlasting access to sensitive information. This level of AI involvement within the enterprise data ecosystem will breed some level of discomfort.
The same goes for AI integration into Outlook. Not everyone’s ready for an AI system to sift through personal and skilled exchanges.
Microsoft must display that Copilot’s advantages outweigh the privacy concerns while being transparent about how user data is handled.
As Wave 2 rolls out, it’s clear that Microsoft is betting big on AI integration. Google is predicted to reply with its own latest wave of AI-driven features for Workspace.
Time will only tell how useful these tools are and the extent of business adoption, or whether we want slightly longer for people to simply accept AI’s massive front-, center-, and behind-the-scenes role in our personal and business lives.
