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Esteban Solano G.
Esteban Solano G.

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The future of work: Introducing Microsoft 365 Copilot 🤖

This blog post is available in English here and from my blog here.

Introducing Microsoft 365 Copilot: Combine your cloud data available in Microsoft Graph with artificial intelligence technology! We are at a moment in the history of work where the maximum aspiration is productivity and time efficiency.

Nowadays, we leave aside (sometimes due to its cost or extra time required) aspects such as creativity and art in order to achieve things on time and meet deadlines. How to achieve rebalancing and leaving aside the cognitive load of our work to refocus on what matters and feel that we take advantage of all the daily activities of work?

Preview

Well, the future of work in 2023 is increasingly being taken over by intelligent bots that, far from taking our jobs away, seek to relieve the workload and allow us to make more use of creativity and excellence. On March 16th, 2023 Microsoft presented the ‘Copilot’ initiatives for the Office 365 suite and many widely known products such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, among others that will be resized with an increasingly intelligent assistant capable of getting the most out of our work with Artificial Intelligence. You can watch the event recording here.

In Jared Spartaro’s words during the event, we are finding a way to reconnect with the soul of our work and a new stage of how we interact with computers.

Introducing Microsoft 365 Copilot:

Microsoft 365 Copilot combines your cloud data available in Microsoft Graph with LLM (Large Language Models) technology to perform natural language computing and conversational style assisted by Copilot, which will be available throughout the suite of productivity tools through Business Chat to keep us up to date, generate content and automate many of the derived activities such as scheduling, sending reports (contents, etc.), extending it with automated tools such as workflows with Power Apps.

The pillars used by this technology are based on the principles of Security, Compliance, Privacy and Artificial Intelligence (Responsible AI), which makes them ready for use in business and personal life. One of the most highlighted features is the integrated use of Copilot in Teams, which can be used in different ways to interact with content such as Documents, Contacts, Email, among others. If you are familiar with Copilot technology on GitHub, which was recently announced (already being used by ChatGPT 4!), which was introduced some time ago, it has proven to be very useful for developers to automate ordinary tasks, review code and facilitate automation in order to focus on background work.

More recently, with the introduction of ChatGPT 4/3, LLMs and increasingly intelligent chatbots, many of these capabilities gain greater strength and impact on the productivity of our day-to-day work.

How it works: Natural language.

How does it do it? Copilot introduces natural language, just like having a conversation and understanding the context of a conversation about what you need, and being able to display content such as writing an email, summarizing a document or other content and being able to keep up with all the load (understand more context and noise occasions) derived from the digital work environment, which can be overwhelming at times.

Just look at some of the demos to get an idea of the great potential and features that have been released in the same Bing search engine.

Demo: PowerPoint

Of my favorite features, the ability to give context to Copilot’s situation and generate content based on it and cloud documents is one of the best that Copilot incorporates, allowing you to collapse, expand or give touches to the tone of the text (neutral, professional, casual) just before you can send it. Or save it as a draft to edit later, for example in business proposals when there is little preparation time or apply common or company formats. How many times have you had to put together a PPT from a document you already had in Word? Now you can do it with just a few instructions from Copilot!

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzoZ_f7ji5Q (ingles)

With all of this, let's stay tunned on upcoming announcements and attend the next //Build 2023 (hibrid format!) which now has registration opened! I would enjoy to hear from your impressions. Do you think it's going to change the work as we know it?

Let's keep in touch!

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