At Microsoft Ignite 2023, we are announcing new innovations across Microsoft Copilot—one copilot experience that runs across all our surfaces, understanding your context on the web, on your PC, and at work to bring the right skills to you when you need them across work and life. Microsoft is the Copilot company. And soon there will be a Copilot for everyone and for everything you do.
On November 1, 2023, Copilot for Microsoft 365 became generally available for enterprises, and already, customers like Visa, BP, Honda, Pfizer, and Chevron, and also partners such as Accenture, EY, KPMG, Kyndryl, and PwC, are betting on Copilot.
New Work Trend Index data shows that already, Copilot makes people more productive and creative, and saves time—77 percent of people who have used copilot said they don’t want to give it up, 70 percent said copilot makes them more productive, and 68 percent said it improved the quality of their work. In experiments that we ran, users were 29 percent faster overall across a series of tasks and caught up on missed meetings nearly four times faster. It’s clear from the data: the age of copilots is here.
It’s early days, and we will continue to take a learn-it-all approach to deeply understand both the perceived and quantitative impact of Copilot on work and learning alongside our customers. Read on for more details about the announcements.
We are taking the next step to simplify the user experience and make copilot more accessible to everyone. Bing Chat and Bing Chat Enterprise will now simply become Copilot. It has foundational capabilities, like the ability to answer questions, create content, and reason over data. And it has web grounding, so it always has access to the latest information. When you’re signed into Copilot with your Entra ID, you get commercial data protection for free—which means chat data isn’t saved, Microsoft has no eyes-on access, and your data isn’t used to train the models.
Copilot for Microsoft 365 has those same foundational capabilities, web grounding, and commercial data protection, and importantly, it also inherits your existing Microsoft 365 security, privacy, identity, and compliance policies—so you know it’s enterprise-grade. Your data is logically isolated and protected within your Microsoft 365 tenant, and always within your control. Copilot for Microsoft 365 doesn’t change any of our data residency or data handling promises. And Copilot acts on behalf of an individual user—so it can’t access any information you don’t have permission to see. Copilot for Microsoft 365 has access to the Microsoft Graph and is integrated into the Microsoft 365 apps that millions of people use every day.
We also announced Copilot for Sales and Copilot for Service.
You can access Copilot for Microsoft 365 in Windows and in Bing.
At Ignite, we announced Microsoft Copilot Studio, a low-code tool to customize Copilot for Microsoft 365 and build standalone copilots. It brings together a set of powerful conversational capabilities—from custom GPTs, generative AI plugins, and manual topics. You can customize Copilot for Microsoft 365 with your own enterprise scenarios—build, test, and publish standalone copilots and custom GPTs and manage and secure your customizations and standalone copilots with the right access, data, user controls, and analytics. Copilot Studio exposes a full end-to-end lifecycle for customizations and standalone copilots within a single pane of glass—build, deploy, analyze, and manage all from within the same web experience. With Copilot Studio, you can connect Copilot to other data sources, including pre-built or custom plugins and GPTs, to tap into any system of record—from SAP, Workday, and ServiceNow—and even your own proprietary business solutions. Copilot Studio is available today, and the integration with Copilot for Microsoft 365 is now available in preview.
At Ignite, we shared three thematic updates to Copilot: more personalization, sophisticated mathematical and analysis capabilities, and Copilot becoming a full participant in collaboration.
We’re bringing more personalization to Copilot. New capabilities allow you to give Copilot details about your role and instructions on what’s important to you, so you can get tailored responses based on your unique role and preferences, including preferences on formatting, style, and tone. This new capability will roll out initially in Word and PowerPoint and will follow soon in the other Microsoft 365 apps, complementing previously announced personalization features such as “sound like me” for Copilot in Outlook, which matches your unique writing style and voice when drafting emails.
The recently announced Python in Excel allows you to perform sophisticated mathematical analysis using one of the most powerful programming languages in the world. And, in combination with Copilot in Excel, users will be able to unlock this capability using natural language.
We’re also announcing powerful new capabilities that make Copilot a full participant in collaboration, helping everyone stay focused on the discussion in a Microsoft Teams meeting, turn notes from a brainstorm into visualizations on a digital whiteboard, and build shared workspaces in Microsoft Loop that help your team collaborate and stay in sync.
Read on for the full list of new capabilities in Copilot for Microsoft 365—all generally available unless otherwise noted.
Copilot in Microsoft Teams meetings
Copilot in Outlook
Copilot in Loop
Copilot in word
Copilot in Powerpoint
We are also continuing to test Copilot with small businesses and entrepreneurs as part of our Early Access Program, and we’ll share more on broader availability in the coming months.
Customize Microsoft Copilot and build standalone copilots
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