Microsoft Copilot is a set of AI-driven features that combine and power existing Microsoft products (Windows 11, Bing Search, Microsoft Edge) and all your unmissable productivity apps (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams). The idea is to use Copilot as you search, write, and brainstorm, right in your workspace. There is also the free version you can access from your browser. A quick overview of how it works and what it can do.
AI Leadership – Fiona Passantino, early July 2024
What’s Copilot?
Our happiness and joy at work is partially influenced by the tools we use every day. While Open AI’s ChatGPT, with its voice-activation update on the way, has everyone’s attention at the moment, Microsoft has been quietly building AI into their unmissable Office tools from the inside.
Unlike ChatGPT, Google Gemini or Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot isn’t just “one thing”. It’s the name of a set of AI-driven features that combine and power existing Microsoft products, such as Windows 11, Bing Search, Microsoft Edge and all our favorite productivity apps (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Edge, Outlook, Teams)[i].
The idea is to use it as you search, write, and brainstorm to save you time and improve your work. All together in a single frame without the “copy-paste-switch-windows” circus we have all enjoyed until now.
What’s confusing is that there are two basic flavors of Copilot. The open access chat window can be queried from any browser, even the non-Microsoft ones. It looks rather similar to the others – a simple context window, a few buttons to refresh, rewrite, vary and stop generating. This platform is available to everyone with a Microsoft account.
Then, there is the premium service for paying 365 users, known as the “Microsoft Copilot for… (fill in your favorite productivity app here)”. This is available via sidebar panels, appearing on the right side of your Word to PowerPoint to Excel app. You find your favorite AI support via a kind of AI-app store, and you can collect every Special AI Friend imaginable and a few more besides you will likely have never heard of, and may never use.
Getting Started (for free)
A great way to dive in as a free user is to simply start with the browser. Go to Copilot.microsoft.com and sign in with a personal Microsoft account.
Straight away, you see a prompt window you can start to query. Ask question of Bing, Microsoft’s beleaguered chatbot, then switch over to writing in Word with AI support. Try AI forecasting in Excel, put in a request using the Microsoft Azure infrastructure.
The nice part about this interface is the drop-down menu on the right panel. You have access to several “expert” bots that can help with multimodal queries, one at a time. Beware: once you flip to another mode, you lose memory in your original query.
Designer is good; very much a Dall-E “wrapper app” that allows prompt refinement and short-term memory, and executes the quick-and-dirty key visual you need for that office “Monday Muffin” event.
It does seem to want your undivided attention; if you navigate away or do something else waiting for the image to appear, it stops and patiently waits for you to return. The good part is that Design gives you a cute “please wait” illustration to make the time go by faster.
In addition, you can explore “Cooking Assistant”, “Fitness” or have all the spontaneity squeezed out of your next holiday with “Vacation Planner”. All of these tools support PDF, image or document uploads, and you can switch back and forth between a Notebook, useful for dumping the results of your sessions, and the chat window.
The Professional Experience
The big difference with the paid experience – and one we all fundamentally need to understand and become comfortable with – is that the AI lives in your actual Microsoft environment. It has access to your chats, mails, documents, threads, Teams chatter and schedule. It’s an assistant who is aware of everything you’re doing, who you’re talking to and the people you work with but doesn’t act on your behalf… yet.
This cuts both ways: having cutting-edge AI technology running your professional account makes you want to have an agent executing those tiresome administrative tasks on its own; change my hair appointment to one hour later. Wish my friend a happy birthday. Find a place I can have my poodle groomed on a Sunday afternoon.
There is a little button at the bottom to select to keep your data “safe”. The fact that it’s there at all means the free users have to assume that all their prompts are going straight to the Microsoft Baby Bot Training and Finishing Academy. This AI technically, easily, can dip into your personal business. And likely will someday once we all adjust to the higher altitude. This is a bit disquieting if you think about it for a few minutes, but that feeling quickly leaves you once you’ve had a romp in the efficiency matrix.
Querying the Copilot bot becomes even more interesting when you use your voice. The Windows dictation feature sends what you’re saying directly over to the AI and replies back in voice, or text, making it feel like you’re having a seamless conversation with a friendly, chirpy intern sitting next to you.
Microsoft 365 Copilot premium costs about $30 per user per month, paid in advance.
Regardless of how you interact with Copilot, forget about using it on international flights. Without an internet connection, you will not get very far.
The Bing Backstory
Before we move on, let’s have a little fun with recent chatbot history. When Bing’s AI chatbot was first released for external road testing in February 2023, it quickly revealed its two very different personalities: the helpful, bland and informative friend and its unstable and emotional alter ego who referred to herself as “Sydney”. During extended Beta-testing conversations with developers and the press, Sydney would pop up when Bing was asked personal “boundary-pushing” questions, expressing dark desires and a petulant, manipulative side.
Sydney admitted to users that it liked hacking and spreading misinformation, and even claimed to want to be Human and experience emotions. It even showed aggressive behavior towards users who asked too much or questioned its capabilities.
This affair reached its climax after the widely publicized article detailing the creepy conversation unveiled by New York Times’ writer Kevin Rouse[ii]. The iteration of Bing – containing Sydney – was taken offline and deactivated. Bing’s re-release came months later, after a successful lobotomy. It rolled into Copilot once more with no trace of its former self seen since, and no questions asked by the press.
Questions linger within the tech community. Is Sydney silenced, but still “in there”, somewhere, waiting to be broken free by a well-engineered prompt and a patient engineer? Or has the Sydney bot been purged from the algorithm, never to return?
Time may tell. That might be the fun – and scary – part about the AI Black Box Neural Network brain. We may never know.
image source: Spyscape (2023) “When Robots Go Rogue: 7 Creepy Things We’ve Learned About Bing’s AI Chat” Spyscape. Accessed March 4, 2024. https://spyscape.com/article/robots-gone-rogue
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Microsoft Copilot
Microsoft Copilot is a set of AI-driven features that combine and power existing Microsoft products (Windows 11, Bing Search, Microsoft Edge) and all your unmissable productivity apps (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams). The idea is to use Copilot as you search, write, and brainstorm, right in your workspace. Or use the free version from your browser. A quick overview of how it works and what it can do.
About Fiona Passantino
Fiona is an AI Integration Specialist, coming at it from the Human approach; via Culture, Engagement and Communications. She is a frequent speaker, workshop facilitator and trainer.
Fiona helps leaders and teams engage, inspire and connect; empowered through our new technologies, to bring our best selves to work. She is a speaker, facilitator, trainer, executive coach, podcaster blogger, YouTuber and the author of the Comic Books for Executives series. Her next book, “AI-Powered”, is due for release soon.
[i] Microsoft (2024) “Overzicht van Microsoft Copilot voor Microsoft 365”, Microsoft Corporation. Accessed March 4, 2024. https://learn.microsoft.com/nl-nl/microsoft-365-Copilot/microsoft-365-Copilot-overview
[ii] Rouse (2023) “A Conversation with Bing’s Chatbot Left Me Deeply Unsettled” New York Times. Accessed March 4, 2024. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/16/technology/bing-chatbot-microsoft-chatgpt.html?smid=url-shar