At its Future of Work With AI event, Microsoft has unveiled a new AI-powered tool called Copilot that will start rolling out to customers later this year.
While Copilot will be integrated into most Microsoft Office products including Word, Excel and PowerPoint, in this article we’re going to focus on the key changes announced for Microsoft Teams.
Business Chat
Business chat is a new feature that works across the suite of Office products. For Teams, this means you’ll be able to engage with the data stored in your Office account such as documents, meeting transcripts, calendar events and other Teams conversations via chat.
Microsoft is promising you’ll be able to use business chat to quickly summarise documents, recap meetings held earlier in the day and even generate status updates for other team members based on meetings and documentation produced.
Meeting Summaries
Copilot will soon be available in Teams meetings and provide summaries of who said what, as well as the key discussion points from within a conversation. Action points can be identified, and as mentioned above the information can also be surfaced in Business Chat later.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1gpkk-MwpY
Based on Microsoft’s demonstrations, the meeting summaries feature works in real-time as the meeting is occurring. One expects you’ll need to have the transcription feature enabled to ensure the Microsoft AI model can work it’s magic.
How much will it cost?
At this point Microsoft hasn’t yet confirmed pricing details for these new AI capabilities in Office, but it’s easy to imagine that the company will introduce new licenses particularly for organisations using commercial Office 365. The company says more information, including a launch date, will be provided later this year.
With the Build conference just around the corner in late May, expect to hear more soon including how developers might be able to build experiences upon Microsoft’s AI capabilities.