Microsoft brings OpenAI-powered AI assistant Copilot to every app in its Microsoft 365 productivity suite

Microsoft is bringing OpenAI's AI assistant to its Microsoft 365 productivity suite, with a Copilot in every app.

Microsoft has partnered with OpenAI to introduce generative AI models in its Microsoft 365 productivity suite, with a Copilot in every app. 

The AI-powered feature is currently being tested by around 20 Microsoft corporate customers. The Copilot in each app will be powered by OpenAI's GPT-4 large language model, which is pre-trained on vast amounts of internet content and can access business data from Microsoft Graph to generate content such as email content and meeting summaries. 

According to Microsoft design chief Jon Friedman, Copilot represents a new frontier of user interface design in "conversational UX," which calls on different and more powerful resources. Copilot will appear in the app's user interface in one of three ways: as an immersive experience that can glean data from multiple apps, as a task-focused presentation for individual apps, or as a passive component that offers help through prompts or small suggestions. 

Friedman says the initiative brought hundreds of Microsoft employees, including designers, engineers, product managers, marketing people, data scientists, and ethics teams, together over several months, who worked together to build something big in a short time frame.