Earlier this month Microsoft unveiled its groundbreaking vision for Microsoft Copilot—an all-encompassing digital companion designed to enhance your life in the digital realm. This innovative concept aims to deliver a unified Copilot user experience across a range of Microsoft products, including Bing, Edge, Microsoft 365, and Windows.
As the initial step toward realizing this vision, Microsoft revealed a new visual identity—the Copilot icon. The company is also set to provide a consistent user experience, which will first launched in Windows on September 26 and then in Microsoft 365 Copilot, available to enterprise customers from November 1.
Here's a quick overview of what this announcements mean for commercial customers:
1. Microsoft Copilot in Windows (Available September 26)
This feature will enable users to complete tasks more efficiently and reduce cognitive load, making complex tasks seem simple.
Microsoft Copilot is seamlessly integrated into Windows, easily accessible via the taskbar or the Win+C keyboard shortcut.
The Windows version features the new Copilot icon, a new Copilot user experience, and Bing Chat, all provided to commercial customers for free.
2. Bing Chat Enterprise
Building on Microsoft Copilot, Bing Chat Enterprise offers enhanced commercial data protection to ensure that business data remains confidential.
Chat data is not stored, and Microsoft does not have access to it for training large language models.
Available as a standalone subscription for $5 per user per month or included in Microsoft 365 E3 and E5.
3. Microsoft 365 Copilot (Available November 1)
Microsoft 365 Copilot is an AI assistant for work that combines enterprise-grade security, privacy, compliance, and responsible AI.
It provides in-depth data processing capabilities within your Microsoft 365 tenant, offering solutions to complex work-related challenges.
Integrated into Microsoft 365 Apps like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams.
Priced at $30 per user per month for enterprise customers.
Microsoft 365 Copilot—Your AI Assistant at Work
The Copilot concept promises to transform the way we work by unleashing creativity and boosting productivity across popular Microsoft 365 apps like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams. Microsoft 365 Chat, a hero feature of Microsoft 365 Copilot, offers a deep understanding of your work, helping you connect the dots and solve complex problems efficiently.
Key features include:
Seamless integration into Microsoft 365 Apps.
Advanced data processing, including emails, meetings, chats, documents, and web searches.
Accessibility for preview customers and later, all users with a work account.
Availability to enterprise customers starting from November 1
The Need for Copilot in a Changing Work Landscape
In an era of increasing workloads and meetings, Copilot offers a solution to ease the burden. Copilot Lab, an initiative aimed at helping users adapt to AI-powered work habits, will be integrated into Microsoft 365 Copilot. It will assist in creating effective prompts and offer inspiration for new ways of working.
Enhancing Productivity with Copilot Experiences
Copilot experiences are being integrated into various Microsoft 365 apps to enhance productivity:
Copilot in Outlook: Summarizes email threads, matches your writing style, and facilitates catching up on missed Teams meetings.
Copilot in Word: Offers document summaries, paragraph rewriting, formatting assistance, and more.
Copilot in Excel: Provides data analysis, formatting, and advanced analytics capabilities.
Copilot in Loop: Aids collaborative work, table generation, content summaries, and code suggestions.
Copilot in OneNote: Assists in note organization, content summaries, and editing.
Copilot in Stream: Offers video insights, quick summaries, and the ability to find specific content in videos.
Copilot in OneDrive: Helps find insights without opening files through open-ended questions and content summaries.
Bing Chat Enterprise—Confidence in Generative AI
Bing Chat Enterprise, designed to add a layer of commercial data protection to AI interactions, now features multimodal visual search and Image Creator. This extension will enhance creativity while safeguarding sensitive business data. Bing Chat Enterprise is already included in various Microsoft 365 plans, giving access to over 160 million users.
Copilot in Windows
Copilot in Windows will launch on September 26, making tasks easier and lessening cognitive load. It will be accessible via the taskbar or keyboard shortcuts, providing assistance across all your applications. IT administrators will have control over deployment, and Windows 365 Boot and Windows 365 Switch will be available for a comprehensive experience.
Building Responsibly
Microsoft is guided by its AI principles, Responsible AI Standard, and extensive AI research as it brings Copilot to users. The Copilot Copyright Commitment assures users of confidence in using Copilot services without copyright concerns.
Ready for Co-Pilot?
As Microsoft's licensing partner, MapleTronics is committed to bringing these transformative capabilities to our clients, ensuring they stay at the forefront of technological advancements in the Microsoft ecosystem. Stay tuned for more updates on how these innovations can benefit your organization or contact us or your CRM today for more information on getting licensing for Co-Pilot.