Copilot, a natural language bot that can pull data from the Microsoft 365 suite, is currently in testing with some commercial customers.
Microsoft is bringing AI chat to its 365 suite with a new tool based on a large language model called Copilot, the company announced today.
Microsoft 365 Copilot combines large language models, built into a user’s own data in Microsoft Graph (which draws from context and content, such as emails, files, and meetings) and Microsoft 365 apps Copilot is an AI writer; he is able to draft e-mail responses, write texts, plan and summarize meetings and answer questions such as “Which product was the most profitable this year?”
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Copilot takes advantage of Microsoft’s 365 ecosystem
An interesting disambiguation here is that Copilot leverages the Microsoft 365 ecosystem to extract context and data. Microsoft marks this as an entirely different way of interacting with software. The more information you give the AI - or the more Microsoft 356 tools you use – the more powerful it is.
For example, Copilot can build a PowerPoint presentation based on a report composed in Word. Professional users can ask him to base the text of a report on the format of another assignment saved on their computer in Word. The text is based on AI – and Microsoft stresses that humans should always check and tweak what the AI spits out – but also on typical user behavior.
Outlook and other Microsoft 365 apps show a Draft with co-pilot option. After the AI composes the message, the user can adjust the length and tone or ask the AI to try again. User can also adjust text and images from there. The demo at today’s Microsoft event included a PowerPoint project where the user could instruct Copilot to easily add images and transitions to a presentation based on written instructions. Copilot can also summarize live meetings in Teams as they happen.
Copilot sits in a chat window next to a Word document, allowing users to tweak, shorten or lengthen text immediately based on naturally worded instructions. The same breakout panel in Excel can be used to analyze data or create new sheets. Copilot “post-processes” a large language model response through Microsoft Graph.
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New productivity assistant: Business Chat
Microsoft also announced Business Chat, a Copilot tool that appears in a tab next to Teams (Figure A). Business Chat can summarize what users need to catch up for work, document scanning, chats, emails, and meetings. This Copilot tool helps pull together disparate information and can respond to queries such as quarterly risk or revenue; it can also create an analysis of your company’s strengths and weaknesses. It’s always possible that the data pulled by the AI is incorrect, so in today’s presentation, Microsoft made sure to frequently demonstrate that the human user is changing some of the text.
Figure A
Introducing Copilot for Viva Sales
Copilot was actually first released in some form as Dynamics 365 Copilot for CRM and Sales. Now it also integrates with the Viva Sales platform in a suite of features called Copilot for Viva Salesthat works with Microsoft Dynamics 365 or Salesforce.
Copilot can provide you with a “catch-up” to refresh you on what you already know about the client. It can also provide meeting notes and merge them into your calendar or email to help you compose a follow-up message. The idea is to eliminate tedious tasks such as sending meeting invitations or reminders.
How does Microsoft approach Copilot security and privacy?
It is on the Graph layer that Microsoft overlays its security. Microsoft said it took privacy concerns into consideration and monitors Copilot in real time, and built it in accordance with responsible AI internal standards the Aether Committee, the Office of Responsible AI, and the Responsible AI Engineering Strategy. (Another AI ethics and society team was part of a series of layoffs to the company this week.)
Microsoft’s Bing search continues to follow the AI trend. He has for the past five weeks been running on GPT-4the new system of the popular OpenAI.
The hardware behind the AI
Meanwhile, Microsoft Azure is looking to expand supercomputing in response to the call for more AI-powered apps and services. Microsoft has upgraded to run AI for its customers and internal products like those in the 365 suite.
In a blog post from March 13Microsoft introduced the ND H100 v5 Virtual Machine, a virtual machine that delivers the computing power of eight to thousands of NVIDIA H100 GPUs interconnected by NVIDIA Quantum-2 InfiniBand networking – no matter how many one needs. given customer.
AI models will get a long list of processing upgrades:
- 8x NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs interconnected via next-gen NVSwitch and NVLink 4.0
- 400 Gb/s NVIDIA Quantum-2 CX7 InfiniBand per GPU with 3.2 Tb/s per VM in a non-blocking fat-tree network
- NVSwitch and NVLink 4.0 with 3.6 TB/s bisection bandwidth between 8 local GPUs within each VM
- 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors
- Interconnect between PCIE Gen5 host and GPU with 64 GB/s bandwidth per GPU
- 16 channels of 4800 MHz DDR5 DIMMs
Organizations like Inflection have used the combined infrastructure of Microsoft and NVIDIA to power advanced AI models.
“Our focus on conversational AI requires us to develop and train some of the most complex large language models. Azure’s AI infrastructure provides us with the performance to efficiently process these patterns reliably at scale. We are excited about the new virtual machines on Azure and the increased performance they will bring to our AI development efforts,” said Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Inflection, in a statement. Press release.
Where else is Microsoft using AI?
On March 6, Microsoft announced that its Power Platform low-code application development tool would include Capabilities powered by ChatGPT. The Dynamics 365 Copilot sales, customer service, and marketing tool now also has AI capabilities to automate data collection, analysis, or email campaign creation. In particular, the Power Virtual Agent chatbot tool and the AI Builder workflow automation tool will benefit from ChatGPT’s text generation functionality.