Microsoft 365 Copilot Arrives Today

It may not be the first of Microsoft’s copilots, but it is the most full-featured and the most important to the company’s future: The Microsoft 365 Copilot arrives today for organizations, bringing with it Microsoft 365 Chat and new AI functionality across core apps like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams.

“Microsoft 365 Copilot is your AI assistant at work,” Microsoft corporate vice president Jared Spataro wrote back in September. “It builds on Bing Chat Enterprise but is in a class all its own. It includes enterprise-grade security, privacy, compliance, and responsible AI to ensure all data processing happens inside your Microsoft 365 tenant—using technology Microsoft 365 customers have relied on for years.”

Unlike Bing Chat and the Copilot in Windows 11, Microsoft 365 Copilot isn’t free and it doesn’t come cheap: Microsoft is charging enterprise customers $30 per user per month for the service, and that’s after an expensive license for Microsoft 365 E3 ($36 per user per month) or E5 ($57 per user per month). Users will need to install the Microsoft 365 apps (the Office suite), sign in via Entra ID (formerly Azure Active Directory), and use specific apps and services like the new Outlook, OneDrive, Teams, Loop, and Whiteboard for full functionality.

But the benefits may be worth it. Microsoft 365 Copilot includes Microsoft 365 Chat, which uses the power of the Microsoft Graph to surface information across your organization—emails, meetings, chats, documents, and more—and the web in response to Bing Chat-like prompts. And the app-specific features, even at this early date, are extensive and seem impressive.

For example, the new Outlook uses Copilot to summarize lengthy email threads and create footnotes of related emails so she can get up to speed in discussions quickly. Copilot uses a new “Sound like me” feature to draft email responses in your specific writing style. It offers coaching tips and suggestions on clarity and tone when you write your own email messages. And if you miss a meeting in Teams, the new Outlook will notify you when a recording is available so you can watch it later.

There are similar advances in the other core apps. In Word, Copilot can summarize documents, rewrite paragraphs of text, refine your writing to be more concise or adopt specific styles, and generate tables. Copilot in Excel can analyze, format, and edit data for you, add formula columns with key data called out, and provide advanced analytics. PowerPoint can auto-fill content from elsewhere and then automatically format each slide, and it can turn written text into full presentations. And even secondary apps like Loop, OneNote, and Stream gain AI capabilities from Copilot.

I’m guessing that Microsoft will have some additional surprises up its sleeve today—at the time of this writing, the software giant hasn’t publicly announced the general availability of Microsoft 365 Copilot—but given recent history, this much is obvious: You can expect Microsoft 365 Copilot to be updated at a heady pace, with new features each month. And we should learn more about the consumer version of Microsoft 365 Copilot in the weeks and months ahead as well.

You can learn more at the Microsoft 365 Copilot website.