Despite our protests, Microsoft is determined to make AI tools in the workplace accessible and engaging with a number of new improvements to Microsoft 365. (M365) Productivity toolset.
In an announcement on the M365 blog, the tech giant announced “Wave 2,” rolling out (mostly) in September 2024, which includes Copilot Pages, “a dynamic, persistent canvas” for AI-powered collaboration. It also announced that Copilot would see increased functionality across a number of key apps, such as data analysis in Excel and inbox management in Outlook.
While the company highlights the importance of its AI tool for small and medium-sized businesses that may need to manage costs, it is also keen to point out that Business Chat (or “BizChat,” as it insists on calling it), the content-sensitive part of Copilot, requires a subscription. Copilot’s standard chat is free, but it only searches the internet.
The net positives of “wave 2”
It sounds like the integration of business content into AI-generated content has been around for a while now, but Microsoft says the second wave will bring “reasoning” to Copilot Business Chat, helping it make more contextual decisions and answer more contextual questions. For example, with Microsoft Teams, “you can ask Copilot if there were any questions you didn’t answer in a meeting, and it will quickly review what was said and what was typed in the chat to see if anything was left unanswered.”
So Copilot Business Chat is better now, in ways that are unclear. It can pull in more company-specific data, while Word now supports quick reviews of all of it in the app, along with additional writing prompts from the blank page.
Microsoft also says that “dynamic narration” is now available in PowerPoint, helping users create a structure for their presentations. It will also incorporate company branding to make business presentations look sleek and on-brand. It also says that Copilot will “soon” be able to pull information from “approved” images in SharePoint libraries.
Copilot is making it easier to create AI chatbots, the scourge of customer service, and tailor them to specific “business processes” to “work with or for humans.” An agent builder in Business Chat will be available to the general public “in the coming weeks” to facilitate this, according to the company.
Microsoft Excel gets arguably the most interesting development, albeit only in public preview for now, as its natural language prompts are being equipped with the Python programming language to make advanced data analysis easier than ever, with Microsoft promising to enable advanced data analysis.[with] “No coding required.”
Copilot Business Chat, marketing language and you
However, there are BizChat deniers within Microsoft who resist the very idea of its existence. User HalSclater writes on the Microsoft blog for small and medium-sized businesses: “BizChat? Suddenly it’s everywhere, and yet it’s not a product. Please, stop!”
Microsoft should hire him to write its copy, because “BizChat” isn’t the only aggressive marketing campaign Microsoft is doing in this regard. The concrete thing here seems to be Copilot Pages, which puts “ephemeral AI-generated content” into a collaborative editing space.
Please ignore that insisting on calling this concept “multiplayer” and “a completely new work pattern” is outrageous, given what Google is doing by implementing its Gemini AI in Google Workspace. And it’s not just “a persistent dynamic canvas,” but one “designed for multiplayer AI collaboration,” going so far as to say that “it’s the first new digital artifact for the AI era.” The hasty copywriter there who just blatantly associates words and expects them to mean things has my eternal respect, but at the same time, “please stop!”
