Microsoft adding AI technology to Word, Excel

Microsoft announced on Thursday that it will add artificial intelligence (AI) technology to its Microsoft suite of business tools and programs.

In a news release, Microsoft said its new AI feature, referred to as Copilot, will be built off of “the power of large language models (LLMs) with business data and the Microsoft 365 apps, to unleash creativity, unlock productivity and uplevel skills.” 

Microsoft also said that users can decide what to keep, modify or discard when using the feature, saying that with the new tools, users can be “more creative in Word, more analytical in Excel, more expressive in PowerPoint, more productive in Outlook and more collaborative in Teams.” 

The latest Copilot feature will be available to use through Microsoft 365 apps such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, Power Platform and Business Chat. 

“Copilot combines the power of large language models with your data and apps to turn your words into the most powerful productivity tool on the planet,” Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President of Modern Work and Business Applications Jared Spataro said in a statement. 

“By grounding in your business content and context, Copilot delivers results that are relevant and actionable. It’s enterprise-ready, built on Microsoft’s comprehensive approach to security, compliance, privacy and responsible AI. Copilot marks a new era of computing that will fundamentally transform the way we work.”

The announcement comes as the company announced earlier this year that its new premium messaging service, Teams Premium, will be powered by OpenAI’s ChatGPT messaging service. 

Microsoft also announced that it will invest billions of dollars in OpenAI in part of a third phase of a partnership between the two companies as the latest investment follows previous ones both tech companies made in 2019 and 2021 and extends the partnership across the two companies. 

OpenAI’s ChatGPT is a free tool that launched in November that automatically generates human-like responses to user queries in a way that is more advanced than previous technology. 

The new innovative technology has raised the concerns of many parents and educators recently, with some saying that students may have used ChatGPT to cheat on assignments, resulting in school districts in New York City and Seattle banning the device tool. 

OpenAI announced plans on Wednesday to release a new AI tool called GPT-4, saying that the new technology tool is a large multimodal model, which means that images and text prompts can be used to generate content.