📣 Huge announcements by Microsoft, check it out!

Yesterday, Google had their big I/O day with exciting news. What a coincidence that Microsoft released exciting news a few hours before the Google event 😉 They have us a glimpse of Copilot and a fresh work trend report.



In summary, Microsoft:
✅ Expanded access to Microsoft 365 Copilot from 20 to 600 selected enterprises.
✅ Released its 2023 Work Trend Index report.
✅ Introduced new features for Copilot in Whiteboard, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, and Viva Learning.
✅ Introduced the Semantic Index for Copilot.

💡 My first impressions
🗺️ With the Semantic Index for Copilot, search is improved by not only including results from the search phrase but also providing results that match your intent, in your specific domain (company).

The example used is searching for “March Sales Report”. It understands that “sales reports are produced by Kelly on the finance team and created in Excel.” and will provide related search results.

Time will tell if this is actually helpful or just provides a lot of information that isn't what you're looking for. Since this is likely to be powered by GPT-4 (or GPT-3.5), I’m optimistic that this will work well and decrease the time spent finding the right information - which I spend a lot of time on as a knowledge worker.

👩‍✈️ The new Copilot features in Whiteboard, PowerPoint, Outlook, and OneNote clearly take advantage of the GPT-4/DALL-E capability of summarizing, categorizing, and generating pictures, great!

From what I see, all the functionality mentioned by Microsoft is available today in different applications. Now Microsoft is bringing everything together in a nice package directly in the Office tools you use. When Copilot is rolled out and approved by your company, you can use all new functionality while being IT-compliant.

A few examples that will be useful for for a project manager:

✅ Rewrite in PowerPoint, taking text-heavy slides and turning them into bullet points. This means that you can focus on writing a manuscript which will be automatically turned into bullet points with good flow and precision.
✅ Image generation in PowerPoint, with direct DALL-E access.
✅ In Outlook, Copilot will coach you with the tone. This can be helpful when you must write an important email but are exhausted or have a very tight deadline.

❓ I was not clear on how integrated the company data will be (except for semantic serach), e.g., could DALL-E generate new illustrations following your brand guidelines?

Regarding the user interface, it seems as if the Bing integration in Edge is an indication of how it will look in several Microsoft applications.

🤩 Exciting times, looking forward to reading the Work Trend Index report in depth.