Microsoft (MSFT) is pouring more of its AI-powered Copilot technology into its Microsoft 365 productivity products, including Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams. The updates, which include the ability to use Copilot to draft PowerPoint presentations and a feature that prioritizes your emails in Outlook, are a part of what the tech giant refers to as its Copilot Wave 2 rollout.
In addition to the improvements to its Microsoft 365 apps, Microsoft also announced a new collaborative tool called Copilot Pages, which lets teams of workers access, edit, and manipulate data on a single page using information pulled from Copilot.
The company also debuted a new agent builder option that lets users easily create Copilot-powered agents, AI assistants designed to automate and executive business processes.
The moves are all a part of Microsoft’s broader efforts to infuse its vast portfolio of business software products with AI capabilities as it seeks to outpace rivals in the space ranging from Google (GOOG, GOOGL) to Salesforce (CRM) and monetize its enormous investments in AI technology.
Microsoft says the number of customers using Copilot increased more than 60% quarter over quarter and that the number of people who use it daily at work doubled. What’s more, the Windows maker says Vodafone is purchasing 68,000 Copilot licenses for its 100,000 employees after it found that the software helped workers save an average of three hours per week per person.
The new Copilot features for Microsoft’s 365 apps are all designed to help improve worker efficiency, whether that means tracking meeting transcripts and chats to make it easier to catch up or quickly adding references to documents, PDFs, and emails in a Word document.
The Copilot agent builder for Copilot Studio, meanwhile, is designed to help put together an AI-powered agent that fits your company’s needs without needing much technical know-how.
“One of the things which we heard very consistently was … it’s not one size fits all when it comes to Copilot,” Charles Lamanna, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of business and industry Copilot, told Yahoo Finance.
“If you have this company and this company, say, Disney versus Novartis, what they want to do in Microsoft 365 with Copilot is going to be slightly different. They have different data sources, they have different workflows, they have different processes. They have just … different ways of working.”
That’s where Microsoft’s agent builder comes in. Say, for example, you want to make it easier for new employees to better understand their health benefits. You can use Copilot Studio to tell an agent to answer questions about your company’s healthcare offerings and point it to any relevant documents.
When a worker uses the agent, it will automatically pull data from those documents, providing them with the information they need without having to scour multiple microsites and digital pamphlets.
“Everyone in a company will be able to create agents and to use agents,” Lamanna said.
Microsoft’s Copilot software is a major part of its broader push into the generative AI space, which includes investing in ChatGPT developer OpenAI, and is at least part of the reason the company’s stock price is up more than 30% over the last 12 months. Rival and Google parent Alphabet’s stock is up 14% in the same period.
During its most recent earnings report, Microsoft announced that its Intelligent Cloud segment revenue, which includes Azure services, was $28.5 billion. That was just short of Wall Street’s expectation of $28.7 billion. And while that was a 19% year-over-year revenue increase, investors reacted negatively to the news, sending shares lower following the earnings announcement.
Email Daniel Howley at dhowley@yahoofinance.com. Follow him on Twitter at @DanielHowley.
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