Microsoft is ‘turning everyone into an instant engineer’ with new Copilot AI features

Microsoft is trying to solve the problem of creating a good prompt for generative AI, with the goal of turning everyone into an immediate engineer. In the coming months, Copilot for Microsoft 365, the paid service that adds an AI assistant to Office apps, will be updated with a new autocomplete feature that offers suggestions for improving AI prompts.

If you start creating a prompt, Copilot will soon offer to supplement it with extra details to improve the end result of whatever you’re generating or the questions you’re asking. So if you start typing “summarize,” Copilot will display options for summarizing the last 10 unread emails in your inbox or other Office data-related tasks.

Microsoft is also working on a new “craft your prompt” feature in Copilot for Microsoft 365 that will essentially rewrite all the prompts you create. This should help when you want Copilot to perform an action on a file, but you’re not sure what level of detail will help you make the most of a prompt.

“With its new rewrite feature, Copilot turns a basic prompt into a rich prompt with the click of a button, turning everyone into a prompt engineer,” said Jared Spataro, corporate vice president of workplace AI at Microsoft, in a statement. blog post. Copilot for Microsoft 365 will also soon include a new “Catch Up” chat interface that highlights upcoming meetings and presents documents and other relevant information that will help you prepare for the meeting.

Microsoft will also enable Copilot for Microsoft 365 subscribers to create, publish, and manage prompts in Copilot Lab that can be customized for individual teams across companies. This should make it much easier to share useful instructions for colleagues to use.

Microsoft is revealing these upcoming Copilot for Microsoft 365 features alongside its latest annual Work Trend Index, which this year is a joint report from Microsoft and LinkedIn on the state of AI at work. Microsoft interviewed 31,000 people in 31 countries, analyzed hiring trends on LinkedIn, and analyzed data from Microsoft 365 to provide some statistics on the use of AI in companies.

“As AI becomes ubiquitous in the workplace, both employees and companies are under extreme pressure,” says Spataro. “The pace and intensity of work, which accelerated during the pandemic, has not slowed, so employees are bringing their own AI to work.” Microsoft claims that 78% of AI users are bringing their own AI tools to work rather than waiting for organizations to implement the tools.

Microsoft also claims there is a “rise of the AI ​​power user,” a type of worker who has adopted AI to save time at work. “Compared to the skeptics, AI power users have refocused their workdays in fundamental ways, reimagining business processes and saving more than 30 minutes a day,” says Spataro.

Microsoft’s self-serving report comes as the company is under pressure from investors to show that its big investments in AI will generate returns. Of the 31% growth in revenue from Azure and other cloud services in Microsoft’s latest quarter, revenue from AI services contributed seven points – an increase in AI’s impact from the previous quarter.