Your Copilot Chat Primer
Welcome to Generation AI, a new blog post focusing on Microsoft's generative AI efforts and what they mean for enterprise IT. Helming this effort is seasoned tech reporter Andy Patrizo, who brings his years of expertise and insight to the expanding world of AI.
Thanks for joining us for the inaugural Generation AI blog post. I'll be digging deep into the world of generative AI, with a focus on Microsoft's efforts, to distill what you need to do when integrating these tools and services in your enterprises. For the first post, I thought it would be beneficial to start with a primer – a "cheat sheet," if you will – on the many different components of Microsoft's latest entry: Copilot Chat.
Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat is an AI-powered assistant integrated into the Microsoft 365 office productivity suite, designed to automate tasks, make intelligent suggestions and provide users with insights to help them work more efficiently.
Copilot, for the unfamiliar, was previously known as Bing Chat. It is a part of Microsoft's Bing search engine as well as Windows 10, Windows 11 and the Microsoft Edge sidebar. There are also stand-alone Copilot apps for Android and iOS.
Copilot Chat works across the various Microsoft apps like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams and more. It uses natural language processing (NLP) and large language models (such as OpenAI's GPT models) to interact with users in a conversational way and serves as an AI assistant that integrates data from your documents, e-mails and other Microsoft 365 content.
Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat is a rebranding of Bing Chat Enterprise before Microsoft introduced the Copilot brand and adds the AI agent interface, which were previously only available via a $30 per user per month subscription. In addition to the agents provided by Microsoft, you'll be able to create your own agents using Copilot Studio.
Microsoft has provided some resources for IT to jump right in, and I wanted to make my own deep dive into Chat, looking at how IT departments can use the tools built into Copilot Chat to manage agents created by the organization.
Copilot has several notable features, starting with its conversational interface. Users can engage with Microsoft 365 apps using natural language queries instead of manually searching through keywords and hoping the search engine finds what you looking for.
That's because Copilot Chat understands the context of your work. For example, if you're working in a document, it can help write or rewrite sections based on the context, offer content suggestions and provide intelligent recommendations.
It works across multiple Microsoft 365 applications, enabling users to interact with documents, emails, spreadsheets, presentations and meetings all in one place. This cross application integration means you can pull data from Excel into a Word document or draft e-mails based on document content.
In addition to simplifying tasks, Copilot can automate repetitive tasks, such as generating emails, reports, or meeting agendas. Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat as specific tools for each of the major Microsoft applications. Let's run down the list:
Word Copilot Chat
Word Copilot is designed to work with other office productivity apps like Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams, making it easier to transition between documents, presentations and collaborative environments. Overall, Copilot in Microsoft Word 365 aims to enhance writing, streamline workflows, and provide AI-driven assistance that adapts to a user's needs over time.
In addition to keyboard and mouse input, users can interact with Copilot through voice commands and context-sensitive help. It can understand the content of your document and offer relevant suggestions, such as rephrasing, summarizing or improving sentence structure and clarity.
Copilot can quickly summarize long documents or specific sections, making it easier to digest content and understand the main points without reading everything. It can analyze data within Word documents, such as tables, charts or lists, and offer insights, recommendations or even generate text-based analysis based on the data. It can also assist in translating content into different languages.
Copilot automates mundane functions such as formatting, adjusting layouts or creating templates. It also support collaboration between co-workers by helping users track changes, generate comments or feedback, and integrate input from multiple users.
Excel Copilot Chat
Excel has an extensive and comprehensive data analytics side to it, and Copilot assists users on things like data analysis and formula generation.
For data analysis and visualization, Copilot can automatically analyze datasets to identify trends and generate visual representations like charts and PivotTables, taking raw data and turning it into useful analytics and insights.
As part of this, Copilot offers data highlighting, sorting and filtering to simplify data manipulation by executing commands to highlight, sort and filter information simply and more efficiently.
Excel's formulas extend well beyond basic math that most uses know into complex and often esoteric formulas. Copilot aids in creating and understanding complex formulas, making it accessible for users with limited experience in Excel functions.
Finally, Copilot has Python Integration for advanced users to leverage Python within Excel for comprehensive data analysis, including machine learning and intricate visualizations.
PowerPoint Copilot Chat
The main focus around Copilot for PowerPoint is an AI-powered assistant designed to enhance your presentation creation experience by streamlining content generation, design and organization. It integrates seamlessly with Microsoft 365 applications, allowing you to craft professional presentations efficiently.
By entering a topic or prompt into Copilot, it can generate an in-depth draft of the presentation, including content, layouts and speaker notes. It can also condense lengthy presentations into concise summaries, and assists in structuring your presentation by grouping slides into logical sections.
Outlook Copilot Chat
Copilot Chat for Outlook assists with e-mail management, scheduling and provides contextual information. It can help draft e-mails based on user prompts, adjusting tone and length as needed, as well as summarize lengthy e-mail threads. Users can set up automatic replies for specific dates and times, and create rules to manage incoming e-mails more efficiently than Outlook does now.
Teams Copilot Chat
Microsoft Teams Copilot Chat is designed to enhance collaboration and productivity within chats and channels by summarizing conversations, identifying key points and suggesting actionable items. It can provide summaries of main points, decisions, and action items from lengthy chats by capturing key discussion points, suggesting action items and answers questions in real-time.
Copilot Chat for Teams can access data from documents, presentations, e-mails, calendars, notes and contacts in addition to conference calls, making it easier to find information in your data clutter.
OneNote Copilot Chat
Copilot Chat for OneNote allows you to interact with your notes in a conversational manner, condensing lengthy sections of notes or even entire notes into brief, easily consumed summaries that can be shared. It can transform notes into actionable to-do lists and generate structured plans for events, meetings or projects based on your existing notes.
Power BI
Power BI as it is, is already a powerful data analysis tool. Copilot Chat is designed to enhance and streamline the data exploration and analysis functionality of the application already by using natural language interactions. Copilot Chat assists users in generating reports, creating visualizations, suggesting DAX formulas and summarizing report content.
It can generate overviews of report content, highlighting key trends and patterns across visuals using both view and edit modes, so users don't need to engage in manual analysis. Copilot offers customizable prompts to obtain tailored assistance, guiding users through the data exploration and analysis process.
Viva Copilot
Copilot Chat for Microsoft Viva is designed to enhance employee experience by streamlining tasks, fostering creativity and boosting productivity. Copilot Chat for Viva makes heavy use of generative AI in all Viva suite of applications.
It offers things like drafting posts, managing feedback and creating questions and answers in Viva Engage, supports sales teams by providing suggestions and summarizing conversations, helps construct training paths employees, summarize course content, and locate relevant educational resources, facilitating continuous learning and development.
Viva Insights offers a Copilot Dashboard offering analytics into Copilot usage within the organization, while Viva Goals assists in creating objectives and key results (OKRs), generating status summaries and offering planning tips to align team activities with organizational strategies.
Hope you found this breakdown helpful. Join me next time as I dig into Microsoft' AI agents, and how you can start integrating them into your day-to-day.
Posted by Andy Patrizio on 03/19/2025 at 1:08 PM