This week at Ignite, Microsoft brandished its Copilot Swiss Army knife, embedding the AI assistant into all of its products and services.
The company’s chief executive officer, Satya Nadella, said, “Microsoft has over 1 million paid Copilot users in more than 37,000 organizations that subscribe to Copilot for business, with significant traction outside the United States.”
The company even decided that the name of its chatbot, Bing Chat “will simply become Copilot”, a change that, Nadella said, goes beyond “cosmetic” reasons and instead aimed to create an accessible and simple user experience.
Copilot is also getting added to a slew of products and services including Microsoft Fabric, Azure, Dynamics 365, Microsoft 365, Teams, Viva, Power and more.
Even Windows 10 will soon receive an update that features the Windows Copilot, which, so far, has only been rolled out to Windows 11. It won’t be quite the same Copilot that Windows 11 users will experience, however. Microsoft said that is because some of the APIs Windows 11 Copilot relies on don’t exist in Windows 10.
This update to Windows 10 comes as a surprise, as Microsoft has been pushing upgrades to its Windows 11 flagship, yet according to StatCounter, Windows 10 remains wildly popular, accounting for about 68 per cent of all Windows PCs, many of which cannot run the newer OS.
Further, Microsoft introduced two new role-specific copilots; Service and Sales, each costing US$50 per user, per month, and both including a license for Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365.
During customer interactions, agents will be able to ask Copilot for Service questions in natural language and receive insights pulled from customer and product data repositories. It will include integrations with Salesforce, ServiceNow and Zendesk.
Copilot for Sales seeks to allow sellers to harness the benefits of generative AI across all workflows and productivity surfaces, including Microsoft Teams and Word.
Security Copilot
Moreover, Microsoft is juicing up Security Copilot, embedding it into Microsoft Purview. This is designed to help customers swiftly generate a comprehensive summary of alerts and information to accelerate investigation and response, upskill talent, and use natural language to define search queries.
Microsoft’s e, Charlie Bell said that the company brings together three critical advantages that exists nowhere else; “large scale data threat intelligence, most complete end to end protection and industry leading responsible AI,” all of which power a “flywheel of innovation.”
“As security becomes more connected through the cloud, greater visibility spins the signal processing part of the flywheel, which, in turn, generates insight leading to better protection,” said Microsoft’s corporate vice president, security, Microsoft, Vasu Jakkal.
Microsoft Security Copilot will also be embedded in Microsoft Entra to assist in investigating identity risks and troubleshooting daily identity tasks.
Build your own Copilot
Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of Cloud and AI, Microsoft, kicked off Day 2 of Ignite, reminding the audience that “Microsoft was founded as a developer tools company, and developers remained at the very center of our mission.”
Here’s a few of the many tools that developers and enterprises are getting so they can, as Guthrie said, “build your own Copilots”:
- Azure AI studio, announced in public preview, includes leading models, data integration for retrieval augmented generation (RAG), intelligent search capabilities, full-lifecycle model management, and content safety.
- Models-as-a-Service enables pro developers to easily integrate new foundation models like Meta’s Llama 2, G42’s Jais, Command from Cohere and Mistral’s premium models into their applications.
- Prompt flow, an orchestration tool to manage prompt orchestration and LLMOps, is now in preview in Azure AI Studio
- Azure AI Content Safety to allow developers to evaluate model responses, address harms and security risks introduced by LLMs, all in one unified development platform.
- GPT-4 Turbo with Vision, in preview, coming soon to the Azure OpenAI service and Azure AI Studio, allowing developers to deliver multi-modal capabilities in their applications.
- New innovations to Azure OpenAI service including GPT-4 Turbo and DALL-E 3 in preview now and GPT-3.5 Turbo in general availability at the end of November
- Vector search, a method of searching for information within various data types will be available in Azure AI Search to bolster developers’ information retrieval techniques, and consequently the quality of generative AI responses
Protecting customers who use Microsoft AI
In September, Microsoft announced the Copilot Copyright Commitment, aimed at protecting Copilot customers from copyright infringement claims. This is being expanded to customers using Azure OpenAI Service.
Microsoft will defend and pay for any adverse judgements if commercial customers are sued for copyright infringement for using the outputs generated by Azure OpenAI Service.
The program is now called Customer Copyright Commitment (the only place Microsoft thought the name Copilot did not belong) and will be available starting Dec. 1.
