News
Anyone watching the news coming out of Microsoft Build got an earful about generative AI and how Microsoft sees it changing the way we work. The developer-focused conference built on the vision set forth last November at Ignite, when the company outlined how Copilot would be brought into every tool, application and platform in the Microsoft ecosystem today.
Build came a week after Google’s I/O developer conference, where generative AI once again played a starring role. One might even say it was a one-person show.
Of the many announcements made at Build, the following were of particular note for the workplace.
Team Copilot
For anyone scared generative AI is coming for their jobs, the new Team Copilot is going to be grist for the mill. According to a Microsoft blog, the new Team Copilot takes a step beyond being a relatively simple personal assistant to being a member of the team.
Available in Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Loop and Microsoft Planner among other applications, it works inside a given team and can fill a number of roles including:
- Meetings: Team Copilot can manage meeting agendas and take notes during the meeting, which anyone in the meeting can edit or coauthor.
- Chats: In its role as a group collaborator, Team Copilot can surface relative information, track items in an agenda it may have already prepared, track actions that have been decided upon in the meeting and address unresolved issues, although how it addresses those issues is currently unclear.
- Project Manager: The new Team tool can assign tasks, track deadlines and notify team members when their contribution to a given project is needed.
These capabilities will be available in preview later this year for organizations with a Copilot for Microsoft 365 license.
Related Article: Your Microsoft Copilot Prep List
Custom Copilots (Agents)
While Microsoft has talked about the efficiency copilots can bring to business processes from the very start, at Build it unveiled a new addition called Microsoft Copilot Studio. As might be expected, developers can use Studio to build customized copilots that can work as agents under the direction of whoever has been assigned the copilot.
However, it looks like these customized copilots would initially meet very specific functions including:
- Automating long-running processes.
- Apply "reason" to process user actions and inputs.
- Make decisions in context through memory.
- Take and adjust future responses and behaviors based on user feedback.
- Take into account exception requests.
The bottom line here is about cost savings across all processes. Microsoft says it is only getting started in this area and that it is “optimistic” about how these agents can evolve in the future.
“For example, an 'order taker' copilot can handle the end-to-end order fulfillment process — from taking the order, to processing the order and making intelligent recommendations and substitutions for out-of-stock items, to shipping it to the customer,” the blog reads.
All of this will undoubtedly help people meet goals in the digital workplace. However, what is unclear here, or from any of the other big vendors in the space, is the impact this kind of functionality will have on jobs.
Copilot Studio is currently available for people in a limited private preview with wider availability expected later in 2024.
Related Article: Microsoft's Annual Work Trend Index: AI Is Here, But It's a Band-Aid, Not a Transformation
SharePoint Embedded Generally Available
Microsoft has also announced that SharePoint Embedded, announced in preview last fall at the European SharePoint conference, is now generally available.
With Embedded, users can integrate advanced Microsoft 365 features into apps, including the full-featured collaborative function from the Office Suite, security and compliance tools, and Copilot capabilities.
In essence, Embedded is a headless, API-based version of SharePoint which developers and ISVs can use to embed Microsoft capabilities into their apps.
Microsoft's Zach Rosenfield wrote that Embedded addresses the problem of accessing and using documents spread across multiple systems.
"SharePoint Embedded delivers Microsoft 365 superpowers as part of any app and consolidates all files and documents within a universal document layer. Apps that manage files and documents with SharePoint Embedded have a common set of collaboration, compliance, security and AI capabilities, all designed to delight users and admins," Rosenfield wrote.
While any app built with Embedded will be fully integrated with Microsoft 365 services, it also enables the creation of a partition that will be logically separated from storage areas that already exist for OneDrive or SharePoint Online. As a result, it is billed as a pay-as-you-go model that is separate from Microsoft 365, which means developers can use it to build apps without eating into their organization's Microsoft 365 usage limits.
There is, of course, a copilot element to it. Microsoft has also announced that along with Microsoft 354 integration, custom copilot experiences based on SharePoint Embedded managed data and built on the Copilot platform are also now in private preview.
Related Article: Working With Microsoft 365 Doesn't Happen Automagically. Here's What You Can Do About It
Microsoft's Partnerships With Hugging Face and Khan Academy
Finally worth noting is Microsoft's extension of its partnerships with AI developers. Nvidia and OpenAI are, of course, long-standing partners but it also announced an extended partnership with Hugging Face.
The partnership will initially bring Hugging Face's models to Azure AI studio.
The announcement came as part of a wider announcement of the release of AI Toolkit for Visual Studio Code. Designed for developers, the toolkit enables them to try, find and push state-of-the-art AI models into applications.
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The models will come from Hugging Face and Azure AI Studio, which was released this week. Azure AI Studio offers 1,600 cloud-hosted models from Mistral, Microsoft and OpenAI among others, while Hugging Face provides access to more than 400,000 models.
Elsewhere, Microsoft announced a partnership with Khan Academy focused on using AI tech to power education. Here Microsoft is offering Azure infrastructure access and Khan Academy is working to make its AI teaching assistant, Khanmigo, free to teachers.
Obviously Build covered a lot of ground, so these are just a few of the highlights. We'll continue to follow the announcements in the space as they come to fruition.