Microsoft and Meta have announced that they are expanded there AI partnership which will see Bing and Meta (who own Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram) working together to create enhanced user experiences.
Microsoft say that Meta will extensively use Bing Search which it will integrate into their AI’s chat experiences, enabling more timely and up-to-date answers with access to real-time search information.
Meta AI and Bing (image from The Verge)
Bing’s integration will also extend to some of Meta’s other AIs, such as ChatGPT, that are available to message with in WhatsApp, FaceBook Messenger, and Instagram.
This announcement builds on the previous collaboration between Microsoft Bing and Meta to accelerate innovation in the era of AI.
Microsoft say that Bing aims to deliver powerful and useful AI experiences into the products people use most. If a request requires fresh information, Meta AI will automatically ask Bing to get the chat answer….
Benefits of the Bing and Meta Partnership
This partnership should benefits users in several ways, inluding allowing users to access the latest web data and information from Bing through Meta AI’s chat services, such as Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram.
For Microsoft this gives them more usage and reach of Bing in search, a service typically led by Google. Microsoft AI is extremely powerful and smart but often not exposed as users “default” to Google and “googling it”.
Microsoft hosted a live Surface and AI event on Thursday 21st September where they announced a lot of new and exciting features and products across its various platforms and services. In this blog post, I have tried to summarise the most notable ones and explain how they might benefit you and your organisation.
Disclaimer (and product plug) - Since this was an AI event in whole, I also want to state that other than some slight tweaks, this blog post was written by Bing Enterprise Chat - Microsoft Designer created the image. The whole thing took less that 10 minutes.
Copilot: Your AI Assistant at Work and Beyond
Copilot is a new feature that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to help you with various tasks, such as drafting emails, summarizing texts, creating images, and more. You can access Copilot from Windows 11, Microsoft 365, Edge, and Bing, and chat with it in natural language. Copilot will understand your intent and provide relevant assistance based on the context and your data.
For example, you can ask Copilot to draft an email for you with a specific tone, or to generate a graphic art based on your description. You can also use Copilot to answer questions, troubleshoot your PC, control your settings, and access recommendations. Copilot is designed to save you time, reduce your cognitive load, and ignite your creativity.
Copilot will be generally available for enterprise customers on November 1st, and for a select group of consumers and small business customers as part of the Early Access Program (EAP). It will initially be limited to three hundred licenses and will cost $30 per user per month.
Windows 11: The Most Powerful and Personal Windows Ever
Windows 11 is the latest (and IMO best) version of the Microsoft’s desktop operating system that powers millions of devices around the world. Windows 11 offers a fresh and modern design, improved performance, and security, and a more personalised and connected experience. They announced the latest update coming next week (Sept 26th). Some of the new features in Windows 11 will include:
An updated Start menu that gives you quick access to your apps, documents, and settings.
An updated Taskbar that lets you easily switch between multiple instances of each app, hide the time and date, and end tasks with a right-click.
A new Dev Home that helps you set up your development environment by downloading apps, packages, or repositories, connecting to your developer accounts and tools, and accessing experimental features in WSL.
A new Dev Drive that provides a fast and secure storage volume for developers, with a file system that delivers both performance and security.
A new WinGet Configuration that simplifies the setup process for developers by reducing it to a single command.
New Gallery in File Explorer that makes it easy to access your photo collection across all your devices.
A new Snipping Tool that lets you record your screen with audio and mic support, copy and redact text from a screenshot, and edit your images with Paint.
A new Photos app that has new editing capabilities to achieve stylish background blur effects and makes it easier to find specific images backed up in OneDrive.
Updated Narrator that uses natural human voices in new languages, and lets you use voice access to log in to your PC and access other areas on the lock screen.
Refreshed Notepad app that automatically saves your session state, allowing you to close Notepad without any interrupting dialogs and then pick up where you left off when you return.
A new Instant Games feature that lets you play your favorite casual games directly from the Microsoft Store without the need to download and install them on your device.
Windows Copilot – Your Copilot for Windows.
Windows 11 also announced general availability of Windows 365 Boot and Windows 365 Switch, which allow you to log into your Windows 365 Cloud PC as the primary Windows experience on the device or easily switch between the Cloud PC and the local desktop. Windows 365 is a cloud PC service that lets you stream a full Windows experience from anywhere on any device and is fully managed from Intune.
This update will start rolling out as a free update on September 26th.
Surface: The Ultimate Devices for Work and Play
Surface is Microsoft’s line of devices that combine innovative design, powerful performance, and versatile functionality. Surface devices are built to work seamlessly with Windows 11 and Microsoft 365, offering the best productivity and creativity tools for work and play. I am a massive fan of Surface
The new / refreshed Surface devices include:
Surface Laptop Studio 2: The most powerful Surface ever built, with the latest Intel Core processors, NVIDIA Studio tools for creators, touchscreen display, and flexible design with three unique postures.
Surface Laptop Go 3: The lightest and most portable Surface Laptop, with touchscreen display, premium features like an incredible typing experience and a Fingerprint Power Button, and four stylish colours.
Surface Go 4: The baby Surface Pro is this time, available only for corporate and not consumer market (why??), the device is the same dimensions as before but is more repairable (the most repairable and sustainable device int he Surface Fleet). It ditches the 4GB RAM option (good) and brings a higher spec entry level processor. Pricing increases too which is a shame as is ditching consumer market. These are great for school kids.
Surface Hub 3: The ultimate collaboration device for teams, with a large interactive display that runs the Microsoft Teams Rooms experience. Surface Hub 3 pairs seamlessly with Teams-certified devices and supports Hub on day one. There was also an upgrade announced for Surface Hub 2S customers to upgrade to Surface Hub 3,
The new Surface devices are available for pre-ordering now.
Microsoft 365: The World’s Productivity Cloud
Microsoft 365 is a cloud-based subscription service that offers the best productivity apps for work and life. Microsoft 365 includes apps like Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, OneDrive, Teams, Stream, Loop, Clipchamp, and more.
Microsoft 365 Copilot (which will be available from 1st November) is an add-on service at $30 per user per month and provides in-built AI-powered features and services that help you get more done across all your Office 365 apps and services – with support also coming to Microsoft Designer, Loop and Clipchamp and more.
Some of the new features and services in Microsoft 365 include:
Copilot in Outlook, Excel, Word, Loop, OneNote, Stream, and OneDrive: Copilot is integrated into various Microsoft 365 apps to provide AI assistance for different tasks. For example, you can use Copilot in Outlook to draft emails, in Excel to create charts, in Word to summarize documents, in Loop to generate content blocks, in OneNote to take notes, in Stream to transcribe videos, and in OneDrive to find files.
Generative Expand, Fill, and Erase in Microsoft Designer: These features let you manipulate images in creative ways, such as expanding the canvas, filling in missing areas, or erasing unwanted objects. Generative Erase is generally available now, and Generative Fill and Expand are coming soon.
Copilot Lab: Copilot Lab is a feature that lets you learn how to use Copilot effectively, share your favorite prompts with coworkers, and get inspired by other users. Copilot Lab will be accessible to all Microsoft 365 Copilot users once it’s generally available in November.
Mobile Application Management (MAM) for Windows: This feature allows employees to access organisational resources through Microsoft Edge from an unmanaged device, while giving IT the ability to control the conditions under which the resources can be accessed.
Bing and Edge: The Smartest Way to Search and Browse
Bing and Edge are Microsoft’s search engine and web browser that offer a fast, secure, and personalized way to search and browse the web. Bing and Edge use AI to provide relevant information and assistance based on your needs and preferences.
Some of the new features and improvements in Bing and Edge include:
DALL-E 3 in Bing Image Creator and Microsoft Designer integration: Bing Image Creator is a feature that lets you create images from text descriptions using AI. Bing Image Creator is now powered by DALL-E 3, which produces more realistic and detailed images. You can also access Bing Image Creator directly from Microsoft Designer for further editing.
Content Credentials: Content Credentials is a feature that uses cryptographic methods to add an invisible digital watermark to all AI-generated images in Bing. This helps you verify the origin and authenticity of the images. Content Credentials will be supported in Bing Image Creator, Microsoft Designer, and Paint soon.
Bing Chat Enterprise: Bing Chat Enterprise is a feature that lets you chat with Copilot from the Edge mobile app. You can also use multimodal visual search and Image Creator from Bing Chat Enterprise.
Copilot in Microsoft Shopping: Copilot in Microsoft Shopping is a feature that helps you find what you’re looking for more quickly. You can ask for information on an item, and Bing will ask additional questions to learn more. Then, Bing will use that information to provide more tailored recommendations. This feature will be available soon on both PC and mobile.
Personalised Answers: Personalised Answers is a feature that uses your chat history to inform your results. For example, if you’ve used Bing to track your favorite soccer team, next time you’re planning a trip it can proactively tell you if the team is playing in your destination city. Personalized Answers will begin to roll out soon.
Microsoft Advertising: The Best Way to Reach Your Customers
Microsoft Advertising is a platform that helps businesses connect with their customers across the web. Microsoft Advertising offers various solutions and tools to create effective and engaging ads that reach the right audience at the right time.
Some of the new features and improvements in Microsoft Advertising include:
Copilot in the Microsoft Advertising Platform: Copilot in the Microsoft Advertising Platform is a feature that simplifies and enhances every aspect of your experience with the platform. You can use Copilot to create campaigns, get content recommendations, optimize your performance, and more. This feature will be coming soon.
Compare & Decide Ads: Compare & Decide Ads are a new type of ads that pull relevant data of various products or services into a succinct table. This helps users easily evaluate different options based on their criteria. Compare & Decide Ads will be available for cars initially and will be brought to closed beta in early 2024.
Conclusion
These are just some of the highlights from the Microsoft September 2023 News. There are many more features and products that we didn’t cover here, but you can find them on the current web page context. I hope you are excited about these new developments, and I would love to hear what you are most excited about.
Today (Thursday 21st September) at a live event in New York, Microsoft announced their “revised” vision, release date and confirmation of pricing for Copilot – a “digital companion for your whole life”. Microsoft have said this this Copilot will create a single Copilot user experience across Bing, Edge, Microsoft 365, and Windows (plus more services that will come later). There’s also a new logo!
The Copilot experience promises to be consistent across all platforms and products – Microsoft 365, Bing, and Windows 11.
This has been in preview with Windows Insiders for a while and is essentially the new and revamped “cortana” [ok its far more than that]. Microsoft describe this as “a digital companion for your whole life” and will be nested into Windows 11 from September 26, 2023.
Windows Copilot will be embedded into Windows 11 and will bring generative AI, search, and the ability to control apps and services within your desktop environment.
Currently in preview – will start rolling out starting from September 26 as part of 23H2.
Windows Copilot will also support third part app support like Spotify and Adobe.
Microsoft 365 Copilot
Described by Microsoft as “your AI assistant at work”, this was initially announced back in March as been in closed invite only Early Access Preview since June.
Microsoft 365 builds includes enterprise-grade security, privacy, compliance, and responsible AI to ensure all data processing happens inside your Microsoft 365 tenant—using which will be natively built into the Microsoft 365 apps and services everyone already uses like Teams, Excel, PowerPoint, and Word.
This will be available for enterprise customers for $30 per user per month
It requires a base license of Microsoft 365 E3, E5 or Business Standard or Premium
It will be available from November 1st to purchase
Includes the new Microsoft 365 Chat (formally Business Chat).
Rollout will be staggered – with release first to EA customers who were on the Early Access Programme and then will be available in phases there-after. Customers are advised to speak to their Microsoft Team for more information.
Note: Whilst this is great – IMO it is a little too soon (about 4 months sooner than most expected). Organisations do need to ensure their data lifecycle, governance, compliance, and security is in top shape to get the most from Copilot in Microsoft and there are strong recommendations about getting Copilot Ready – I have covered this here previously. This is an area I’m working a lot with organisation with at the moment – helping with use cases, data preparation, training, awareness, security, and governance.
Bing Chat Enterprise
This has been in public preview for a couple of months for Commercial and Education customers and is the same as Bing Chat for consumer (which is also free) but brings commercial data protection for AI
This is available free for Microsoft 365 E3 and E5, Business Standard, and Business Premium customers or at a cost of $5 as a standalone
Bing Chat Enterprise adds commercial data protection to Bing Chat, ensuring that sensitive business data is never seen by anyone, never stored, and never used to train the foundation models.
Support multimodal visual search and Image Creator and will also be available on Microsoft Edge and Bing mobile app
“Rival” tech giants Microsoft and Oracle have announced a deepening of their four-year cloud partnership in a move that will see Oracle physically locating their Exadata hardware in Microsoft’s data centers in order to speed up their apps and improve the customer experience.
Known as Oracle Database@Azure, this will result in Oracles’ customers having direct access to Oracle database services running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure but deployed physically into Azure data centers. Microsoft and Oracle said this this will mean their shared customers will be able to operate, monitor and manage their Oracle services directly from the Azure Cloud dashboard, instead of having to run a separate Oracle dashboard.
It’s all about AI and Data
AI needs data and and Oracle is big in data! The reason for the deeper integration between Oracle and Microsoft is to leverage more value in each others services – linking Microsoft’s middleware, AI and software and services with Oracle’s Autonomous Database in a way that will reduce the latency which usually occurs when accessing and acting on data from muti cloud environments.
This extended partnership aims to bring together Oracle’s hardware and software with all the advanced functionality Microsoft brings in their extensive and global cloud services.
“You have to have data to deploy AI, and that data might reside in an Oracle database. With this collaboration, we can bring Azure OpenAI to Oracle data.”
Sayta Nadella | Microsoft.
Accelerating Digital Transformation
Oracles’ Larry Ellison said that this is interesting for existing and new applications. He said that “Many customers have partially migrated to the cloud, but a lot of data is still on-prem… “
With further cooperation between Microsoft and Oracle, both claim this will help speed up and simplify the cloud migration and modernization process by making it easier for customers to get their data into the Cloud and to manage their Oracle and Microsoft cloud services from a single place.
Larry Ellison said at the end of the annoucement that hundreds of their customers are now using the interconnect between Microsoft and Oracle, but their customers still need faster, lower latency integration and this is what this will do. “We’ve made the network invisible and can now interconnect everything (Oracle) within Azure without realising you’re dealing with multiple stacks and multiple technologies”.
This level of partnership and collaboration demonstrates how technology and customer demand have driven more cooperation among software and cloud giants.
“Our expanded partnership with Oracle will make Microsoft Azure the only other cloud provider to run Oracle’s database services and help our customers unlock a new wave of cloud-powered innovation” .
Microsoft said yesterday in a blog post that they will “pay legal damages on behalf of customers using its artificial intelligence (AI) products if they are sued for copyright infringement for the output generated by such systems“.
In the post, Microsoft said that they will assume responsibility for the potential legal risks arising out of any claims raised by third parties for copyright infringement so long as their company’s customers use “the guardrails and content filters” built into their AI powered products which include Bing Enterprise Chat and Microsoft 365 Copilot. Microsoft said that this offers functionality that is designed to reduce the likelihood that their AI-powered services will return content that infringes copyrighted content.
Microsoft is announcing our new Copilot Copyright Commitment. As customers ask whether they can use Microsoft’s Copilot services and the output they generate without worrying about copyright claims, we are providing a straightforward answer: yes, you can, and if you are challenged on copyright grounds, we will assume responsibility for the potential legal risks involved.
Microsoft
Microsoft’s say that their Copilot Copyright Commitment will protect customers so long as they have “used the guardrails and content filters we have built into our products” said Hossein Nowbar, [CVP and Chief Legal Officer at Microsoft] in their blog post yesterday. Microsoft also pledged to pay related fines or settlements and said it has taken steps to ensure its Copilots respect copyright.
Microsoft’s pledge comes are part of their ethical use of AI commitments and say that “We believe in standing behind our customers when they use our products – we are charging our commercial customers for our Copilots, and if their use creates legal issues, we should make this our problem rather than our customers’ problem“.
Generative AI is now everywhere
Generative AI applications leverage existing content such including news, images and artwork, and evening programming code and use it to generate new “AI generated” content which may use combinations of different data sources. Microsoft is embedding much of this technology, powered by their partnership with OpenAI Inc, into their core technology products like Windows 11 and Microsoft 365 which as a potential to put their customers in “legal jeopardy”.
With the proliferation and growing use of generative AI – people are using these tools to generate text, images, sounds, other data, and people have raised concerns over the technology’s ability to generate content without referencing it to its original authors. To address this Microsoft, said that “We are sensitive to the concerns of authors, and we believe that Microsoft rather than our customers should assume the responsibility to address them. Even where existing copyright law is clear, generative AI is raising new public policy issues and shining a light on multiple public goals. We believe the world needs AI to advance the spread of knowledge and help solve major societal challenges. Yet it is critical for authors to retain control of their rights under copyright law and earn a healthy return on their creations“.
Protecting and upholding Copyright Laws
Artists, writers, and software developers are already filing lawsuits or raising objections about their creations being used without their consent which has accelerated since the available of Generative AI tools exploded with the release of ChatGPT back in November 2022. This includes programmers, artists, and authors.
I cannot show you that, as it would be unethical and illegal to do so. AI breaching copyright is a genuine issue that affects many artists and creators who have their original works used without their permission or compensation.
Microsoft say that their Copilot Copyright Commitment extends their existing intellectual property indemnification coverage to copyright claims relating to the use of its AI-powered assistants called Copilots and through to their AI powered Bing Chat Enterprise.
Microsoft state in their blog that “we have built important guardrails into our Copilots to help respect authors’ copyrights. We have incorporated filters and other technologies that are designed to reduce the likelihood that Copilots return infringing content. These build on and complement our work to protect digital safety, security, and privacy, based on a broad range of guardrails such as classifiers, meta prompts, content filtering, and operational monitoring and abuse detection, including that which potentially infringes third-party content”.
You can already see evidence of this safety net in tools such as Bing Enterprise Chat where the tools will do what it can to avoid purposely breaching copyright.
I have run well over a dozen Business Briefing sessions with customers over the past month and whilst still not available to (most of) us yet, one thing is for certain – Microsoft 365 Copilot will be an absolute game-changer for any business that uses Microsoft 365 as their primary productivity and collaboration toolset.
If you are already leveraging Teams, OneDrive, SharePoint, Office, and even apps like Forms, Loop and Viva, the way you work with these apps, with your teams and customers is about to be turbo charged – bringing huge benefits to every employee who has a Copilot license.
This blog covers the 5 key things I’ve been talking to business’ about in the run up to release of Microsoft 365 Copilot.
Recap – what is Microsoft 365 Copilot
Microsoft 365 Copilot will be as deep rooted into Office 365 as Windows is on moder desktop and will be as revolutionary and disruptive as the hype. Whilst we may have “heard this before”, my early experience of Microsoft 365 Copilot tells me that this goes beyond any form of productivity gains we’ve been promised or seen before.
Microsoft 365 Copilot will be an absolute game-changer for any business that uses Microsoft 365 as their primary productivity and collaboration toolset.
Copilot won’t just be for IT and the techies either – in fact, IT may benefit the least!
Copilot will help increase the speed to get work done, improve the quality and help people get more from your tools and data. It should help increase profit by automating tasks, enhancing productivity, and improving skills.
Copilot will be accessible to users through natural language and starts with a prompt from you in the associated Office 365 App through an approach called “grounding”. Microsoft 365 Copilot will help with anything and everything. It can help you with tasks such as analysing data in Excel, summarising documents, creating presentations from scratch or content elsewhere in PowerPoint, automatically minuting meeting and assigning follow-up tasks and providing detailed responses to any clarifying questions.
There is so much excitement for Microsoft 365 Copilot but also many things’ organisations need to do to prepare to ensure they get the best return on their investment – yes, it’s an investment, at circa $30 per user per month.
Here’s my five key things to be excited about and to make sure you prepare for….
Whether you are a business leader, manager, or a member of team, you need to understand how Copilot works and how it can benefit your role and your organisation. Otherwise, you will find your competition are using it to their advantage.
#1 It’s still a waiting game….
Whilst Microsoft announced Microsoft 365 Copilot back in March 2023 and made it available to an extremely limited (twenty-six) US organisations, the sizzle videos Microsoft released, which dominated social media has sparked huge interest, questions, and speculation about what is coming.
Then, in June 2023, Microsoft expanded the availability of the product to an “invited” list of around six hundred customers. Microsoft said they also expect to release Microsoft 365 Copilot in the “coming months” but realistically I think that this is still nine to twelve months away, though I expect the private preview will be available to more organisations around the time of Microsoft Ignite at the back end of 2023.
Whilst we hate to wait – there is a lot of preparation that most organisations will need to do to plan, prepare (and pay) for Microsoft 365 Copilot to get the best value from it.
We also now know that Microsoft 365 Copilot will set you back around $30 pupm based on the pricing Microsoft announced back in June 2023.
#2 – Quality of your data will be critical to success of Copilot
Microsoft 365 Copilot is powered by a large language model (LLM) that can access and analyse information from the Internet (it’s built on ChatGPT-4) but most importantly (and the main differentiation of this and ChatGPT), your organisational data.
Microsoft 365 Copilot will be deep rooting into your Office 365 environment, giving it the ability to leverage your Outlook messages, Teams chat, calls and meetings, OneDrive and SharePoint documents, Loop components, CRM data (Dynamics 365), Azure Files, and other internal and external data (via plug-ins) that it is permitted to access – and act on this data (at your command) to provide you create new content (from multiple sources), analyse data, compare content or re-write work directly from within your Office applications and services.
The other thing that stands Microsoft 365 Copilot aside from other AI tools like ChatGPT is a new indexing tool coming to Microsoft 365 called Semantic Index for Copilot, which is a sophisticated map of all your user and company data. For example, when you ask Copilot about the “March Sales Report,” it doesn’t simply look for documents with those words in the file name or body, it instead understands that “sales reports are produced by Kelly on the finance team and created in Excel.” And it uses that conceptual understanding to determine your intent and help you find what you need.
Sounds incredible right? Yes, but Microsoft 365 Copilot’s performance will depend primarily on what you ask it to do (more on that later), and the quality and completeness of your data. If your data is inaccurate, has multiple conflicting versions, or the permissions/access control are not correct, it may not give you the best results or even be able access the information. There is also the danger that it will have access to things you think it shouldn’t if your data governance and protection need work!
Therefore, if you do nothing else while you wait patiently for it, you need to ensure that your data is clean, updated, and consistent. The quality and security of your data has never been so important.
This is something that will need addressing and it is something that Microsoft strongly recommend doing now (while you are waiting for Copilot to be available).
Teh success of Microsoft 365 Copilot within your organisation will not be Copilot itself - it will be your organisational data that Copilot relies upon to do its job.
#3The impact of Copilot will be huge for everyone.
We’ve all (most likely) used ChatGPT or Bing Chat Enterprise to help us write or summarise text, but with Microsoft 365 Copilot, employees will be able to get a jump start into whatever task they are starting or finishing.
This is because, with Copilot, Microsoft have not just added a tool that can access Generative Chat services (think Bing Chat Enterprise – which is powered by ChatGPT4).
Once you have your hands on Microsoft 365 Copilot, employees will be able to focus on the part of work that needs real human and skilled input, using the power of AI to get started quicker, improve quality of our work, and spend less time on mundane tasks. Microsoft 365 Copilot should be able to assist people in creating high-quality content in a a much shorter amount of time.
Using AI to improve how we work – Image (c) Microsoft.
You will have seen from the demos that every Office app will have a Copilot button, which once clicked will call your Copilot assistant’s chat box right from within your application.
For example….
In Excel – Copilot can help analyse data and generate charts, creating formulas from free text input, visualise information better or look for trends across different cells, sheets, or workbooks. It will also be able to help with data management by suggesting content and formatting options for your spreadsheets
In Word it will help you write documents, curate executive summaries, create proposals or summarise from emails, presentations, or meeting notes. It will be able to write, edit, summarise, and creates right alongside you with only a brief prompt. Copilot will help you create a first draft of document, bringing in information from across your organisation and the internet as needed. Copilot can add content to existing documents, summarize text, and rewrite sections or the entire document to make it more concise.
In PowerPoint – Copilot can help you turn your ideas into stunning presentations. Copilot will be able to transform existing written documents into decks complete with speaker notes and sources or start a new presentation from a simple prompt. It will be able to condense lengthy presentations at the click of a button and let you use natural language commands to adjust layouts, reformat text, and perfectly time animations. Microsoft call it your “storytelling partner”
In Outlook – According to a report by McKinsey, the average employees spend 28% of their time reading and responding to emails. Copilot will help you triage your inbox, summarise long email threads, and generate replies for you. Copilot will also help you with tasks such as scheduling meetings, creating tasks, and setting reminders and can also help with email management by suggesting content and formatting options for your messages.
In Teams – Copilot will help you summarise and prepare for meetings by combing through all your documents, emails, meetings, files, and resources to get you information you need that is highly relevant. It can streamline tasks such as scheduling meetings, creating agendas, and taking notes during meetings. It can also help you with tasks such as creating tasks, setting reminders, and managing your to-do list. Copilot can also help you with team collaboration by suggesting content and formatting options for your messages.
Copilot won't be limited to Microsoft 365 either. Copilot is coming to Dynamics 365, Teams, Viva and of course Power Platform. Copilot is also coming to Windows 11, Bing and of course their developer tools GitHub. There's even a Security Copilot for your Microsoft 365 Admins and SOC.
#4 Copilot “should” pay for itself.
Watch the sizzle video again – Microsoft 365 Copilot will be able to do all the things shown here just by chatting to the Copilot chat bot. it and will also suggest things proactively.
At $30 per user per month, this can add a lot of cost to your cloud subscriptions, but rest assured, Copilot will save vast amounts of wasted time, which will increase productivity (letting people work on other things). Copilot is there to aid every person do almost any task in any app.
For example
While you may not be able to test this until you have your hand on a pilot yourselves, most of the organisations I have spoken to know that eventually investment in AI has the potential to more than pay for itself. With Microsoft 365 Copilot, this $30 (£25) pupm, should improve output and productivity, save time (which saves money) and enabled people to get more done quickly (which saves money) depending on how you look at it to more than £25 pupm in investment.
So, £25 a month is around 75p per day. If you have someone earning £50,000 a year, and they work ~250 working days then this is about £200 a day or £25 an hour.
Now, say they host/run TWO meetings a month and spend 30 mins writing up minutes and action plans after the meeting – then that’s about one hour @ £25 cost.
If, instead of doing this themselves, Microsoft 365 Copilot could write up the minutes and take actions just for that one meeting then we have technically saved that £25 for an investment of £25 (per month) – so we have already broken even after one Copilot run meeting!
Once you’ve run a pilot and tested this out, I am pretty certain almost every person or role would benefit from Copilot and even if not everyone, you’ll want to look at a time and motion study (or mini assessment anyway) and look at the ways Copilot can squeeze an additional 30 mins a day in time back or revenue generating tasks.
#5 – It won’t be perfect so make sure you “check it’s work”
Like all transformative technologies, there are tasks that AI is not well suited for, so it’s important to be aware of the potential drawbacks.
AI-produced content and outputs may contain inaccuracies, biases, or sensitive materials because they were trained on information from the internet, as well as other sources. AI may not know about recent events yet, and struggles to understand and interpret sarcasm, irony, or humor. Please remember that it’s not a person.
Microsoft advise that “It’s important that you review any content the AI generates for you to make sure it has accurately produced what you wanted.” – this means you are responsible for the content and checking its sources!!
Remember again, that Copilot’s ability to do the best job will be reliant on what you ask and where the data comes from that it uses, so remember – rubbish in, rubbish out. Your pilot and testing of Copilot are critical in making sure users get the best experience.
Microsoft have unveiled another way for employers to empower their workforce with the announcement and preview availability of Bing Chat Enterprise by giving them better answers, greater efficiency, and new ways to be creative. Microsoft say it’s “Secure AI-powered chat for work.”
Bing Chat Enterprise | Microsoft
Secured with Microsoft Entra – Conditional Access
Bing Chat brings the power of generative AI to work, however, consumer Generative AI services like ChatGPT and Bing Chat (consumer), are helping people get answers, generate code, content and find things, but using these consumer servers for work, inadvertently puts corporate data at risk since it’s being shared with public AI services which use your data and your searches to train and teach their language models.
This is where Bing Chat Enterprise comes in! With Bing Chat Enterprise, organisations gets all the goodness of “AI-powered chat for work” with the commercial data protection organisations demand. “What goes in—and comes out—remains protected”, Microsoft say, which means employees get secure and managed access to better answers, greater efficiency, and new ways to be creative. User and business data is protected and will not leak outside the organisation, and chat data is not saved, viewed or accessible by Microsoft or used to train their language models.
What’s more, access to Microsoft Bing Chat Enterprise is secured and governed for seamless, managed access to using Microsoft Entra ID (Azure Active Directory) and organisations can also customise “Microsoft Search” to build out and map business answers within the Microsoft 365 Admin Centre.
How do you enable Bing Chat Enterprise?
To enable this, you need to ensure that Microsoft Search has not been disabled in your tenant and then go to https://aka.ms/TurnOnBCE as a Tenant Admin in Microsoft 365 and then enable the Bing Enterprise Chat feature as shown below ⬇️. The settings can take up to 4 hours to apply….
Enabling BCE in Microsoft 365 Admin Centre
How does Bing Chat Enterprise Work?
Video (C) Microsoft.
Privacy and Data Protection
Because workplace chats might contain sensitive data, Bing Chat Enterprise is designed with commercial data protection in place to keep organisational data safe.
Chat: When users ask questions in chat, it’s called a prompt. Those prompts can send generated searches (also known as queries) to Bing, and the resulting answer is called a response. User and business data is protected and won’t leak outside the organization. What goes in—and comes out—remains protected. Chat data isn’t saved, and Microsoft has no eyes-on access to it—no one sees it. And your data isn’t used to train the underlying models.
Search: Any searches generated by Bing Chat have workplace identities removed before they’re sent to Bing. The searches aren’t linked to users or business by Bing and any searches sent to Bing are under the terms of the Microsoft Services Agreement and covered by the privacy statement.
Organisational data: Bing Chat Enterprise doesn’t have access to organisational resources or content within Microsoft 365, such as Word documents or PowerPoint presentations. Only content provided in the chat by users is accessible to Bing Chat Enterprise.
Plugins: Importantly, Bing Chat Enterprise doesn’t have plugin support to prevent any commercial data from being sent to any external providers.
Chat history: Bing Chat Enterprise doesn’t retain chat prompts or responses. With Bing Chat history disabled for Bing Chat Enterprise users, no previous chats are maintained or available to users.
Back in March, Microsoft announced the upcoming availability of Microsoft 365 Copilot, an AI powered service that would bring generative AI features into Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, and the rest of the Microsoft Cloud which has the potential to fundamentally change the way we work with apps, data and services and ever…
CoPilot will work alongside your Microsoft 365 apps and services and leverages the same built in security and privacy in mind so that data is always safe. It respects existing Microsoft 365 security and privacy settings as well as respects individual and group permission policies. This means that you can use it to generate reports, summaries, or other documents without worrying about data leaks or unauthorised access.
How much will Microsoft 365 Copilot cost?
Until now, there has been no indication as to pricing or available (Microsoft 365 Copilot is currently in a closed private preview), but this week, Microsoft used their global partner conference to announced pricing.
Microsoft 365 Copilot for commercial customers will cost an extra $30 per user per month on top of what organisations pay for their Microsoft 365 licenses. There is also minimum base license requirement (for the add on) of Microsoft 365 E3, E5, or Business Standard or Professional, though I expect that large enterprise organisations will be able to get a cheaper rate on Enterprise Agreements.
Microsoft 365 Copilot will cost $30 per user per month for commercial customers.
What about other Sectors?
Pricing for Public Sector, Healthcare/NHS, Edu and Not for Profit has not yet been announced.
Cheaper than “expectations“?
Rumours of what organisations in the Early Access Program (EAP) had been paying led to speculations that costs could be closer to $40 per use per month so this price is actually lower that what some thought, though other rumours suggested Microsoft “might” bundle it in Microsoft 365 E5.
What do you think – how much were you expecting Microsoft 365 Copilot to cost?
When will Microsoft 365 Copilot be available?
No dates have yet been annouced for wider preview, public preview or General Availability (which is the cycle Microsoft usually follows for new products and services.
Microsoft 365 Copilot is still currently early access preview testing (EAP) with 600 paying enterprise customers.
Bing Chat Enterprise
Microsoft also yesterday announced Bing Chat Enterprise, a new version of the ChatGPT-4 powered Bing Chat service that is now built into their Edge browser and Windows 11 (currently in preview). Bing Chat Enterprise’s main difference will be its privacy model which will ensure user and business data are protected and will not leak outside the boundaries of the organisation.
Bing Chat Enterprise
“Bing Chat Enterprise gives your organization AI-powered chat for work with commercial data protection,”
Yusaf Mehdi and Jared Spataro |Microsoft
Microsoft said that unlike it’s AI rivals “Chat data is not saved, and Microsoft has no eyes-on access, which means no one can view your data. And your data is not used to train the models.”
Bing Chat Enterprise will be “free”
Unlike Copilot, Bing Chat Enterprise will be available to existing Microsoft 365 customers at no additional cost, and Microsoft also said that they also plan to offer a standalone version for $5 per user per month.
Data privacy has been a major concern for many companies, who are putting in contols to stop employees using generative AI chat tools. Global organisations including Samsung, Verizon, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, and Goldman Sachs are all among the companies that restricted or banned the use of public verisons of Bing Chat, ChatGPT, Google Bard etc. Bing Chat Enterprise’s privacy guard is designed to enable organisation to leverage these AI tools with peace of mind.
When will Bing Chat Enterprise be available?
Bing Chat Enterprise is currently available in preview and is accessible from within Microsoft Edge or bing.com/chat.
When Windows Copilot (not to be confused with Microsoft 365 Copilot) is released to the public in a Windows update later this year, Bing Chat Enterprise will also be available from within Windows 11. You can test out Windows Copilot today as a Windows Insider.
In late June 2023, Microsoft quietly annouced their new AI language model Orca — a new open-sourced development in the field of Al that can imitate the reasoning of large foundation models in a much smaller footprint, which may revolutionise development of generative AI technology…..
This new AI model is designed to solve many of the limitations of using smaller language models and revolutionise the Al industry.
Orca will do this by “imitating” the reasoning processes of GPT-4 into smaller language models making it more efficient and effective is specific and niche use cases and in more localised instances.
Built in Microsoft and OpenAI partnership
The development of Orca is part of the ongoing collaboration between Microsoft and OpenAI, which has led to the creation of a new AI model that can replicate the intricate reasoning and complex instructional processes of GPT-4, and able to house billions of parameters.
Orca is a 13-billion parameter model that learns to imitate the reasoning process of LFMs
Microsoft
Microsoft say that with the help of GPT-4, Orca is capable of learning explanations, step-by-step thought processes, and other complex instructions.
What makes Orca AI different?
What makes Orca AI different from other AI models is its unique learning approach. Orca will learn by emulating the reasoning processes of large-scale language models.
This approach will enables Orca AI to understand and replicate the reasoning steps of these models, thereby enhancing its own reasoning capabilities. This learning mechanism is big change from the conventional AI models, and since Orca is much smaller in size, it will not need as much computational resources to operate and is said to be equal in performance with large foundation models (LFM) and Large Language Models (LLM) such as #GPT-4.
The video below explains this in more detail.
Microsoft Orca (source: The Road to AGI)
Orca is the first small parameter model to replicate, not only the patterns and output created by large parameter modules, but also to imitate the reasoning process of these models, all while maintaining a much smaller overhead.
Orca can also be optimised for specific tasks and trained using large language models like GPT-4.
Microsoft is investing heavily in AI and are working on multiple AI projects and tools to further enhance, innovate and differentiate their products and services, and Orca is another step in that direction.
The latest Windows 11 preview build, which is now available to Insiders in the Dev Channel, ships with the first “beta” version of Windows Copilot, which is powered by the same AI technology that Bing Chat uses.
Microsoft initially annouced Windows Copilot last month at Build, and said it would be available in preview from June. In today’s Dev build (23493), Windows Copilot is available to preview, and is expected to roll out to all users later this calendar year.
Using Windows Copilot
Windows Copilot can be launched from the Taskbar and appears as a sidebar app that is docked to the right of your screen. Windows Copilot can do pretty much everything Bing Chat does, but also brings new experiences specifically for Windows 11. Whilst limited in this initial release, Windows Copilot supports commands such as:
“Change to dark mode.”
“Turn on do not disturb.”
“Take a screenshot”
“Summarise this website” (which uses an active tab in Microsoft Edge)
“Write a story about a dog who lives on the moon.”
“Make me a picture of a serene koi fishpond with lily pads
Windows Copilot Beta
As you can see in the above screenshot, Windows Copilot does not appear on top of apps, but is instead docked to the right side of the screen so that you can use it without it getting in the way. This builds on Windows 11`s ability to work with other apps side-by-side.
As it stands today, the side bar is really just Edge running in a window, rather than a full native Windows App, and it just look just like (since it is) BingChat. Hopefully over time, this will be polished to look a bit more Windows 11 like, rather than just BingChat in a sidebar… But this is an initial release…
Asking a command like “Take a screenshot”, not only gives instructions on how to perform that task, Copilot also opens or performs the relevant task for me. Like I say, these are simple interactions in this initial release.
Windows Copilot in action.
Feedback: I’d like the option to be able to turn off the confirmation unless Copilot isn’t sure of my command, this would make Copilot more streamlined and mean I dont have to confirm. Maybe show me how to open or peform the action (that is useful) but do the task first!
Current Limitations
This initial version of Windows Copilot preview is missing a few of the things that were annouced last month, including third-party application support. There’s also still only a handful of settings and tasks it can perform – the aim of this beta is of course to get user feedback from the Windows Insider community (it’s far from ready for general availability).
Windows Copilot also requires you to be using Microsoft Edge (version 115 or higher). Edge is required since Windows Copilot is an extension of Microsoft Edge and uses WebView2 to display the chat window inside the Windows Copilot sidebar. It’s essentially BingChat currently, but again, it’s early days and this far from ready for mainstream release (it’s an early preview).
Microsoft said that Windows Copilot’s first preview doesn’t have everything shown at their Build conference. It cannot be used to try third-party plugins from OpenAI or modify advanced Windows Settings…. Yet!
They have said that new features or “actions” will be added over time as Microsoft continues to work on the update.
I will be attempting a hands on video with the new Windows Copilot soon. In the meantime, check out more on this in the official Microsoft Blog.
Microsoft Teams Meeting recap is now live for both Teams Standard and Teams Premium users. For users with Teams Premium licenses, they also get access to the AI powered “Intelligent recap” feature. In this blog I will cover.
What is Intelligent Recap
What is Teams Premium
How does Intelligent recap work in Teams
How do you summarize a team meeting transcript
How much does Intelligent recap cost?
What is Intelligent recap
Intelligent Recap is a Teams Premium (a service that provides an enhanced Teams experience, including many advanced features including several that use artificial intelligence to provide time saving tasks for meeting organisers and attendees.
Intelligent recap provides AI powered insights, automatically takes notes, recommended tasks, and highlights, as well as creating speaker-indexed video and transcriptions of the recording. It is available to use now for Teams Premium users.
According to research by Microsoft and feedback from their customers, this tool should save people a lot of time since who, more than 55% of people claim that actions and notes are often unclear or inconsistent following a meeting.
What is Teams Premium
Microsoft Teams Premium was released early this year and amongst other premium features, it brings new artificial intelligence powered tools to Teams designed to improve your productivity. The biggest AI feature within Teams Premium is intelligent recap, which after being in preview for while is now generally available.
Intelligent Meeting Recap in Teams Premium
How does Intelligent recap work in Teams
To be able to recap a meeting the meeting organiser (or permitted attendee) will need to ensure they choose (or set to automatic) to record and transcribe the meeting. You also need to have a Teams Premium license.
Intelligent recap is designed to help attendees to catch up on a meeting by reviewing the content, video, key content, and discussion points and to review suggested actions. It also useful for people that were invited to the meeting but were unable to attend and to ensure that everyone has notes from the meeting and are clear on the actions (which it suggests based on the meeting).
Intelligent recap uses Microsoft’s Generative AI to generate meeting notes, recommended tasks, and personalised highlights, which it takes from the transcription it creates.
Intelligent recap also creates personalised timeline markers that are only visible to a specific user. These highlight when someone is specifically mentioned by name, when something is shared by that person and when someone leaves the meeting. This is useful, if, for example, you had to leave an over running meeting because, you can then easily use the recap to catch up on what you missed at the end – particularly if you are given an action.
Intelligent recap also creates speaker timeline markers which make it quick and easy to jump to the most important (or specific parts) of a meeting. They speaker markers show when different people spoke and are organised based on who spoke the most, which is again useful to see the dynamic of a meeting.
Chapters, (which have been delayed but are coming soon), will divide meetings into sections and attempt to organise them by topic – this is currently in testing.
Meeting Recap in Teams “Standard”
It is worth noting that the standard version of Teams does have a meeting recap feature – but lacks the AI powered intelligent notes described above. Instead, the “Recap” tab of a Teams meeting provides links to the meeting transcript, recording, and any notes that were taken manually. You are also able to watch the meeting recording directly within Teams without needing to go to another app or web page. This will also support the new collaborative meeting notes feature when it rolls out in the next month
How do you summarize a Team meeting transcript
To summarise a Teams meeting transcript, you need to make sure the meeting is recorded and transcribed, and you need to have a Teams Premium license assigned.
There are no manual steps needed to summarise the meeting, since the Intelligent Recap feature will work automatically after the meeting ends and after it has processed and analysed the recording and transcription.
One the meeting has finished; you will see a recap tab within the meeting window.
In the Recap panel, you can watch the recorded meeting and access key information such as the agenda, meeting notes, shared content etc. You can also quickly see and navigate to where specific people spoke or where you were mentioned in the meeting for your mentions. You can do that by clicking on the @ over the video window.
The Recap panel is simple to use and very intuitive. From here you can access any notes manually taken during the meeting as well as access the AI notes generated by Teams.
Scrolling down further, shows the AI generated actions that Teams detected or has suggested if not explicitly stated. In my experience these are quite accurate, but it does mistakes – expect it improve over time with more user feedback!
How much does Intelligent recap cost
Intelligent meeting recap is part of Microsoft Teams Premium. Depending on your region and licensing agreement, pricing may vary but RRP is currently on promo for £5.80 pupm. It is due to increase to around £7.
Thanks for reading – as always welcome your comments and feedback.
Today, fueled by the growth and demand of AI, data plays a crucial role in digital transformation and gaining a competitive Edge. Microsoft say that today’s data lakes can be fragmented, messy and complicated, making it hard for organisations to create, integrate, manage, and operate data lakes.
Microsoft, having recognised this, announced at Microsoft Build 2023, Microsoft Fabric, which provides an end-to-end platform that can bring together all the necessary data and analytics tools for an organisation. Fabric integrates Azure Data Factory, Azure Synapse Analytics, and Power BI into a single, seamless product, empowering data, and business professionals to unlock the full potential of their data.
What is the use of Microsoft Fabric?
Microsoft Fabric is made up of multiple subsystems, is “lake-centric”, open and extensible and is backed by a shared platform providing world class, enterprise grade, robust data security, governance, and compliance.
Microsoft Fabric – Image (c) Microsoft
Microsoft Fabric is essentially umbrella that sits over the top of Microsoft’s three main Data Analytics products – Power BI, Azure Data Factory, and Azure Synapse. It is a third generation of data platform.
First generation data platforms, such as SQL, SQL Data Warehouse and HDInsight, were inherently isolated data platforms built on traditional data products. Second generation data platforms such as Azure Synapse Analytics, went further by providing integrated platforms at a UX level were still disjointed at the data level. This third generation of data platforms like Microsoft Fabric, builds upon the Synapse “unification” approach but are focussed on enabling data-level interoperability and insights powered by Azure AI.
What are the benefits of using Microsoft Fabric?
The benefits of using Microsoft Fabric include reduced complexity, increased agility, improved security, and reduced costs through unified capacities. Powered by Microsoft AI, and natively integrated into Microsoft 365 applications such as Excel, PowerBI, Teams, and Dynamics 365. Fabric also supports thousands of connectors and deep APIs to allow organisations to better to connect almost any application, workflow, or data source.
Fabric announcement at Build 2023
Fabric has been designed to empower every business user by deeply integrating with Microsoft 365 applications and provides a rich set of connectors and APIs. Power BI, a core component of Fabric, is seamlessly integrated with popular applications like Excel, Teams, PowerPoint, and SharePoint and as such this deep integration allows users to discover and analyse data directly within these applications, driving a data culture and enabling better decision-making without the needs to switch applications or context.
How does it compare?
Fabric is a complete analytics platform that should eliminate the complexity and expense of integrating and administering multiple subsystems from different vendors. This means users get a truly unified experience and architecture, providing all the capabilities required for extracting insights from data and presenting them to business users. Moreover, Fabric offers role-specific experiences for various teams involved in the analytics process, ensuring a seamless workflow for data engineers, data scientists, analysts, and business users.
Fabric’s lake-centric and open approach is another key differentiator. Fabric includes a multi-cloud data lake called OneLake, which simplifies data management, integration, and operation. OneLake aims to eliminate data duplication and vendor lock-in by organising data into an intuitive hub. OneLake supports open data formats such as Delta and Parquet and allows organisations to work with a single copy of the data across all their Fabric workloads. This reduces cost, vendor lock in, complexity, and management overhead.
OneLake is the core of Fabric – a single storage account for an organisations multi-cloud data, whether that is inside of Azure, AWS or in a private DC. It is a single, logical “data lake” containing all an organisations’ Fabric workloads
Fabric is powered by AI, through Azure OpenAI Service, which is integrated at every layer, it will enable users to leverage the latest generative AI capabilities to quickly find insights across all their data. The upcoming Copilot feature will provide conversational dialogue that will let users quickly create dataflows, build models, and visualise the results using natural language queries and dialogue.
Availability and Pricing
Microsoft Fabric is currently available in preview, and organisations can sign up for a free trial to experience its capability.
Whilst this is in preview, pricing is not final, however, Microsoft say that to share content and collaborate in Microsoft Fabric, your organisation needs to have an organisational license and at least one individual license. A Microsoft Fabric subscription consists of tenants, capacities, and workspaces and can be organised in different ways to fit the needs of your organisational needs.
In short, an organisation needs capacity licenses and individual user licenses. The following information from Microsoft on Fabric Licensing which you can read more here.
Capacity is a dedicated set of resources reserved for exclusive use. It offers dependable, consistent performance for your content. Each capacity offers a selection of SKUs, and each SKU provides different resource tiers for memory and computing power
Individual licenses allow users to work in Microsoft Fabric.
Free – which allow users to create and share Fabric content in Microsoft Fabric so long as they have access to a Fabric Capacity (trial or paid).
Pro – A Pro license lets users share Power BI content with other users. Every organisation needs at least one Pro license if they intend to work with Power BI. If you’re purchasing a Microsoft Fabric license for your organisation, ensure you purchase at least one Pro license for your organisation.
Summary
In summary, Microsoft Fabric is comprehensive and integrated solution for data and analytics designed to maximise the AI era. Fabrics’ unified platform, lake-centric approach (OneLake), AI-powered features (including its own Copilot), seamless integration with Microsoft 365, and cost-saving benefits. Fabric aims to simplify, align, and streamline how organisations leverage the power of their data for insights and decision-making.
Yesterday at Microsoft Build, Microsoft announced that is making its’ inevitable step in the future of Windows – making AI an integral part of Windows 11 with Windows Copilot.
In the (to be expected) incredible sizzle video from Microsoft (see below), we saw how the new Windows Copilot tool will live within the Windows sidebar and will be able to offer contextual actions and suggestions based on what’s currently on screen. The user will also be able to ask natural language questions and Copilot will respond much like Bing Chat does.
Microsoft said initial previews of Windows Copilot will begin as soon as next month with Windows Insiders and Windows MVPs.
It will see Microsoft AI becoming front and centre across more than 1.4 billion Windows users in the coming months.
What will Windows Copilot be able to do?
Microsoft say the Copilot will make all Windows users Power Users. It can be used to accomplish tasks within the OS such as turning on or off wireless, changing between light and dark mode, changing projection mode etc, all without having to fumble around trying to find the specific setting. Windows Copilot will also function as a true AI assistant, summarising documents, opening apps, and even sending documents via email. In short – Windows Copilot is the Cortana that never was.
Microsoft Windows Copilot Announcement Video
Initially, Windows Copilot will launch as a text-only tool, but in the announcement, Microsoft’s envisions that it will evolving into something you can interact with in other ways, like voice – like Cortana once did #RIPCortana.
Extensibility and Third-Party Apps
As was another common theme at Build2023, Windows Copilot, just like Bing Chat, will also support the same third-party plugins that OpenAI’s ChaptGPT uses. This is huge, since it means that in time, any application developer will be able to easily connect their applications and services to Windows Copilot, which is vital for Windows Copilot to not just be limited to its stock apps and Operating System functions.
This means that users will soon be able use Copilot to perform cross-application tasks. For example, it could review and shorten a document, create a Spotify playlist or share a recent photo to your social media platforms or an email all through a single prompt.
“AI is going to be the single largest driver of innovation for Windows in the years to come… It’s going to change the way you work, change your interaction models to make it easier. It’s going to understand so much about what you need.”
One thing I will say is that by bringing AI front and center of the Windows 11 operating system, (as they will be doing with Office apps and services, I honestly believe this has the potential to totally change the landscape of how we use and interface with our apps and devices.
What about Security and Privacy
We don’t currently know where the AI processing for Windows Copilot take-place will. It is conceivable that this max be a blend of local processing and within Microsoft’s data centres. We also do not yet know if you must be connected/online to the internet for Windows Copilot to work.
From a privacy perspective, we also do not yet have information about whether things like chat history will be preserved, or if there will be a “private mode”. More I am sure will be made available in coming weeks and once it starts being tested with Windows Insiders next month.
I would image also, that the initial Windows Insiders preview will only be available to the US, as is usually the case when these previews first hit.
Microsoft says Windows Copilot will be available in a preview version for Windows 11 users in June. The feature will then roll out some time later this year.
Will it Cost?
We expect this to be “included” within the Windows 11 license for consumers. Less is known about commercial customers at this point.
What do you think?
I’d love to know your thoughts and feedback. What do you think about the flood gates of AI being injected into every application we use. Is it too soon? What are the potential issues?
Everyone has been talking ChatGPT, but here I want to talk about the similarities, differences, and in my view,the HUGE ADVANTAGES OF BING CHAT OVER CHATGPT. Whilst both look similar in the way they work, are both powered by the OpenAI’s Generative AI technology and are conversational based, the speed, accuracy, quality of their responses and capability differs hugely.
Both Bing Chat and ChatGPT are based on the OpenAI GPT technology.
Natural language chatbot ChatGPT, quickly become the focal point in the tech industry since it was annouced and released to the masses at the backend of 2022. Whilst most initially saw it as a “fun way” to write poems, essays, answer exam questions and even generate computer code, 6 months later we are starting to see the true potential of AI as digitial assistants
We now have a plethora of AI tools, with new ones (it feels) coming every day. Outside of this fun stuff, the AI technology behind these tools is capable of so much more, and we are just at the beginning of what will change the way we interface with our devices and apps such as Microsoft Copilot – more on that here:
ChatGPT debuted in Nov 2022, and in Feb 2023, Microsoft their new AI powered version of Bing with Bing Chat being its’ standout feature, powered by the same technology (be it a Peter, better version) behind ChatGPT – a generative artificial intelligence algorithm created by Open AI. Recently Google had also released their AI chat tool Bard, which is not based on OpenAI GPT technology.
ChatGPT debuted in Nov 2022.
In Feb 2023, Microsoft their new AI powered Bing Chat, powered by the technology behind ChatGPT, a generative artificial intelligence algorithm created by Open AI.
Bing Chat vs ChatGPT – What’s the difference?
Bing Chat and ChatGPT both fall under the category of generative AI, which means they can generate brand-new text that has never been written before.
This kind of AI is useful since rather than leveraging keywords to look for text and return results based on a ranking, it works by providing the answer to the question you ask. Of course, it is only able to do this if it can provide accurate information. To do this is needs access to an entire world of data – like the Internet! So how does it work?
Both Bing Chat and Chat GPT are both built on a large language model (LLM), developed by OpenAI, of which Microsoft now own a majority share.
ChatGPT’s model, known as GPT-3.5, has been trained on billions of articles from across the internet but only as recent as end of 2021.
Bing Chat uses a newer, advanced, GPT-4 language model which can work with more different media types and not just text. Free to use.
ChatGPT offers a paid/premium version of its LLM (also using GPT-4), but it is only available today as a $20 per month subscription service.
The first major advantage of Bing Chat is that it, (since it’s also integrated into their native Bing Search, their Edge browser, and Windows 11), is that it can also search the internet for information and references in real-time. This is a huge advantage, because it’s up to date, but can lead also make it less accurate, since any misinformation it finds upon this search can introduce bias or error into its response. In most cases though, Bing Chat does reference its sources at the bottom of each response, which allows you to quickly verify the Bing’s accuracy and appropriateness by clicking on one of the citations.
Who “knows” more? Bing Chat vs Chat GPT
If you’re looking for information on a technical subject or recent event, Bing Chat will always deliver a higher-quality response as it can search the internet in real time so is “up to date”. ChatGPT does not do as well in recent events as it only has knowledge of events prior up to 2021.
This is the second big win for Bing, since it can be used as a copilot for the Internet, for anything from breaking news headline, shopping, days out, and travel since it does not have date limitations and can use the Internet to keep its LLM up to date.
The third key differentiator between the two is that Bing Chat lets you choose from three modes of conversation – Creative, Balanced, and Precise. Creative mode is closest to ChatGPT’s default behaviour.
More Creative: Longer, more descriptive, and “imaginative” answers.
More Precise: Shorter, straightforward search-focused answers.
More Balanced: Default mode – informative, yet friendly – middle of the other styles.
Visually Speaking | Bing Chat vs ChatGPT
The fourth standout feature for me is that you can use Bing Image Creator to generate images based on text prompts as pictured above. OpenAI does offer DALL-E for the same purpose. However, it’s not integrated within ChatGPT currently. What makes Bing Chat great is that you can use it in the flow of the conversation – or can use Bing Chat to create you an image on the fly. Bing uses also uses OpenAI’s DALL-E AI image generator (it is powered by Bing Image Creator) and has fewer limitations that the official OpenAI DALL-E website.
As shown below, by using the “More Creative” conversation style, you can start with a simple question and then elevate to an image all in the same context and without switching to a different tool.
Where can you use it? Bing Chat vs ChatGPT
ChatGPT launched in late 2022 as a web-based tool and whilst there are a few third-party browser extensions the browser remains the main mode of use.
Bing Chat is free and available to all and accessible via the new Bing home page at https://www.bing.com.
The fifth standout feature for me, is all the other places you can access Bing Chat from. For example, there is a dedicated Bing app, you can access it via the Skype app, directly from the Edge Brower, from the Windows 11 search and via the SwiftKey keyboard app.
Current limitations | Bing Chat vs ChatGPT
Bing Chat is free and available to all and accessible via the new Bing home page at https://www.bing.com. as well as via Skype, Edge, Windows 11 and more. Bing Chat uses he newer, more powerful GPT-4 model and supports image search and image creation.
ChatGPT is also free but available only via the web and is limited to Text and uses GPT-3.5, though you can pay for the premium version ($20 a month) where you get higher-quality responses, thanks to the GPT-4 model and should also get priority access to the service, faster response times, and early access to new features. as they become available.
Bing Chat limits conversation length (currently) to twenty conversations per topic before you need to start again, meaning long back-and-forth conversations may not always be possible. Microsoft says that most people find what they’re looking for within five replies or fewer.
ChatGPT doesn’t have such restrictions and imposes very few restrictions on usage (even the free version), allowing for almost unlimited length conversations.
Bing Chat can understand most major languages including French, German, and Japanese.
ChatGPT will also respond in other languages, but the underlying GPT-3.5 model was primarily trained on English samples and text so responses in other languages are not as accurate.
Bing Chat does not impose limits on use and there is no premium tier. Responses are funded by advertising, meaning you may see ads that show up embedded inside the chat responses. For example, if you ask for holiday recommendations, you may see suggestions from local travel agents.
ChatGPT uses a token system, and you are limited to a set number of tokens per day for the free version. The premium (paid) version removes these limitations. Additionally, ChatGPT does not currently use an advertising model so is cleaner not biased.
So which one? Bing Chat or ChatGPT?
So, ok, I may be biased, but that doesn’t mean I am wrong, but in my experience, Bing Chat offers a far more premium offering over ChatGPT. It is free and is (if you like that), integrated across more of the applications, services, and platforms that you most likely use. My reasons to use Bing Chat are:
Bing Chat can be accessed from Windows 11, Skype, Edge, Bing app and SwiftKey
Bing Chat can search the web – it is natively integrated into Bing Search (the new Bing).
Bing Chat lets you tailor your chat experience – providing a richer experience than ChatGPT.
Bing Chat is not just about text chat, it can use images and even create AI powered images
Bing Chat is uses GPT-4 and is still 100% free. ChatGPT 3.5 is also free but not as good and you have to pay $20 a month to use the better GPT-4 version. So just use Bing!
Questions and Answers
Is Bing Chat the “same” as Chat GPT?
No. While both leverage Open AI’s Chat GPT, Bing AI uses a more advanced model codenamed Prometheus that has more capabilities than ChatGPT. Prometheus is a proprietary technology from Microsoft that uses Bing and GPT to generate responses based on real-time data. Microsoft’s new Bing also leverages real-time information and OpenAI’s next-generation GPT-4 model to generate responses and can also search the internet. You cannot do this with ChatGPT, though there are browser extensions which provide some search functionality.
What does GPT stand for?
GPT stands for Generative Pre-Trained Transformer. “A GPT is a language model that has been trained on a vast dataset of text to generate human-like text. For example, the “Chat” part of “ChatGPT” refers to it being a chatbot”. [source: HowToGeek]
Who Owns ChatGPT?
ChatGPT was created by OpenAI, a San Francisco-based start-up. The same Large Language Model (LLM) also powers Microsoft’s Bing Chat. Microsoft owns a majority share in OpenAI and is also using the technology along with its propriety Prometheus model to power upcoming features in Microsoft 365 co-pilot.
What’s the difference between Bing Chat and ChatGPT?
Chat GPT uses GPT-3.5. Bing Chat uses, GPT-4 – OpenAI’s latest language model that’s smarter, safer, and more accurate. GPT-4 supports image inputs for the first time, allowing you to submit visual prompts like a drawing, graph, or infographic. GPT-4 is also smarter and more “creative”.
Chat GPT does have a version based on GPT-4 but is a paid-for premium service. Bing Chat uses GPT-4 already. Bing Chat is also integrated into Bing, Edge, Skype, and Windows 11.
What is Generative AI?
Put simply, Generative AI is a term used to describe computer algorithms that can generate text, images, videos, and audio all on their own based on natural language queries.
Before Generative AI, most AI systems weren’t highly creative and would deliver far worse results than a human. However, that’s no longer the case with generative AI. With Generative AI, you can ask an AI tool like Bing Image Creator to create a photorealistic image of a “cute blue AI creature with orange eyes” and it will deliver the results you see above. In this case, the AI has not been explicitly taught or trained to produce this image, it creates a unique image based on what it knows and what it has therefore “learnt” based.
As such generative AI is designed to mimic the way humans perform tasks. The first step is to extract patterns from existing data (the LLM), so if you want an AI that can generate a face for example, you will need a large dataset containing different images of faces. With enough training, the learning algorithm will learn what a face looks like as well as understanding the common features that a face has, such a nose, eyes ears, and lips. From here, it can start working on smaller details like expressions, facial hair, and skin tones to create unique images.
Summary
Hope you found this blog useful and informative and above it, that it’s made you want to try to Bing Chat. As a reminder, here’s how Bing Chat differs from ChatGPT.
ChatGPT and Bing Chat both use GPT as their large language model (LLM), but Microsoft has adopted a more advanced model for Bing Chat which is more accurate and faster (currently) than Chat GPT.
Since Bing Chat is built into Bing Search, the new Chat feature is more up to date that ChatGPT since it can also leverage web results to feeds it LLM. ChatGPT (currently) does not have knowledge of most recent events like up-to-date news.
Bing Chat is available on more platforms than ChatGPT which seamless integration into Edge, Bing Search, Skype and even SwiftKey keyboard for iOS and Android.
Whilst ChatGPT is great with text-based stuff, Bing Chat also has in-built AI image generators powered by Bing Image Creator (try it – it’s awesome).
Bing Chat uses GPT-4 and is free whereas to get equivalent premium access to ChatGPT, you need to pay circa $20 a month which gives you priority usage and other benefits which include GPT-4 LLMs.
Bing provides three different Chat modes (Creative, Balanced and Precise), while ChatGPT does not have any settings or fine-tuning its output and response mode.
Bing Chat always provides links to its’ data sources whereas ChatGPT does not.
Bing Chat supports many non-English languages and is trained on more than English. Whilst ChatGPT can understand non-English languages, its training was primarily on US English words and samples.
Semantic Index for Copilot promises to help organisations get ready for AI within their workplace. What is it? How does it work? and Why will we need it?
Last week as part of Microsoft’ annoucement about the next stage of the early previews of Copilot, they also annouced Semantic Index for Copilot, which will allow organisations to better prepare their data and users for Copilot by creating a “sophisticated map” of user and corporate data.
Image (c) Microsoft
This map is formed by encoding and indexing the keyword searches by uses into a vector that combines the phrsses, meanings, relationships and context of the data. This map is used to help Microsoft 365 Copilot to essentially learn more about your organisation (privacy and data protection being preserved of course), allowing it to better respond to user queries or “prompts.”
Available soon (for no additional cost) for Microsoft 365 Enterprise [E3 and E5] customers as well as Microsoft 365 Business Standard and Premium, it will work with the Copilot subsystem and the Microsoft Graph to create a sophisticated map of all the users, data and content in your organisation. It’s purpose will be to identify relationships between people and data, helping it to create important connections between them. Organisations will be able to use this to test the responses, answers and deductions formed by Copilot to help clean up, secure and better govern data eliminating the “garbage in, garbage out”, ensuring it will be able to deliver relevant, actionable responses to prompts based on data held within the company. This little video from Microsoft helps bring the process to life:
Microsoft video on Semantic Index for Copilot
Copilot’s new Semantic Index feature should help the chatbot locate and fetch the correct data requested by a user rather than spitting out every result based on a keyword search.
As the technology community eagerly anticipates the wider release of Copilot, Microsoft’s ongoing efforts to enhance its functionality and expand its accessibility represent a significant step forward in harnessing the power of AI to empower users and streamline work processes. Last week the early preview was extended to 600 (invite only) organisations across the US.
Microsoft also shared new upcoming improvements to their existing products which will become AI infused. These annoucements include the integration of Copilot into Whiteboard, Outlook, OneNote, Loop, and Viva Learning. They also said that new image generation features powered by DALL-E are coming to PowerPoint.
Finally, a reminder from Microsoft that they are committed to ensure tbeir AI solutions adhere to their strict Responsible AI Standard while providing meaningful benefits to their customers.
Microsoft’s Work Trend Index reenfoced our ‘need’ for AI
In order to further remind us, why we lift like Copilot is needed in today’s work environments, Microsoft also revealed the results of their 2023 Annual Work Trend Index.
This report is based on surveys of 31,000 individuals spread across 31 countries. Microsoft’s findings this year indicated that there has been a drastic increae in the volume of assigned work and the pace required from employees. The report claims that leaders, managers and workers are more looking towards AI solutions to reduce their respective workloads, rather than being scared about jobs it may replace.
The work trend index also highlights the following key points..
62% of employees spend unnecessary time searching for information, as well as communicating and coordinating across teams, leaving little focus time
Nearly two-thirds of the respondents noted that they did not find enough time to do their actual job
70% of respondents would prefer delegating some of their workload to AI copilots
With the rise in AI-powered solutions, 49% are concerned about job security
Managers are 2x more likely to empower their employees with AI rather than replace them with it
82% of enterprise leaders believe that their employees will require new skills in this age of AI, including prompt engineering and enhancing their workflows by integrating AI
There has been a 79% year-over-year increase in LinkedIn job postings which have used words like “GPT” and “GAI” (generative artificial intelligence)
Everyone got very excited when Microsoft introduced the world to Microsoft Copilot back in March this year and just yesterday they reached a new milestone, after annoucing a private preview with just 600 global customers.
But… One of the questions I get asked a lot (between colleagues, partners and customers) is “…are there things we need to do to be ready for Copilot when it becomes available”.
The simple answer is yes – if you want it to work as expected
The longer answer is “it depends” on if you plan to use it, how well your current data is structured, organised and governed, and what processes you have in place around user education, training and change management.
Based on the work I have been doing with Microsoft, this list is aimed to provide the key things, suggestions and considerations for IT, managers and leadership on things you’ll want to get ship-shape while we wait for Copilot to be more generally available, which my sources tell me will be late 2023 to Q1 2024.
1. Get your data in shape.
The reason Microsoft 365 is the productivity suite of choice for so many (arguably most) organisations is because it brings together applications, data, groups, users and services into a common and integrated suite, as well as providing thousands of connectors to allow organisations to connect third-party apps and data into mix.
Powered by the Microsoft Graph, Microsoft 365 already has the power to connect people, teams, and organisations across all their apps and services in an intelligent and context aware, with AI powered services scattered across the Microsoft 365 apps and services you use every day….
With Microsoft Copilot….this will move to a whole new level.
Copilot will put conversational AI at the front and centre of every app and service you know and use. Leveraging personal context, re-generative learning and of course the Microsoft Graph, Copilot will make its’ own deductions on what you ask, what you mean, and how you work. Whilst it will learn and evolve, it will of course, still be dependent on your organisational data, and how its structured, governed and secured.
This means if you have say 50 different documents spread out in 15 different locations that talk about your company strategy or business objectives, and only one of them is the up-to-date version. How will Copilot know which version is correct when it needs to surface information based on a request? In the same way, if the management and reporting structure, job titles and other information is incorrect in Azure AD, Copilots’ decisions and advice around people will also likely be incorrect.
To help, organisations get AI-ready, Microsoft have announced that they will soon start to roll out a service known as Semantic Index for Copilot. This is a new service coming to Microsoft 365 which will create a sophisticated map of your data to help you test how Copilot will ingest and act on your data. Image for example a sales manager asking for “FY23 Sales Report,”. Copilot will be data and context aware, meaning that it will not simply look for documents that contain keywords in the filename or text body. Instead, Copilot will try to “understand” and “learn” about who within the organisation produces such reports, when they are shared, and where they are shared to.
Microsoft say that Semantic Index for Copilot will be a vital tool to help organisations ensure that employees will get predicable, relevant, accurate, and actionable responses to their asks of Copilot and will help your organisation to “tweak” their data lifecycle and governance to ensure that the data Copilot acts on is correct and accessible (or not) by the right people.
What should you do? 1. Check and refine your SharePoint and Teams lifecycle, governance and compliance policies 2. Speak to your Microsoft partner about a funded data governance workshop 3. Review and update Active Directory (or connect to HR to ensure these are up-to-date) 4. Look out for the release of Semantic Index for Copilot to "test your data"
2. Get your security in order
In a similar fashion to making sure our data is correct from a version and validty perspective, if we dont get our security and access control polcies in shape, we risk Copilot duiscovering data that a employee or team may not “meant to have access to”.
In the much the same way that the Office 365 apps “discover” the data around you – presenting files that your collegaues and teams are working on together, Copilot will do the same but on a whole new level, as what is searches for, indexes and uses, will be instructed by the user rather than simply surfaced.
Just like the rest of Microsoft 365, Copilot will adhere to the security, privacy, data governance and data sensitivity policies that has been set-up within your organisation, and will not provide information that the user doesn’t have access to. It may suggest for, example, “you dont have access to that, you may need to request this from Pam in accounts”.
The potential problem of course is that many (ok most) organisations have a sprawl of Teams sites, poor or inconsistent data governance, and inadequate user training, meaning that put simply, you may not realise the sheer amount of information and documents that is being shared within your organisation, and more importantly who actually has access to what data and how many copies may exist and where!
We all worry about Security – do we have MFA? Do we have conditional access configured? Are account protected? Is sensitive information protected? etc. We know the slogan “hackers dont hack in, they login” – just imagine if you have Copilot, and a users’ identity gets compromised. They log in, and with Copilot at their fingertips, they don’t need to worry about where stuff is stored as Copilot will do all the discovery for them!
So what can you do? 1. Review and refine your document management, security and privacy policies - perhaps introduce or enforce DLP and Data Classifcation - aka Microsoft Purview 2. Review your security posture, MFA enforcement, risk based conditional access etc 3. Create straightforward instructions and train people where to store documents and how to protect and secure them 4. Run a pilot and look at adoption data loss prevention and information classification to protect sensitive data. 5. Speak to your Microsoft partner about a funded workshop for 1, 2 and 3.
3. Explore, Plan, Experiment – but treat it as organisational change!
The release of Microsoft Copilot is still a little way away (it is a closed Private Preview today with around 600 global organisations) and there are currently no dates on the roadmap for a public preview mainstream release. There is also no pricing yet about pricing.
What we do know is – it is coming and it will fundamentally impact and change how your people and teams will work. Yes, there is still an element of hype, lots of desire to test it out, loads and loads of questions and lots of unknowns.
Communication and training is going to be a key part of sucess. How do you interface with AI? Yes its’ intelligent, but it’s not a human, therefore people need to be taught how to best work with Copilot. Bear in mind most people use around ten percent of the functionality of say Teams (with most just using basic functions like chat and calling), but to get the most from it, users need to know what to expect, how to use it and how the organisation wants (or not) employees to use it…
Create a pilot group and mini success team. Use this team to keep up-to-date with the news and blogs and above all make sure leadership, management and IT are “in the know”.
Start communicating your plans for Copilot and AI in general. Employees will and should have questions. Are there roles that might change or not be needed? Will you stop hiring? Will you wait and see? It will be important to talk to, and listen to employees, and ideally form a “success with AI” unit, bringing people together from different parts of the business, to discover the challenges they face in their everyday work and how they think and hope AI will help them.
Above all – think of this like a project (one of continual change). Depending on your business, AI will have an impact, and the whole organisation will need to understand and embrace this change (once we have it all working of course). Consider an AI abmassador and follow your usual approach to change management with a roadmap, PoCs, pilots and feedback groups so you hit it head on, with ideas, and a solid vision but with room for hiccups, course changes and surprises on the way.
That sounds like a lot - what can we do? 1. Build a success unit (could be a Team site of Viva Community) 2. Get onto early adoptor programmes when availble, go to the AI conferences and start to leverage demos etc when available. 3. Talk to your peers, partners, and Microsoft Team and look out for funded workshops which will likely be available from summer. 4. Read Microsoft's Worklab report on working with next generation AI (it's a good read).
4. Keep Calm – it is coming but there is time to prepare
Microsoft has just announced the launch of their Microsoft 365 Copilot Early Access Program. It’s an invitation-only, paid preview program that’s set to roll out to only 600 clients across the globe at first in the coming weeks.
They say that they have received overwhelming feedback from their initial early preview clients, they have been “testing the concepts” with. They say those clients have indicated huge benefits to business and the ways in which it can transform and reshape work. In recent months, Microsoft have also released further information around how Copilot will will impact other applications such as Viva, Dynamics 365, Teams and more with new capabilities being announced almost weekly.
This new generation of AI will remove the drudgery of work and unleash creativity…There’s an enormous opportunity for AI-powered tools to help alleviate digital debt, build AI aptitude, and empower employees
Satya Nadella |Chairman and CEO |Microsoft
We will know more as we move forward – there are lots of moving parts – previews, public previews, (potentially) governments getting in the way, data soverignty issues (today data is only processed in the US and not local in local geo), licensing prices and of course availabilty….
In fact – this is probably already out of date as its a rapid moving landscape, and this is just the tip of the iceberg and just Microsoft.
What should you do? 1. Keep checking with your Microsoft team,. your partner and the Microsoft 365 Roadmap 2. Start thinking roles that will be positively affected by AI in the workplace. Speak to users, buid your success team. 3. Think about new skills your teams will need to work along side AI. 4. Read Microsoft's Worklab report on working with next generational AI (it's a good read).
What is next in CoPilot?
A good question….
When Microsoft annouced Copilot in March, where they showed the value concepts in apps like teams, Powerpoint and Excel, they said that this was “just the beginning”. Over the last couple of months, Microsoft have continued to tease new Copilot capabilities to bring AI to every part of Microsoft apps and services. The key annoucements (since the actual annoucement include):
Copilot in Whiteboard – which will make Microsoft Teams meetings and brainstorms more creative and effective. Using natural language, you will be able to ask Copilot to generate ideas, organize ideas into themes, create designs that bring ideas to life and summarise whiteboard content.
Copilot in Outlook will offer coaching tips and suggestions on clarity, sentiment and tone to help users write more effective emails and communicate more confidently.
Copilot in OneNote will use prompts to draft plans, generate ideas, create lists and organize information to help customers find what they need easily.
Copilot in Loop will helps your team stay in sync by quickly summarising all the content on your Loop page to keep everyone aligned and able to collaborate effectively.
Copilot in Viva Learning will use a natural language chat interface to help users create a personalized learning journey including designing upskilling paths, discovering relevant learning resources and scheduling time for assigned trainings.
Q&A – This will evolve
Question
What we know
Source
Where will the data be processed by Copilot?
Microsoft have said that currently all processing will take place is the US. It will eventually be regionalised based on customer tennant. No time scales yet
May 2023: Microsoft 365 Conference
Will Copilot respect data seciuroty and soverienty?
Yes -Microsoft have made it clear that Copilots’ sphere of access will be limited to the user context in which it runs, goverened by your organisation’s policies.
Microsoft Designer was first announced back in August of 2022 and has been available in a limited preview to since January this year to gain early feedback from users.
This week however, Microsoft announced that (whilst still in preview), the AI driven social media content creation platform would be available for anyone to try. Microsoft also announced plans to include the tools into their Edge browser in much the same way they have provided the ability to use the new Bing AI search.
Introducing Microsoft Designer
Microsoft Designer is a “Canva-like” designer tool aims to provide a simple, sleek and AI infused tool to help business and consumers quickly produce high quality online content such as social media posts, greeting cards, banners, branding, alerts, promotions etc.
Powered by DALL·E and built as a progressive web app, Microsoft Designer is the latest AI powered tool now in ‘preview-mode, which joins Bing Chat and Bing Image Creator along with many other tools which can be accessed on their own or from within the sidebar of their Chromium powered Edge browser.
Available from https://designer.microsoft.com or from the Edge side bar, users can use Designer to manage and create animations, impressive visuals, text, and design templates specifically for sharing on social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, TickTok and Instagram, or of course on enterprise social tools within an organisation like Viva Engage [aka Yammer].
Example Designer design (c) Rob Quickenden
Here’s some of the great things you can do today in Designer.
Easily create designs with >20 different social media layout sizes across Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
Automatic (manual override) of elements such as text, video and images to best accommodate your chosen layout, reducing time needed to manually format you posts.
Wide range of animation features including auto text transitions and animated backgrounds.
Save or share directly with social media your finished creations.
Being in preview there is still more to come and the app will continue to evolved based on user feedback and their development lifecycle. Here’s more AI powered tools that Mcirosoft are working on which will be coming “soon”.
New Fill tool that allows users to select an area of a design and quickly place an object in that location
Simple erase function which will allow the user to brush over a person/object in the design and have Designer remove the object, generate and replace it with another image
Expand Background tool, which will be able to quickly fill any gaps within the foreground of your design, and
Replace Background which will be able to switch the background to a new one preserving the rest of your design.
Why integrate into Edge?
Microsoft say that by integrating Designer into Edge, they are bringing these capabilities straight into where people work. Since it will be accessible directly via the edge sidebar, users can access it by simply clicking on the Designer icon. Microsoft say this makes the tools accessible and “in the flow of creativity“, meaning users can quickly create unique designs instantly by simply describing the graphic you want without needing to leave the page they are, switch windows, load apps, or download custom extensions to the browser.
The aim is to improve the workflow and “keep you in the moment” – since whilst creating a social media post, Designer in Edge will provide AI-powered design suggestions to include in the post, which can then be customised and published without needing to leave the browser of switch apps.
As with any preview, Microsoft encourage users to feedback on their experience of using designer – both as a dedicated service and as a Edge browser integrated experience.
Competing with the Design giants
Designer is still in preview and there is lots Microsoft need to do to get it to the level of comparison with other apps like Canva and Adobe, both of whom have recently released their own AI-powered features. Microsoft have done a great job so far and by opening the preview up to the masses and with their recent investment in OpenAI, I expect a plethora of enhancements and new features to keep coming.
