Microsoft’s latest AI CoPilot could be the voice behind a deluge of work emails

Microsoft’s latest AI CoPilot could be the voice behind a deluge of work emails

Image: The Verge

If you notice that emails from salespeople or responses from customer support agents seem a bit off — or that they’ve gotten a significant bump in writing quality — you may be have AI to thank. Microsoft has announced that it’ll be introducing AI features into Dynamics 365, its set of enterprise apps for customer relationship management and resource planning.

The company calls the set of features “CoPilot,” and is pitching it as a way to help businesspeople “create ideas and content faster, complete time-consuming tasks, and get insights and next best actions.” That involves things like having an AI write customizable emails to customers and automatically generate meeting summaries, write a response to customer service chats and emails based on the previous conversation, and help marketers delve into their data without having to write SQL. The company’s also pitching it as a way to help generate ideas for marketing emails, which means that you could start seeing AI-powered ads in your inbox soon.

Microsoft’s promising even more than that — the company says the system will make it easier to create “virtual agents” for customer support, which can use OpenAI’s tech to search Bing and internal knowledge bases for answers.

Like it has with other AI tools, Microsoft is pitching this as something that humans will use, rather than a way to replace employees. In a LinkedIn post, CEO Satya Nadella called the announcement a step towards “transforming every business process and function with interactive, AI-powered collaboration.”

Microsoft has been pushing generative AI tech in its other business-related apps as well — GitHub, a popular tool for coders, also has a CoPilot feature to help you write code, and Teams uses AI for a variety of things, such as recapping meetings. The company has also started releasing AI-generated “collaborative articles” on LinkedIn.

Similar tech could be coming to software that’s not completely enterprise-focused. There are reports that Microsoft is planning on integrating ChatGPT into apps like Word, PowerPoint, and Outlook. Its most prominent use of the tech is likely with Bing, its chatbot and search engine that’s currently available to people on a waitlist.