We have seen how Microsoft thinks natural language processing (NLP), generative, and multimodal AI is the future of its technology. The company is folding its across services, including its productivity apps through Microsoft 365 Copilot. Alongside the introduction of Copilot, Microsoft also announced Business Chat.
This is a new AI that functions across all business apps and data to provide information when users need it.
Microsoft is banking big on chatbot AI. The company’s Bing Chat AI search is driven by OpenAI’s ChatGPT and GPT-4 AI models. Built on Microsoft’s own Prometheus software, Bing Chat is aiming to transform how search engines work.
Much of the underpinning AI that powers Bing Chat also drives the new Business Chat experience. In fact, the service is only available within Teams or Bing for Microsoft 365 customers. The chat AI is always there, tapping into the Microsoft Graph API to help users build better presentations, documents, email, calendar, notes, and more.
How it Works
It is essentially an assistant for Microsoft 365. However, it is much more powerful than service such as Alexa and uses real natural language AI to provide human-like responses and interactions.
In a blog post, Microsoft provides example prompts to engage with Business Chat:
- “Summarize the chats, emails, and documents about the [customer] escalation that happened last night.
- What is the next milestone on [project]. Were there any risks identified? Help me brainstorm a list of some potential mitigations.
- Write a new planning overview in the style of [filename A] that contains the planning timeline from [filename B] and incorporates the project list in the email from [person].
Business Chat works alongside you, using the power of the Microsoft Graph to bring together data from across your documents, presentations, email, calendar, notes, and contacts. Bring together information from multiple sources to keep everyone on the team on the same page and moving forward together. Spend less time focused on the tools and more time focused on the most important work.”
If you want to know more about Microsoft’s AI productivity announcements for M365, you can see how Copilot works in Office apps, or how it integrates with Microsoft Teams, and drives communication with Viva Engage.
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