Companies considering AI-powered conversational assistants for their teams should take a closer look at Microsoft. The company recently announced significant enhancements to its Copilot AI assistant for Microsoft 365—a subscription-based cloud service that includes Office apps like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and OneDrive.
Jordi Ribas, Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President and Head of Engineering and Product for Copilot and Bing, posted on the social platform X, “We’re excited to share updates for our Copilot for Microsoft 365 users. Starting today, you will receive priority access to GPT-4 Turbo, enabling faster and more comprehensive responses using both web and work data. Additionally, we’re eliminating chat limits and increasing file upload sizes.”
This enhancement follows OpenAI’s decision to make its GPT-3.5 model available for unlimited free use, creating competitive pressure for Microsoft and other AI providers to elevate their paid offerings, like Copilot, and demonstrate their value. Furthermore, Microsoft recently opened its custom Copilot GPT Builder to all Copilot Pro subscribers, further expanding the capabilities of this advanced AI assistant.
Key Features and Enhancements
As Ribas mentioned, Copilot in Microsoft 365 will now default to using GPT-4 Turbo. Introduced by OpenAI at its November “Dev Day” developer conference, GPT-4 Turbo features a significantly larger context window, allowing users to input longer prompts—up to 128,000 tokens compared to 32,768 tokens of previous models. This means users can provide more extensive information and receive detailed responses, analyses, and edits. Additionally, Copilot 365 users will enjoy unlimited messaging and unlimited chats within each conversation, a notable upgrade from the previous limit of 300 chats per day.
Data Protection Assurance
Microsoft emphasizes its commitment to commercial data protection through its Entra ID, which anonymizes and encrypts web traffic for Microsoft 365 users. This process ensures that prompts and data entered into Copilot are safeguarded before being processed by GPT-4. Once a session ends, Microsoft promptly deletes the session data, reinforcing user confidentiality.
The company encourages users to trust Copilot with sensitive data, stating that it can help prioritize important emails, prepare for meetings by aggregating relevant information, and facilitate brainstorming sessions—all under the protection of enterprise-grade data security.
This move is crucial for reassuring customers about data safety, especially after recent concerns arose about potential data leaks. A recent report indicated that the U.S. House of Representatives had banned the Copilot assistant, citing risks related to data security. In response, Microsoft affirmed that it is working to ensure that Copilot meets federal security and compliance requirements later this year.
In the European Union, Microsoft is offering Office 365 with or without its controversial Teams app to comply with antitrust regulations. Additionally, Microsoft plans to roll out Copilot for Government Community Cloud (GCC) in summer 2024. It aims to attract enterprise customers cautious about ongoing copyright lawsuits affecting generative AI by assuring them that Copilot users are covered under its Customer Copyright Commitment. This guarantees Microsoft will assume legal responsibility should copyright issues arise, allowing customers to use the tool without fear of litigation as long as they follow built-in content filters.
Future Enhancements: Increased Image Generation
Starting next month, Microsoft will expand Copilot's capabilities by offering users 100 boosts for fast image generation in its Designer AI image generator tool, up from 15 per day. This change will significantly reduce image creation wait times and enhance productivity.
However, the Designer tool faced scrutiny in the U.S. after reports of nonconsensual explicit deepfake content emerged. Microsoft allegedly addressed the issue by closing the loophole that facilitated such violations of its terms of service.
Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 is priced at $30 per user per month with an annual commitment and requires a subscription to Microsoft 365 Business Standard, Business Premium, E3, E5, or Office 365 E3 or E5.
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