Work more productively in 2024? We asked Microsoft 5 questions about the AI ​​Assistant in Word and Excel

Want to compose an email in an instant, or recap a meeting you missed? Since November 1, the AI-based digital assistant Microsoft 365 Copilot has been widely available to businesses. It is integrated into popular tools such as Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. Miriam Broeders, CTO at Microsoft Belux, explains what Copilot can do.

What exactly is a co-pilot? How can it make our work easier in 2024? We asked Miriam Broeders, CTO at Microsoft Belux. She is also the Director of the Microsoft Technology Center (MTC) in Brussels, a reservist in the Belgian Army Cyber ​​Command, and was selected as one of fifty female role models in technology by Inspiring Fifty in 2022 and nominated for the Leading Award. Woman of the Year in ICT by DataNews.

What can employees do with a digital assistant?

Merriam Brothers. “Over the past year, with ChatGPT, we saw an opportunity to ask technology as if it were a human, and get answers in human language. We created this option to ask questions about the Microsoft 365 solutions used in modern work, Outlook, Excel, PowerPoint, Word, and Teams. In those apps you will find Copilot as a digital assistant. For example, you can ask Copilot to create a summary of a document in Word. Or you can ask in Bing Copilot: “Give me the latest email from a colleague.” Or you have a meeting with your boss in ten minutes and ask them to It gives you some topics for this meeting. Copilot will then go through your agenda and the emails you exchanged with each other and provide an answer.

“Copilot is also integrated into other Microsoft applications, such as GitHub as a developer platform, Dynamics 365, our CRM and ERP system (for customer relations and business operations respectively), Mr. Dr), and the Bing search engine. There you will get an answer to your question instead of links to websites. With Bing, you can also see where these answers come from, because you'll see references to the answer sources. We see Copilot as a digital assistant that makes your life easier. You have faster access to information and can process and edit it more efficiently.

During my presentation to seventy business leaders participating in the Future of Digital Commerce mission of the technology consortium Agoria in Atlanta, USA, I demonstrated how employees with no prior technology knowledge can create their own chatbots in a few minutes.

the brothers. “Yes. In addition to building AI capabilities like Copilot into our own solutions, we also provide organizations with the tools to create these types of Copilots themselves with Copilot Studio. It uses the power of generative AI to optimize workflows, improve analytics, and simplify data management. This allows companies and governments to create A personalized co-pilot for their organization and their specific needs. I showed how you can create a chatbot on a public website in a few minutes and it works instantly. This is just the tip of the iceberg, many more are possible. Take for example a company that has businesses and consumers as customers. E.g. , you can create a co-pilot who can answer questions related to inventory positions.

What do you mainly use Copilot for?

the brothers. “I have a lot of meetings. I often ask Copilot to summarize a Teams meeting I didn't attend. Or I ask what a participant in that meeting said on a topic relevant to me. Being able to find and process information quickly definitely contributes to my well-being. I can feel I get very frustrated when I have to look up information in an email or in a conversation on Teams or anywhere else. My calendar has been regularly cluttered, requiring me to listen to recorded meetings or read text. This takes up a lot of time. I can now I request an AI-generated meeting summary and quickly see what actions were taken. What's more, Copilot takes into account not only what was said in the meeting, but also the PowerPoint slides shown. I've only had access to Microsoft 365 Copilot for a few weeks, but I already feel the tremendous comfort it provides me.”

What is the surprising app?

the brothers. “Copilot can automatically provide suggestions and insights based on data, as Copilot notices things you might not have seen yourself, such as anomalies or trends in the data. This year I became a reservist in the Belgian Army. One interesting application of Security Copilot that we are looking at is providing Incident information within hours or minutes. In the past, you sometimes had to wait days or weeks for this.

It will soon move to Microsoft's headquarters in Redmond, near Seattle. Will you now be the highest Belgian in the Microsoft hierarchy?

the brothers. “I'm the director of the Microsoft Technology Center (MTC) in Brussels, where we discuss the complex challenges they face with customers and how technology can play a role in them. There are about forty of these centers around the world. I will be moving to the MTC Corp team in Redmond in March, Who sets the strategy for those positions. Am I the top Belgian? It depends on how you look at it. If you look at who reports to whom, we can be very proud of Stijn Nauwelaerts. He is the company's Vice President of Human Resources and reports to Kathleen Hogan, Chief Human Resources Officer, who in turn reports to our CEO Satya Nadella.

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