Copilot Wave 2 supercharges productivity with AI across all your Microsoft 365 apps

Microsoft added Copilot, its generative AI chatbot, to Microsoft 365 back in March last year, but now it’s launching what it’s calling ‘Wave 2’ of its AI-assisted boost to your productivity by revamping the whole way you work with Copilot, and adding some more AI features to the Microsoft 365 apps.

In this new way of working you can open up the Copilot chat interface, now called Business Chat, and from there combine all the knowledge Microsoft 365 has about you and your organization with the knowledge it can find on the web by creating collaborative documents called Pages.

So, you could start by asking Copilot about something on the web, then once it’s found what you’re looking for you hit the ‘Edit in Pages’ button to pull that Copilot response into a new Copilot Page (which is a pop-up document window, containing all the information you’re interested in), and then you can continue to expand it, sharing and collaborating on it with all your team members.

Pages (not to be confused with the Apple app of the same name) documents look very similar to Word documents. You can go back to Business Chat and perform more searches for information, then bring that new data into your Pages document. There’s a simple switch at the top of the Business Chat window that enables you to switch between Web or Work. Switch it to Work and Copilot will be able to tap into the knowledge contained in all your work documents; so you could prompt Copilot with something like “make a report similar to that one we did last month for Eric, but with the new data”, and it will compile it for you.

PowerPoint narrative builder

A new narrative builder has been added to PowerPoint that helps you craft a story for your next presentation. This will create a whole deck of slides from a prompt using Copilot, complete with transitions and speaker notes. Type your prompt in answer to the question, “Create a presentation about” and watch it work its magic. You get a draft outline, which you can reorder, edit, and add new sections to. Once you’re happy click on ‘Generate slides’ and Copilot will produce your whole presentation, pulling in images from your corporate library, or it can generate images using DALL-E 3 if required.

Copilot in Excel with Python