Amber Hickman |
Nicole Herskowitz, corporate vice president of modern work and business applications at Microsoft, took to the stage at Microsoft Ignite to showcase new features in Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Studio to help attendees better understand their use cases.
“As IT pros, you are being bombarded with new innovations, it can’t be easy,” she said. “While AI is an exciting opportunity, we know it is a huge responsibility.”
She outlined the three key challenges currently faced by customers when embracing AI including limited user experience, unclear business impact and implementation risks, and how Copilot is designed to alleviate these.
“Deploying AI can feel like a risky proposition,” she said. “But we are not shying away from any of these challenges, in fact it is where we are investing the most.”
Herskowitz shared live demonstrations of how she uses current Copilot features across Microsoft 365 to manage daily tasks, such as customer research and generating email summaries using prompt templates.
She also demonstrated the new Copilot-powered features across the Microsoft 365 portfolio, such as the new ‘sort by priority’ feature in Microsoft Outlook, which automatically sorts emails in the user’s inbox by factors such as email content and sender relationship. Users can also train this feature by setting up key terms, phrases and people that the tool can recognise.
In addition, Herskowitz demonstrated the new ‘presentation creation’ feature in PowerPoint, which allows users to generate slides, transitions and speaker notes based on content prompts.
Jeff Teper, president of collaborative apps and platforms, then joined the stage to demonstrate new Copilot features in Microsoft Teams, including the new facilitator and interpretation agents.
“With these new multi-modal agents in Teams, this is making experiences so much better as the AI is listening, seeing reading and making the meeting more effective for everyone,” he said.
Teper also demonstrated the new agent features in SharePoint with an example of a custom agent created from a curated selection of file sources, and highlighted how this tool can be used to find information quickly.
David Martin, solutions architect at Unilever, also joined the stage to highlight how the firm is using agents to support its customers and partners in their work and ensure operational efficiency.
“It really keeps the richness of our company’s information with our user's side-by-side to support them in their work and ensure the quality in our processes,” he said.
Discover more news from the event on our dedicated Microsoft Ignite page