Microsoft is soft-pushing a new AI assistant destined to change the way professionals work.

Copilot is an AI-powered assistant for Microsoft Office. The assistant will help you write cleaner documents and teach you how to use Office products while doing it.

What Is Copilot?

Software engineers using Microsoft’s software development tool, Visual Studio, have had access to AI assistants for a couple of years. GitHub’s Copilot tool worked as a pair programming companion when integrated with Visual Studio and its companion products. The AI wrote software with you and performed code analysis to recommend better and cleaner ways of writing code.

Microsoft is introducing the same AI-assistant functionality. Microsoft’s Copilot will offer suggestions for improving your writing, highlight spelling and grammatical mistakes, and rewrite your paragraphs. You can also chat with the assistant using a side panel and dialog with the assistant as they rip your composition to shreds.

More Than Chatty Tech

Copilot will do more than critique your writing. Microsoft has a marketing video demonstrating how Copilot can teach you Office features and make changes to documents simply by asking it to.

You can instruct Copilot to change all titles in a PowerPoint to a specific font and color. Instruct it to make pivot tables in Excel, and more.

Clippy, Cortana, & Copilot

Microsoft has pursued assistants for a long time. Microsoft Bob made its appearance in the mid-90s to help Windows users complete complicated tasks.

Later on, Clippy annoyed users for almost two decades before Microsoft introduced Cortana to mainstream users in Windows 10.

Between Clippy and Copilot Microsoft has released more than 10 assistants over the years and finally the technology has made it possible for these assistants to be more than annoying toys.

We are in the middle of a new epoch in human/computer interaction. It’s going to be interesting.

I’m not the only one saying this.