Microsoft will add AI tech to office suite programs like Word, Excel

Microsoft Corp. on Thursday trumpeted its latest plans to put artificial intelligence into the hands of more users, answering a spate of unveilings this week by its rival Google with upgrades to its own widely used office software.

The technology company previewed a new AI "copilot" for Microsoft 365, its product suite that includes Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations and Outlook emails.

First open to select business customers for testing, AI will offer a draft in these applications, speeding up content creation and freeing up workers' time, Microsoft said.

The Redmond, Wash.-based company, which is outpacing peers through investments in ChatGPT's creator OpenAI, also showcased a new "business chat" experience that can pull data and perform tasks across applications on a user's written command.

"We believe this next generation of AI will unlock a new wave of productivity growth," Satya Nadella, Microsoft's chief executive, said in a livestreamed presentation.

Companies compete to reshape how people work

Companies large and small are locked in a fierce competition to deploy software that could reshape how people work.

At the centre are Microsoft and Google-owner Alphabet Inc., which on Tuesday touted AI features for Gmail and a "magic wand" to draft prose in its own word processor. The capabilities that both Microsoft and Google showcased are similar.

The frenzy to invest in and build new products began with last year's launch of ChatGPT, the chatbot sensation that showed the public the potential of so-called large language models.

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Microsoft soft-launched its new AI-powered search engine in early February. After years of playing second fiddle to Google, the new Bing seemed to finally have something exciting to offer. More than a million people signed up on a wait list to try out the new feature. But it wasnt long before some early testers reported that their interactions with the chatbot had taken an unsettling turn. For some, the bizarre interactions were disconcertingly similar to depictions of AI gone sentient straight out of science fiction. Today, Chris Stokel-Walker, a technology journalist and contributor to the Guardians TechScape newsletter, explains this latest chatbot, what the technology is doing and whether its as terrifying as it sounds.

Such technology learns from past data how to create content anew, powering Microsoft's new copilot alongside other business and application data. This type of AI is evolving rapidly as well. Just this week, OpenAI began the release of a more powerful version known as GPT-4, which is included in the chatbot in Microsoft's updated Bing search engine.

In one of the company's biggest updates on Thursday, Microsoft said AI can open up the computational wizardry of its Excel spreadsheet software long the domain of trained analysts to any person able to describe a calculation they would like in plain text.

Microsoft also said AI can summarize email threads and virtual meetings as they occur in its Teams collaboration software, similar to live notes by AI that Google demonstrated to reporters this week.

Microsoft's new business chat experience also can answer a question like, "tell my team how we updated the product strategy," by taking cues from a morning's worth of emails, meetings and chat threads, the company said.