what you need to know
- Microsoft has announced that it will bring AI to Outlook.
- The new AI functionality exists in the form of a “copilot” that can help reply to messages.
- The AI is smart enough to analyze the content of the email and generate a response based on what the user requests.
Microsoft has announced several new AI capabilities coming to Microsoft 365, including a new AI Copilot feature for Outlook that will be able to analyze and generate responses to emails, based on requests described by the user. You no longer need to write long emails as Copilot for Outlook can do it all for you.
In the example posed by Microsoft, a user asks Copilot to reply to an email with approval, while also highlighting the key risks of a document that Copilot can obtain simply by mentioning the file name. Copilot then does the rest, including reading the original email for context, then the document, and then writing a reply with the details highlighted.
This is how Microsoft describes Copilot for Outlook:
“Copilot in Outlook works with you on your inbox and messages so you can spend less time sorting through emails and more time communicating better, faster, and more easily. Summarize long and complicated email threads with multiple people to understand not only what has been said, but also the different points of view of each person and open questions that have not yet been answered. Reply to an existing email with a simple message, or turn sticky notes into crisp, professional messages, pulling from other emails or content you already have access to across Microsoft 365.”
Microsoft has also announced Copilot for other Office applications, including Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. Copilot works in a similar way in each application, with the ability to use natural language to ask each application to generate content based on parameters specified by the user.
Being able to ask Copilot to fetch additional files also increases the power of this AI, as it will be able to include file context that may not be fetched from the Internet. This will be great for referencing internal data at work.
AI functionality in Outlook is currently being tested with a select group of Microsoft 365 customers and will be rolled out more widely in the coming months.
