Thanks in large part to a $10 billion investment in OpenAI, Microsoft has spent the last few months hustling to add generative AI capabilities to its various apps and platforms. That trend continued this week at the company’s Build developer conference.
Microsoft already has added its OpenAI-powered assistants to its Bing search engine, its Edge browser, and its Microsoft 365 productivity suite. Now the company is integrating Copilot, an AI personal assistant, into the software that once was its centerpiece: its Windows operating system.
Windows Copilot can exist in a panel on the right side of the
Windows 11 interface. Using Copilot, users can get personalized answers, quickly tweak a setting in the OS, use a voice command to open an app, or turn on Bing Chat for web searches, to name just a few examples. Copilot also knows which apps are already open, and can summarize or explain much of the content in those apps, Microsoft says.
The Windows integration speaks to Microsoft’s overall strategy for winning new customers with its integration of AI. “Microsoft is trying to leverage its initial leadership in working with OpenAI,” says Jason Wong, an analyst with consulting firm Gartner.
Microsoft wants workers to be able to access generative AI features to assist with whatever sort of project they’re working on, no matter the app, service, or platform. But it’s not just a matter of bringing AI to more places. Microsoft is trying to make its Copilots smarter and more helpful by clueing them in to company data.
Microsoft executives emphasize that the Copilot assistant is better informed than chatbots that rely only on their training data (massive amounts of data scraped from the internet). Microsoft’s various assistants can plug into the Microsoft Graph, a repository of proprietary corporate data and knowledge, meaning Copilot can always access specific “ground truth” information, like product codes or partner information, and cite its sources.
“The integration of Copilot with the Microsoft Graph will reduce hallucinations and increase the accuracy of the information, ” Wong says. All the different Copilots use different models with different fine-tuning to support specific tasks and contexts, he explains.
