Microsoft has announced the next step in its AI journey. This comes in the form of the Microsoft 365 Copilot Early Access Program. This initiative brings Copilot to 600 enterprise customers via an invite-only paid preview.
Microsoft also announced new Copilot capabilities in Whiteboard, PowerPoint and Outlook. Copilot in Outlook will offer coaching tips and suggestions to improve users communication and write more effective emails. In OneNote, Copilot will use different prompts to efficiently generate ideas, lists, and plan to help workers to find what you need easily.
Microsoft is developing these tools in order to help businesses to be more resilient. The company has released its third annual Work Trend Index report which reveals the weight of work is ‘crushing innovation’, and that globally, employees and leaders see AI as an opportunity, not a threat.
The report outlines findings from an external study of 31,000 people in 31 countries and analysed trillions of anonymous and aggregated Microsoft 365 productivity signals, along with labour trends from LinkedIn Economic Graph.
The report further unearthed three key insights business leaders should consider as they look to understand and responsibly adopt AI for their organization:
Digital debt is costing us innovation
In particular, the inflow of data, emails, meetings and notifications has exceeded our capacity to process it all – resulting in a digital debt. This is borne out by the finding that 64 percent of people do not have enough time and energy to get their work done, and those people are 3.5x more likely to say they struggle with being innovative. Furthermore, 60 percent of leaders are worried about lack of innovation.
Another statistic of interest is that of time spent in Microsoft 365, the average person spends 57 percent of their time communicating and only 43 percent on creating.
There’s a new AI-employee alliance
Despite concerns of AI replacing jobs, the report reveals that some employees are more eager for AI to lift the weight of work. Here, 49 percent of people said they are worried AI will replace their jobs, yet 70 percent also said they would delegate as much work as possible to AI in order to lessen their workloads.
Every employee will need AI aptitude
As a fundamental workplace change, AI will introduce a whole new way of working—and cause a ripple effect across everything from resumes to job postings. As an example, the share of job postings on LinkedIn in the U.S. mentioning “GPT” have increased by 79 percent year over year.
