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Microsoft Business Chat is like the Bing AI bot but as a personal assistant

Microsoft Business Chat is like the Bing AI bot but as a personal assistant

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The AI-powered ‘knowledge navigator’ syncs your documents, emails, and more to create summaries and even suggestions.

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One of the new Copilot AI features coming to Microsoft 365 apps and services is dubbed Business Chat. It’s a chatbot experience that’s able to summarize information pulled from meeting transcripts, recent contacts with customers, entries in your calendar, and more that you can plug into emails for the team or as slides in a presentation.

According to Microsoft, by using grounding to focus the AI on your business’ trove of data, it can create relevant, accurate responses to natural language prompts, like “Did anything happen yesterday with [customer X]?” The bot is accessible from Microsoft365.com, Bing when signed in with a work account, or via Microsoft Teams.

Microsoft Business Chat
Microsoft Business Chat
Image: Microsoft

The output will look familiar if you’ve seen the Bing AI chatbot at work, plugging in footnotes to show where it obtained particular data, and in the demo, there was a focus on how users can update or correct entries as necessary.

There’s an acknowledgment in the pitch that it may not create a perfect finished product every time — we’ve seen the potential flaws of chatbot AI already. But this isn’t just a time saver; Microsoft suggests you can ask it to brainstorm on flaws in a strategy and even ways to deal with them.

Here’s a list of proposed prompts:

  • Summarize the chats, emails, and documents about the [customer] escalation that happened last night.
  • What is the next milestone on [project]? Were there any risks identified? Help me brainstorm a list of some potential mitigations.
  • Write a new planning overview in the style of [filename A] that contains the planning timeline from [filename B] and incorporates the project list in the email from [person].

The new Copilot AI features are in limited testing right now with 20 of Microsoft’s customers, and details about pricing haven’t been announced. The company says, “We will be expanding these previews to customers more broadly in the coming months and will share more on new controls for IT admins so that they can plan with confidence to enable Copilot across their organizations.”