Microsoft unveils Copilot for Teams

At this year's Build event, Microsoft has announced Team Copilot, and as you can probably guess from its name, it's a variant of the company's AI tool that can cater to the needs of a group of users. It expands Copilot's abilities beyond that of a personal assistant, so that it can serve a whole team, a department or even an entire organization, the company said in its announcement. The new tool was designed to take on time-consuming tasks to free up personnel, such as managing meeting agenda and taking down minutes that group members can tweak as needed. 

The new Copilot for Teams can also serve as a meeting moderator by summarizing important information for latecomers (or for reference after the fact) and answering questions. Finally, it can create and assign tasks in Planner, track their deadlines, and notify team members if they need to contribute to or review a certain task. The company's customers paying for a Copilot license on Microsoft 365 will be able to test these features in preview starting later this year. 

In addition to Team Copilot, Microsoft has also announced new ways customers can personalize the AI assistant. In Copilot Studio, users will be able to make custom Copilots in SharePoint so that users can more quickly access the information they need, as well as to create custom Copilots that act as agents. The latter would allow companies and business owners to automate business processes, such as end-to-end order fulfillment. Finally, the debut of Copilot connectors in Studio will make it easier for developers to build Copilot extensions that can customize the AI tools' actions.