Microsoft Corporation MSFT announced a new one artificial intelligence-assisted assistant for its 365 applications in the last month.

What happened: The Redmond, Washington-based company is testing “next-gen AI performance” with Microsoft 365 Copilot with “select commercial customers.”

Microsoft said Copilot is embedded in apps people use every day, like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams.

“With these new tools, people can be more creative in Word, more analytical in Excel, more expressive in PowerPoint, more productive in Outlook, and more collaborative in Teams,” he said Satya Nadella-led company in a statement.

Jared Spatarowho leads Microsoft 365 said, “Copilot heralds a new era of computing that will fundamentally change the way we work.”

Why it matters: Microsoft has highlighted how the Copilot – reminiscent of the 1990s office assistant Clippy but on steroids – works in a YouTube video.

The company said the assistant in the Word application “writes, edits and summarizes right next to people as they work.”

The tech giant said that in PowerPoint, Copilot can turn ideas into a presentation through “natural language commands,” while in Excel it can help identify trends or create data visualizations.

Microsoft is moving fast to empower its products with AI. In February, the company added AI to its Edge web browser and Bing search engine. The company said at the time that Bing was running on one Big “next generation” language model. prepared by ChatGPT Creator OpenAI.

In March, the company announced the stable version of Edge, which comes with “Edge Copilot” in the sidebar.

Edge Copilot will help users be more productive by helping them compose “better email” and helping them “search the web faster,” Microsoft said in the release notes.

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