As technology continues to evolve, so does Copilot. This powerful tool is constantly being updated with new enhancements, including new languages and features, to boost productivity and possibilities where it can be used. I thought I would take a short view to explore what the near future holds for Copilot and how it will continue to help us work smarter and more efficiently.
Before going to the future, I must say a few words about the present. I have been able to use Copilot at work since mid-October and it has affected, positively, my work. Has it been flawless and perfect? No. Has it given me surprises how well it can do things? Yes. What I say, when I train Copilot to people, is encouraging them that when you use Copilot more you learn. Not just on how to prompt better but also where to use Copilot and where not to. For example, asking for my today’s agenda doesn’t usually make sense because it is way faster to check in the calendar. And Copilot haven’t learned yet that I have worktimes put to the calendar too, not just meetings. However, I am impressed how well Copilot in Word can provide text drafts and how well you can discover information that would require multiple searches and jumping between apps. Summarization skills in Word and PowerPoint are changing how I read content: I summarize it and decide, based on the summary, which parts I will read more. Or which ones not to read. Every one of us has different ways of working, and Copilot is groundbreaking in its versatility.
Back to the near future
One of the exciting upcoming enhancements being launched for Copilot is the addition of new languages. And Finnish is included in that list! That is very welcome, and I am also really happy that Finnish is in the early wave of languages – thinking globally we are a relatively small number of people, just a bit over 5 million. But it is no wonder why Finnish is included – in Finland we have one of the highest Copilot adoption rates per capita! The Copilot and AI boom is not stopping yet, as more and more Finnish organizations are purchasing licenses and services to boost the productivity. It has been great to be able to work with and help various Finnish and global organizations to rollout Copilot successfully. And I know this is just the first steps on the journey.
New languages will be rolling onto production during March – April this year. This is the list: Arabic, Chinese Traditional, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Hebrew, Hungarian, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Portugal), Russian, Swedish, Thai, Turkish and Ukrainian. Languages that were supported earlier were English, Spanish, Japanese, French, German, Portuguese, Italian and Chinese simplified.
There is a new Copilot experience in Teams. Efficiently replacing M365 Chat with this.
Copilot in Excel has been usable only in English so far, but this is changing during this month (March) as it gets language support for Spanish, Japanese, French, German, Portuguese, Italian and Chinese simplified. Now, I am going to cut corners and make a bold statement that we will get Finnish support for Excel in the next wave of languages – it seems to mirror the M365 Copilot language support rollout. When this happens, it might happen for the Inspire in July, or we can see it in September. But then again – predicting schedules has become more and more difficult as Microsoft is not announcing and launching features in the old way anymore. We are constantly seeing announcements and updates to apps.
Help me create
What has appeared already, is Help me create which does what the name says: helps you create a new content. You provide the idea and key information, and Copilot will create you a draft in the app that best matches your idea, for example a Word or PowerPoint. This is basically extending the Create section in Microsoft 365 portal.
Trying this out quickly with modified example prompt.
And it creates a short outline of the presentation, allowing to choose the app to go forward.
And I can fine-tune it with predefined prompts and write my own.
And it can create a PowerPoint..
It looks to me that Help me create is in its first steps. It can create the content outline, but I haven’t been so far impressed with its ability to create captivating PowerPoint presentations. You get better results when you first use Help to create to create an outline (and ask it to make it longer), save it to Word file and then use Copilot to create a PowerPoint from that. Or the shortcut would be the create the content directly in Word.. And then you could also reference source documents when creating it. With Help me create you can’t reference to existing content.
But it is just first steps for Help to create. I can envision that in the future it could combine Desinger-type features and the results can be much better. So the best thing to do now, is to try it and give feedback to Microsoft so they know what users want and need. I do need to point also out, that I didn’t try Help me create extensively – it just appeared to tenants I have access to and I only tried the PowerPoint creation so far.
Copilot in the upcoming months
Look at the Copilot roadmap, there you can see a big number of features that will be launching during March-April and then there are already items for the next wave during June-July.
Selecting a few from there.
Teams Intelligent Recap is also starting to work with channel meetings (April), thus giving more value to Copilot and Teams Premium. With this update we should be able to use Copilot also in channel meetings, which hasn’t been possible so far.
Did you know that Copilot for Microsoft 365 license includes Intelligent Recap functionalities?
Intelligent Recap is in the intersection of Teams Premium and Copilot for Microsoft 365 when considering feature similarity: both provided insights and information about meetings. If you have Copilot for Microsoft 265 license, but you don’t have Teams Premium it doesn’t matter anymore: Copilot users can enjoy Intelligent Recap without having to have Teams Premium license. While Intelligent Recap is a powerful feature, it alone doesn’t justify the add-on price for most people and organizations. And in my opinion, if you bought Teams Premium for just Intelligent Recap you would waste a huge opportunity to gain value from premium features – and it would seem like a big investment unless you really need meeting AI capabilities. In that kind of situation, I would advise getting Copilot for Microsoft 365 license, because the value it adds to meetings (and many other apps!) is huge.
We will be seeing Copilot for Microsoft 365 on Teams mobile launching in March and overall, a lot of mobile support features are rolling out during March-April.
There are a bunch of Copilots coming: Copilot in Stream, OneDrive, Viva Engage, Glint, SharePoint, Planner and Viva Goals. And I am sure we will see much more in the list until we are in July.
Capabilities like the ability to schedule a meeting directly from email thread is useful. This addresses the need that sometimes you may need to change an email conversation into a meeting, from inside the email. Copilot creates a meeting invite that you can check and send to attendees. Schedule with Copilot lets you see a meeting form with a meeting title, agenda, and conversation summary made by Copilot as well as a list of attendees from the email thread and an attachment of the original email. This is coming to the new Outlook for Windows, web, Mac, and mobile. What I hope this will also do is to know my calendar so it could suggest a working meeting time.
The public preview of Microsoft Copilot for Finance was just recently announced. It is a new offering designed to smooth tasks such as performing variance analysis of a company’s sales and automating audits of accounts receivable. This unlocks AI-assisted competencies for finance teams and professionals as it can pull data from financial systems (Dynamics 365 and SAP) and provide related suggestions in Microsoft 365 apps like Excel and Outlook. Copilot for Finance is a role-based solution, in addition to the already generally available Copilot for Sales and Copilot for Service.
Here are some upcoming features in a table with availability estimates.
| Feature | Availability estimate |
| Expanded resources and coming features in Copilot Lab | March 2024 and summer 2024 |
| Copilot in the Microsoft 365 mobile app and the Word and PowerPoint mobile apps | March 2024 |
| Copilot in Forms | March 2024 |
| Copilot-generated summaries when sharing documents | March 2024 |
| Draft and coaching features in classic Outlook for Windows | early and late March 2024 |
| Copilot in OneDrive | late April 2024 |
| Copilot in Microsoft Stream | late April 2024 |
Read more from Microsoft’s Copilot blog post.
The future
The near future of Copilot is indeed exciting, and we can expect to see even more enhancements and improvements during this spring and summer. Microsoft is putting a lot of effort into Copilot. This helps us users of course, there will be a personal digital assistant in each productivity application in the Microsoft cloud – or so it seems at this point. I will be surprised if there are any key apps without Copilot by the end of this year.
And this is just the beginning. I am already thinking about customized Copilots and plugins that will allow a lot more, directly business process connected, use cases.
Copilot, and the AI generally, is a powerful tool that is constantly evolving to meet the needs of people, businesses and the Future Work, and I can’t wait to see what the future holds for it. It is not only technology, but also a powerful change driver that transforms the way you work and create. Keep in mind that implementing Copilot and AI to the work is not a one-time project, but a continuous journey that requires a strategic vision, a cultural shift, and a constant approach to innovation and learning.
What I have come to realize is that I would not want to work in a company that doesn’t have Copilot in use and encourage & train employees to use it better and more.
Vesa Nopanen - My Metaverse Day 
2 thoughts on “The New and the Next of Copilot ”