Microsoft is reinventing its Power Platform's software development, including Outlook, PowerPoint, Excel and Word, with AI-powered no-code development and adding new features like Copilot. In an event on Thursday (Local Time), the company announced that Microsoft 365 users will soon be able to use what the company is calling an AI "Co-pilot," Microsoft said in a statement. "Makers now have a live in-studio copilot that helps them build solutions and provides suggestions for improvement. To build an app, flow, or bot, you can describe it using natural language and the copilot can build it in seconds. It is that easy," the statement read. "Copilot in Power Apps makes it easy to keep data at the centre of every application.

Microsoft 365 Copilot's AI tools don't seem particularly surprising for the company who originated Clippy's helper bot. But applying AI and natural language to Microsoft Office feels like a profound, fundamental change that could absolutely transform the way you work. Microsoft 365 Copilot essentially injects AI into the various Office apps. You'll still interact with them the way you normally would, but Copilot will also live in the toolbar atop those apps, and you'll interact with it in a sidebar. If you've ever hauled a coworker over and told them, "Show me how to do this," you'll understand what Microsoft 365 Copilot can do. Except it will actually, you know, do it.

Microsoft has revealed its thoughts on how artificial intelligence (AI) could shape how we work in the years to come -- and how it plans to help guide those changes. The announcement was made by Microsoft's Satya Nadella and Jared Spataro at a company event titled The Future of Work with AI. As the name suggests, the show was focused on how artificial intelligence (AI) could affect how we work, both now and in the future. More specifically, the tech giant discussed how it will add AI smarts into its suite of Office apps. In PowerPoint, for example, you will be able to use an AI-powered Copilot that can create entire presentations for you with just a few text prompts.

Microsoft reportedly plans to introduce upgraded Office apps with AI features in the coming weeks. According to The Verge, the tech giant is preparing to show what its Prometheus AI technology and OpenAI's language AI can do for Word, PowerPoint, Outlook and other Microsoft 365 apps as soon as this March. Microsoft recently launched a reimagined Bing that can generate conversational responses to search queries, thanks to the Prometheus model, which was built with the help of OpenAI. Additionally, the company introduced a new Edge with a built-in "AI copilot" that's also powered by Prometheus. A button on the top-right corner gives users quick access to Bing's new chat feature, and as we mentioned in our hands-on, it's like having ChatGPT right in your browser.

Microsoft's Office app for Android and iOS is already one of the best mobile apps you don't know about, able to reproduce the functionality of a scanner with superior OCR text recognition. Now, it's getting even better: the Microsoft Lens portion of the app now promises it can read your handwriting. Microsoft's Office Lens has quietly existed within Microsoft's stable of apps since 2014, when the company first debuted its capabilities of taking a picture of a page of text, scanning it, extracting the text, and formatting it for PowerPoint. In the six years since, Microsoft's had ample time to add features, including document scanning, PDF conversion, PDF signing, and more. Part of the reason you haven't heard about it is because of Microsoft's labyrinthine marketing.

Microsoft has revealed what it's thinking about for upcoming iterations of Microsoft 365 and its Office apps, combining a flexible ribbon and a more muted color scheme with adaptive commands and a greater emphasis on artificial intelligence. In a blog post on Tuesday, the chief designer of Office 365, Jon Friedman, said that some of the changes were on the table, while others were simply exploratory. Friedman didn't provide a timeline for the changes beyond a "year or two," but it's likely that this will be another wholesale update of the Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365) suite. Microsoft has continually updated Office over time--and it's had to, as it's asking customers to spend about $70 per year just for a personal license to what's now called Microsoft 365. In 2018, the new innovation was Microsoft Search, the search box that lives at the top of apps like Outlook and SharePoint.

Microsoft this week launched an Office app that replaces Word, Excel, and PowerPoint on Android and iOS. Merging three apps into one, while adding more features, is quite the achievement. The new Office app is not just for consuming content and maybe a little light editing on the side, but actually creating content on the go. Most interestingly, a lot of these features fundamentally require AI and machine learning to achieve this new mobile productivity paradigm. Microsoft has been adding AI-driven features to its once most profitable product line for years now -- we did a recap of just a handful last year.

Designing an effective productivity suite is increasingly about connections: between services, between data sources, between employees, and between apps. At Google Next on Wednesday, Google debuted a number of upgrades to its G Suite of business apps, which have competed against Microsoft Office and its ecosystem for years. According to Google, more than 5 million businesses have signed up for G Suite. (Microsoft has said previously that it has more than 60 million commercial customers for Office 365.) And that means if you're using Slack, or G Suite, that doesn't mean you won't be able to directly interact with a Word document. If you're a Google G Suite user, here are five ways that G Suite will change for you: While Office and G Suite workers can already interact with common documents, it's always been a bit of a ballet between what files can be opened by which suite, and which require conversion.

Smarter searches don't necessarily need to live in a search engine. This week, Microsoft will debut two tools that will live in Office: Microsoft Search and Ideas, designed to assist workers trying to dig out the document that they need, now. Microsoft hosts its Microsoft Ignite conference this week, and the company promises literally dozens of announcements--most pertaining to its Azure cloud and related services. But Microsoft also plans a few key developments at the user level, including final rollouts of features the company has announced previously, such as the ability to blur backgrounds within Microsoft Teams video chats and transcribe meetings. The two most significant announcements for Office users are probably the enhanced Microsoft Search experience, which will traverse Windows, Office.com,

Microsoft hasn't posted one of its documentary-style Productivity Future videos for a while now -- not since 2015, I believe. But that doesn't mean the company has stopped'envisioning' what might be next for Office and the workplace. In a new Microsoft .Future podcast episode, called How AI will make meetings less painful, Microsoft drops some hints about some of the latest future concepts that ultimately may inspire its coming products and services, including Cortana. The podcast (which is audio only) mentions that Director of Office Envisioning Anton Andrews and team have "re-envisioned everything -- from what you should expect from a dry erase board, to what you might expect from the floor." Andrews said during the podcast that Microsoft sees the floor people stand on as a potential communications tool, but he didn't elaborate on how/when/if the company may provide more on what that means.