Blue Ridge Technology

​Microsoft says Windows 11’s top productivity app is…Copilot? We’re a little skeptical. If you think about your workday, what’s the single most important app you use? The one it feels like you just couldn’t make it through the day without? Microsoft’s newest marketing says the answer is Microsoft Copilot, the AI assistant built into the Microsoft ecosystem (and yes, available as a standalone app). We’re not so sure. More important than Outlook? Teams? To Do? What about File Explorer, OneDrive, or even Snipping Tool? Not to mention, if you use any industry-specific software or big SaaS products (like Salesforce, Shopify, or Adobe products), those probably jump up pretty high on your list. So, respectfully: What is Microsoft talking about here? We have a pretty good idea. Let’s start with the good. The Good: Copilot Can Be Incredibly Useful It’s hard not to notice that AI is literally everywhere in business marketing. Which is probably what this Microsoft claim is: more marketing than re...

Microsoft’s AI assistant, Copilot, is already a pretty useful tool for some people and some functions. What Is Copilot, Again? If you could use a quick refresher, here you go: Copilot is Microsoft’s generative AI assistant. It works a lot like other generative AI tools like ChatGPT or Gemini, but the difference is that Copilot is built into the Microsoft ecosystem. That means it understands many of your Microsoft apps, like OneDrive, Word, Outlook, and Excel, and it can actually do things inside those apps. ChatGPT and the rest are usually confined to a web browser tab, and they can’t reach out and interact with your files and systems directly. (And hey, you might not want them to: that level of access seems kind of intrusive.) But in a way, Microsoft already has that level of access: it’s the company you’re paying for cloud storage, hosting, office applications, and more. So giving the company’s AI assistant access to all that same stuff isn’t that big of a jump. So, li...

Have you taken a look at Microsoft Copilot lately? It’s not for everyone or every situation, but if you haven’t poked around to see what it can do, it’s worth a look. Today we’ll review a few ways that Microsoft Copilot can help you in your work and business. Plus, Microsoft recently announced some new experimental features that may roll out later this year. We’ll distill it all down to the stuff that’s most helpful to business leaders like you. What Is Copilot? Microsoft Copilot is Microsoft’s AI assistant, built into the latest versions of Windows and some Microsoft 365 products. Think chatGPT or Google Gemini, but in Microsoft flavor: Copilot harnesses the power of large language models (LLMs) and other AI technologies to do two primary things: “Understand” conversational text in a way that previous systems couldn’t Respond to that text in sensible conversational text of its own This goes far beyond what a classic Google or Bing search could do: there, the search algorithms tried to...