Microsoft intros a Copilot for teams

Microsoft wants to make its brand of generative AI more useful for teams — specifically teams across corporations and large enterprise organizations.

This morning at its annual Build dev conference, Microsoft announced Team Copilot, the latest expansion of its Copilot family of generative AI tech. Unlike Microsoft’s previous Copilot-branded products, Team Copilot isn’t so much a point solution as a set of capabilities together aimed at “improving collaboration” and “streamlining project management.”

“[Team] Copilot frees teams to be more productive and creative by taking on administrative tasks that can be time-consuming and costly,” Jared Spataro, CVP of AI at work at Microsoft, writes in a blog post shared with TechCrunch.

Team Copilot integrates with Teams, Microsoft’s videoconferencing app, to help manage meeting agendas and take notes anyone in a meeting can co-author. In text chats, Team Copilot summarizes information (with any luck, accurately) and answers questions about what’s been discussed in the group.

Team Copilot extends beyond Teams to Loop and Planner, Microsoft’s collaboration and planning platforms, to create and assign tasks, track deadlines and notify team members when their input’s needed. In Planner, Copilot can also help break up large work items into steps and provide answers to questions about things such as task progress, priorities and stakeholder workload.

Microsoft says that Team Copilot features will be available in preview later this year for customers with a Copilot for Microsoft 365 license, which starts at $30 per user per month.