Microsoft’s Big AI Office Deal with Vodafone: 3 New Excel & Outlook Features

Microsoft’s AI relationship with Vodafone has given Excel and Outlook powerful new Copilot tools that will help workers save time and work together better.

Microsoft stated that Vodafone Group was to enter into a big partnership to deploy Office AI assistants. The company also presented several new AI assisted applications which are designed to assist users in creating Excel charts, managing emails, and work together.

Microsoft said in a blog post released before a webcast Monday that Vodafone will buy 68,000 licenses for business versions of the assistants, which are called Copilots. Early tests showed that workers who used them saved about three hours a week per person.

Financial services company Finastra Group Holdings and Honeywell International are two other partners. Microsoft said that the number of Copilot customers rose by more than 60% in the last quarter compared to the previous quarter. The number of clients with more than 10,000 users also doubled. The business didn’t say how many customers they had in total.

AI-Powered Features in Microsoft Office

Microsoft has been adding AI technology from its partner OpenAI to its own products. The company is advertising the new features as a second wave of business-focused Copilots, which are AI tools made to speed up programs like Teams chat software, Word, Outlook, and others.

By linking OpenAI’s AI models to Microsoft’s popular Office software, Microsoft’s goods stand out from competing ones, even OpenAI’s own. OpenAI released a new model called o1 last week that can do some reasoning jobs like a human. On Monday, Microsoft said it would use the technology in some of its own products.

Microsoft says that earlier versions of the products are still in high demand, and customers like some of their features, especially the way they can summarise meetings and papers. Each Copilot costs $30 a month, and they could become a big new source of income one day.

But a lot of the features are still being worked on. For example, making new material has become less reliable, and using AI tools for things like spreadsheets or tasks that need to understand context has also become less reliable.

Investors have been wary of tech companies’ attempts to make money off of their huge investments in AI in recent months.

Also, Microsoft is adding a new feature to Copilot’s chat app called Pages. Pages give coworkers a place to work together using both their own data and content made by AI software. Pages keeps the content made by AI in one place and lets employees change it and share it with other employees. The new function will be available to most people by the end of the month after it comes out on Monday.

Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, said, “AI can help you come up with ideas and work with other people.”

AI Innovations for Excel, Outlook, and Other Office Tools

Microsoft is also making its Copilot tools for the Excel spreadsheet app available to a lot of people. These tools will help people make maps and pivot tables. You can also use text data and the computer language Python with the Excel Copilot to do things like make predictions and look at risks. You can use plain language instead of programming code to get to the Python tools that are currently in preview.

The big software company said that Word, Teams, and PowerPoint would all get new AI features. Outlook now has a new feature called “Prioritise My Inbox” that sorts a user’s messages by what emails they reply to and who they work for, which can help clear up their inbox. You’ll be able to see a sample of the program at the end of the year. It also summarises the messages and explains why they were put in the order they were.