☀️ AI Morning Minute: Copilot
Microsoft's AI assistant that lives inside the apps you already use
Hi there, I run a 90-minute workshop called Making Sense of AI. It’s happening in 2 days on April 8th, 10am Pacific. $50.00. Plain language, live demos, no technical background needed.
Most AI tools ask you to leave your work and go somewhere else to get help. Copy text out, paste it into a chatbot, copy the answer back. That friction is the reason a lot of people try AI once and stop. Copilot's bet is that AI works better when it meets you where you're already working.
What it means:
Copilot is Microsoft's AI assistant built directly into Microsoft 365 apps like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams. Instead of being a separate chatbot, it sits inside the tools and works with the documents, emails, and data you already have open. It can draft emails, summarize meetings, build presentations from notes, analyze spreadsheets, and pull information across your Microsoft apps without you switching windows.
(Not to be confused with GitHub Copilot, a separate Microsoft product that helps software developers write code.)
Why it matters:
Microsoft recently launched Copilot Cowork, which lets the AI handle multi-step tasks across apps over time instead of just answering one question at a time. That’s the jump from “assistant that answers when asked” to “coworker that finishes the project.”
Copilot now uses models from multiple AI labs, including both OpenAI and Anthropic. A feature called Critique has one model draft a response and a second model review it before showing you the result. That’s two AIs checking each other’s work.
Starting July 2026, Microsoft is bundling AI and security features into baseline Microsoft 365 subscriptions rather than selling them as add-ons. That means Copilot won’t be optional for long. It’s becoming a default part of how Office works, the same way spell check did 30 years ago.
Simple example:
You have a meeting in 20 minutes and you missed the last three on this project. Without Copilot, you’re frantically skimming email chains, searching Slack, and hoping someone took notes. With Copilot, you type “catch me up on the Meridian project” and it pulls the meeting recaps, the email threads, the shared documents, and gives you a summary. You walk in prepared. The AI didn’t do the meeting for you. It did the homework.