Ms signs office AI deal with Vodafone, adds features to Excel, Outlook

By Dina Bass and Matt Day

Microsoft Corp. said Vodafone Group Plc signed a large deal to use artificial intelligence assistants for Office and unveiled a range of new AI tools designed to help workers create Excel charts, prioritize emails and collaborate with one another.

Vodafone will purchase 68,000 licenses for corporate versions of the assistants, known as Copilots, after early trials found workers using them saved about three hours a week per person, Microsoft said in a blog post shared ahead of a webcast Monday. Other clients include Honeywell International Inc. and financial services firm Finastra Group Holdings Ltd. Microsoft said Copilot customers increased by more than 60 per cent in the most recent quarter, compared with the previous period, while the number of clients with more than 10,000 users doubled. The company didn’t disclose overall customer totals. 

Microsoft has been infusing its product line with AI technology from partner OpenAI and is touting the new features as a second wave of business-oriented Copilots, AI tools designed to turbocharge programs like Teams conferencing software, Word and Outlook, among other applications. 

Connecting popular Office software to AI models from OpenAI helps differentiate Microsoft’s products from rival offerings, including OpenAI’s own. OpenAI last week released a new model, called o1, that can perform some human-like reasoning tasks, and Microsoft said Monday that it would integrate the technology in its own products at some point.

Microsoft has cited strong demand for the earlier versions of the products, and customers praise some of their capabilities, especially the ability to summarize meetings and documents. The Copilots cost $30 a month per user and could one day become a major new revenue stream.

But many features remain a work in progress — generating new content has been more unreliable and the same is true of using the AI tools for things like spreadsheets or tasks that require understanding context. In recent months, skittish investors have signaled impatience with tech companies’ efforts to profit from their massive investments in AI.

Microsoft is also rolling out a new feature for Copilot’s chat application called Pages, which gives coworkers a space to work together using data they create and as well as content generated by the AI software. Pages saves the AI-generated material in one place and lets workers edit and share it with other employees. The new feature is being released Monday and will be widely available later this month. “You can ideate with AI and collaborate with other people,” said Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella. 

Microsoft is also widely releasing its Copilot tools for the Excel spreadsheet app, which will help users create charts and pivot tables. The Excel Copilot can also work with text data and use the Python programming language for things like forecasts and risk analysis. The Python features, in preview now, are accessible using regular language instead of programming code. 

The software giant announced new AI features for Word, Teams and PowerPoint. A new Prioritize My Inbox option in Outlook analyzes a user’s messages based on what emails they respond to and who they report to in the office in order to help declutter. The program, which will be available to preview late this year, also summarizes the messages and explains why they’ve been prioritized.