Finally, the Team Copilot can be used to help manage projects, creating tasks and goals within Microsoft’s Planner app that it can then assign to individual workers. It can also complete tasks itself — such as drafting a blog post — and notify team members when additional input is needed.
While Gownder sees potential for the Team Copilot to improve productivity, he noted that some of Microsoft’s messaging around the product is sloppy.
“It says that Team Copilot will engage in ‘meeting facilitation,’ which isn’t what it’s doing,” he said. “Meeting facilitation means acting as the leader of a meeting, ensuring inclusivity, keeping people on-subject and on-time. It’s a particular skill. Team Copilot doesn’t do this; it creates agendas, tracks time, takes notes, summaries key takeaways, and shares files.”
Group moderation is another term that’s wide of the mark, he said. “Moderation sounds like what happens on Reddit — keeping people in line and censoring inappropriate comments. That’s again not what Copilot does; it’s acting more as a business insights assistant for group interactions and meetings,” said Gownder.
All in all, the strategy and the product direction for Team Copilot “make a lot of sense,” he said, assuming they work as described; Copilot for Microsoft 365 remains a work in progress, said Gownder, with genAIunpredictable at times.
The Team Copilot will be available in preview later this year for Microsoft 365 customers with a Copilot subscription.
