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Microsoft recently said that AI’s impact on our lives will be as big as the PC and the internet – something you’d expect from a company that just invested billions of dollars in OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT.
Still, Microsoft is far from alone in making these claims – and ChatGPT’s talents, including advanced text generation and question answering, are potentially transformative. But how exactly can AI tools and machine learning change Microsoft 365, formerly known as Microsoft Office?
At this time, there is no timeline for Microsoft’s integration of OpenAI technology into its suite of productivity apps, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams. But the process has already begun and recent reports suggest that Microsoft will soon add ChatGPT’s talents to its Office suite and Bing search engine, which could change the way we use them.
Based on what we know about ChatGPT’s talents and how they can apply to Microsoft 365, here are five ways AI technology is likely to change how we use apps like Outlook, Word, and PowerPoint.
5 ways ChatGPT can transform Microsoft Office
Microsoft Office, now known as Microsoft 365, already has a few AI tools of its own thanks to Project Turing (opens in new tab). Since 2017, the latter provides features such as assistive AI (see below) for suggested email replies and ‘Smart Find’ for searching your documents.
But OpenAI tools like ChatGPT promise to tie in with Microsoft’s own AI research to boost those features and unlock new ones. Thanks to its language processing and data analysis skills, Microsoft’s partnership with ChatGPT can help…
1. Solve your email headache
For most of us, email has become an old-fashioned chore that lacks the immediacy of the best online collaboration tools like Slack. But generative pre-trained transformers (or GPTs) promise to tame our inboxes, thanks to their ability to crack masses of text and tease their meaning.
According to The Information (opens in new tab), Microsoft “recently looked at how Outlook and Word can use GPT to suggest automatic replies to other emails”. This could go well beyond the simple auto-complete suggestions we have now – Microsoft has apparently also talked about creating “chatbot-like programs in Word and Outlook that write whole chunks of text”.
Ultimately, your role with email could be to approve or lightly edit suggested responses, rather than set aside an hour to sift through them. ChatGPT can also help plan meetings or organize trips, which sounds like good news to all of us.
2. Make you (look) like a better writer
One of ChatGPT’s strengths is the ability to generate text in response to a prompt. The content of the AI chatbot’s replies isn’t always as factual as the confident tone suggests, but the writing itself can convincingly replicate the nuance and character of a particular author.
This is where ChatGPT, especially the inbound GPT-4 model, could have some of the biggest impact on the likes of Outlook and Word. Third party apps like Hemingway (opens in new tab) already act as our virtual sub-editors, but these tools will increasingly be built into apps like Microsoft Office to improve our writing.
You can press a button and get a tighter version of the report you just wrote, or get suggestions to remove jargon. What impact can automatically generated text ultimately have on our writing skills? That’s a thorny question for another day, but in the short term it could smooth out wrinkles, such as over-reliance on the passive voice in our documents and emails.
3. Summarize your meetings
Microsoft’s “At a Glance” feature is already able to summarize your Word documents with bullet points, but ChatGPT’s integration could take this to the next level and spread it across Microsoft 365’s apps.
For example, a long report can be automatically scaled down to a digestible PowerPoint presentation. The same technology can also automatically summarize the transcripts created during your Teams meetings, saving you the task of creating a follow-up email from scratch.
This combination of Turing’s ability to understand text and ChatGPT’s ability to generate it automatically could put a scythe on the repetition many of us experience when creating documents or written text for multiple formats from presentations to e-mail. You still have the power to finally sign off, but the legwork involved in creating PowerPoints and post-meeting emails may soon be scratched off your “to do” list.
4. Create beautiful PowerPoint visuals
ChatGPT’s AI powers also tie in nicely with another OpenAI creation, Dall-E, which went viral long before the chatbot last year. Dall-E is a powerful text-to-image generator and can create visuals (with mixed results) from simple prompts – which can be a very useful way to spice up your PowerPoint presentations.
This is according to a report by The Information (opens in new tab)Microsoft has spoken internally about “plans to let PowerPoint customers use OpenAI’s Dall-E 2 image generation model to create new images for presentations.” This could work in tandem with ChatGPT’s ability to summarize chunks of text with bullet points, allowing you to effectively create concept presentations.
This visual aid is something Adobe has called a “creative co-pilot” that lets you easily describe things you want to add to a scene or image. While it has major implications for digital art, it could also make PowerPoint presentations much less time consuming.
5. Turning you into an Excel expert
Not everyone likes to spend time in Microsoft Excel, but ChatGPT’s data analysis and question answering capabilities can make the spreadsheet tool a much friendlier place for the uninitiated.
The Reddit forums are already lit up with the ways people can plug ChatGPT into Excel (see the video below). And Microsoft’s massive investment in OpenAI carries with it the promise of integrating those skills directly into apps like Microsoft’s spreadsheet king.
For example, it can retrieve data based on a simple prompt (“list of the top five companies in the world by profit”), create Excel formulas and macros, or create data visualization charts for you.
Having a chatbot that lives in Excel ready to analyze data and help you with visualizations would be a huge boon for beginners and also a huge time saver for power users.