Microsoft officially launched Copilot for Office 365 to users earlier this month.

This AI-powered productivity tool can summarize documents, write emails, and attend meetings for you. It is designed for use in any company and links to Microsoft applications, such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams.

So far, the tool has proven popular, so I went to Microsoft’s UK offices to try it out for myself.

First of all, Copilot is surprisingly easy to use. The tool adopts an informal chatbot style, making it highly intuitive and accessible even to non-tech-savvy workers.

Workers can ask the bot to summarize long documents or convert them to PowerPoint or spreadsheets with a few clicks. You can also reply to emails and scan your inbox, selecting the most important messages and writing a response.

Copilot can read long email threads or Teams chats and summarize the main points.

Workers can even send bots to meetings for them. When enabled in a Teams call, Copilot can record meetings, provide transcripts, and separate topics discussed into clips called “chapters.”

This tool could be a breakthrough for busy, email-burdened workers, helping them get the latest information quickly.

It doesn’t offer much customization yet, but Microsoft is working on it. The company plans to launch a feature called “Sounds Like Me,” which will allow Copilot to imitate a user’s voice and tone in emails and messages.

This tool is based on OpenAI’s GPT and uses DALL-E 3 to generate images. The chatbot function is similar to Bing chat which often makes mistakes.

Copilot clearly has the advantage of saving time, but it is not without risks.

The safest way to use AI is to treat it like a new, inexperienced intern. Microsoft says the tool is intended to help workers complete first drafts more quickly and encourage users to edit and proofread the final work.

While Microsoft has taken steps to try to combat AI hallucinations, such as adding footnote references in bot responses that link to information sources, the technology isn’t perfect yet. Microsoft is encouraging companies to train their workers not to treat AI as a foolproof search tool.