So I think this is an important one because there’s a lot of copilot, and you’ve probably heard this name many times. I wanted to break it down a little bit for you so you can understand the various pillars of copilot, and we’ll talk about what we’re going to show off today.
Right now, if you haven’t already used Bing or Bing Chat, it’s now being called Copilot Chat. This is really all about information — information within your business and even outside your business — being able to get information quickly to serve whatever answers you’re seeking.
Then you have the assistants. If you haven’t already used Copilot in, let’s say, Microsoft Office, you can use the assistant within Outlook to help you craft an email, or within Word to summarize a document, or even help you create a PowerPoint slide so you can quickly get through a blocker in your mind about what you should put on the page and how you should frame it out. Microsoft Copilot can help you do that within the productivity suite.
But there are other assistants too — for instance, within Power Platform. If you’re new to Power Platform and you’re stuck on what you need to put together, or if you need content to fill in some blanks, you can ask Copilot to help with that. It can help you craft visuals, content, and more.
Of course, throughout the rest of the Microsoft stack you’ll find various copilots that assist you within those platforms.
Then you have the creation tools, and this is really where we’re going to spend most of our time in our demos today. But I didn’t want to skip over Microsoft 365 Copilot — the productivity copilot itself.
There is the ability to use plugins, and previously we might have called these integrations with other platforms, to pull in data from those platforms and help aid in either the information you’re seeking out or in the creation process.
We’re going to talk next about Copilot Studio and Azure AI Studio. Think of Copilot Studio as your low-code solution — the ability to make a fast start with building a copilot and getting information into users’ hands. That includes taking action within these copilots and creating outcomes that make sense for your organization. There’s a lot of AI built into this — like generative AI and other capabilities you can tie into the chatbots you might build within Copilot Studio.
Think of Azure AI Studio as the highly custom copilots. This is when you’re going to go deep into customizing the language model you’re using, customizing and comparing models, looking for different answers, or even protecting conversations with great granularity. You also have the ability to do deep evaluation of all the conversations you’re getting through Azure Studio and the copilots you build there.
Here’s an analogy I like: think of Copilot Studio as a box of Legos. With an inventive mind you can build all sorts of cool solutions and outcomes. Azure AI Studio is more like a fabrication shop — really, anything is possible. With metal and wood, you can build something pretty interesting as an output from Azure Studio.
That’s the main difference between the two. But they also cross over — you can take advantage of many capabilities in Azure AI Studio from Copilot Studio. So if you want to just build within Copilot Studio and leverage some of the custom capabilities in Azure Studio, that’s possible too.
