Microsoft is bringing more AI tech to its productivity software as it works to monetize its investment (video)

Microsoft (MSFT) is infusing more of its AI-powered Copilot technology into its Microsoft 365 productivity products, including Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams. The updates, which include the ability to use Copilot to create PowerPoint presentations and a feature that prioritizes emails in Outlook, are part of what the tech giant is calling the Copilot Wave 2 rollout.

In addition to improvements to Microsoft 365 apps, Microsoft also announced a new collaboration tool called Copilot Pages, which enables teams of employees to access, edit, and manipulate data on a single page using information pulled from Copilot.

The company also unveiled a new agent creation option that allows users to easily create Copilot-enabled agents, AI assistants used to automate and manage business processes.

All of this is part of a broader effort by Microsoft to add AI capabilities to its already robust portfolio of business software products, as it looks to outdo rivals in the space, from Google (GOOG, GOOGL) to Salesforce (CRM), while also cashing in on its massive investments in AI technology.

Microsoft says the number of customers using Copilot has increased by more than 60% quarter-on-quarter, and the number of people using it daily at work has doubled. What’s more, the Windows maker says Vodafone is buying 68,000 Copilot licenses for its 100,000 employees after finding that the software helps employees save an average of three hours per week per person.

The new Copilot features for Microsoft 365 apps are designed to help your employees be more productive, whether it’s tracking meeting and chat transcripts to help you stay on track or quickly referencing documents, PDFs, and emails in a Word document.

The Copilot Agent Builder for Copilot Studio is designed to help you create an AI-powered agent that meets your business needs without requiring extensive technical knowledge.

“One of the things we heard a lot was that … there’s no one-size-fits-all solution for Copilot,” Charles Lamanna, vice president of business and industry at Microsoft, Copilot, told Yahoo Finance.

“If you have this company and this company, let’s say Disney versus Novartis, what they want to do in Microsoft 365 with Copilot is going to be slightly different. They have different data sources, they have different workflows, they have different processes. They just have … different ways of working.”

That’s where Microsoft’s agent builder comes in. For example, say you want to help new employees better understand their health benefits. You can use Copilot Studio to direct an agent to answer questions about your company’s health care offerings and point them to any relevant documents.

When an employee uses the agent, it automatically pulls data from documents, giving them the information they need without having to search through multiple microsites and digital brochures.

“Anyone in the company will be able to create and use agents,” Lamanna said.

Microsoft’s Copilot software is an important part of a broader push into the generative AI space that includes an investment in chatGPT developer OpenAI, and is at least part of the reason why the company’s share price is up more than 30% in the past 12 months. Shares of Alphabet, the parent company of Google and Rival, are up 14% in the same period.

During its latest earnings report, Microsoft announced revenue from its Intelligent Cloud segment, which includes Azure services, came in at $28.5 billion. That was slightly below Wall Street’s expectations of $28.7 billion. And while that was a 19% year-over-year revenue increase, investors reacted negatively to the news, sending shares lower after the earnings announcement.

Email Daniel Howley at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter at @DanielHowley.

Click here for the latest tech news that will impact the stock market

Read the latest financial and business news from Yahoo Finance