Build 2024: Microsoft introduces Team Copilot and Azure Cobalt 100 updates. Everything you need to know

Microsoft Corp. is creating a version of its Copilot assistant that will help groups of employees collaborate, expanding company-wide efforts to infuse products with artificial intelligence.

Announced Tuesday, Team Copilot will serve as the designated meeting supervisor, taking notes, summarizing key information and tracking deadlines. The AI ​​assistant will be made available to enterprise customers later this year, Microsoft announced on the first day of Build, a conference for developers.

The company has taken early leadership in the field of generative artificial intelligence, which can generate or summarize text and images. After investing about $13 billion in OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, Microsoft has rushed to bring similar capabilities to its productivity software, launching a suite of products under the Copilot brand, which includes everything from a coding assistant to a search engine built into Windows.

Microsoft also provided an update on its efforts to build its own chips. The company said the Azure Cobalt 100 central processing unit, the software giant’s first internal processor, will be available in preview starting Tuesday for customers of its Azure cloud computing service.

The processors aren’t the cutting-edge chips that power artificial intelligence, but Cobalt represents a milestone for Microsoft in its nascent efforts to keep pace with its biggest rivals in the computing power rental industry. Amazon.com Inc., a leading provider of cloud computing services, and Alphabet Inc.’s Google. also make their own chips, in part to create specially designed devices that they can offer at lower costs than chips from companies like Intel Corp. or Advanced Micro Devices Inc.

Cloud service providers are also eager to see their internal chips handle such novel tasks as training artificial intelligence systems. Microsoft’s Maia 100 AI accelerator, which is not yet available to Azure customers, “is starting to hijack traffic in one of our data centers,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in an interview on Bloomberg Television on Monday.