Several players stand out for their reputation among users. Here, I think of ChatGPT, Gemini (formerly Bard), character.ai, Liner, and others, which are more discreet or adopt different strategies than those for the general public. IBM's Watsonx.ai, for instance, is more geared towards enterprises.
So where does Copilot fit into all of this ?
Before discussing Copilot, it's important to know about OpenAI, a company specializing in artificial intelligence founded in 2015, initially as a non-profit and later as a moderately profitable entity. In 2019, Microsoft became interested in OpenAI and invested an initial billion in the company. This helped the company grow rapidly and release the first publicly known GPT-3 model in 2020. That same year, Microsoft made another significant investment in the company and became OpenAI's exclusive cloud provider. This means that ChatGPT now runs on Azure. In total, Microsoft has invested over 8 billion dollars in OpenAI's AI development.
As a result of this collaboration, Copilot was born, an AI from Microsoft based on OpenAI's GPT technology. Copilot quickly made its way onto platforms like GitHub, Bing, Office 365, etc. Its purpose is to help professionals accelerate their work.
Today, Copilot is found in most of Microsoft's tools, as shown in the diagram below.
Does it make sense to have a Copilot in every application ?
As a Maker (user of the Power Platform), I warmly welcomed the news of the transition from Power Virtual Agent to Copilot Studio because I could perceive the value that AI would bring to every ChatBot coupled with the Power Platform.
However, I must say that I wasn't convinced by the idea of having multiple Copilots in different parts of my user journey. After a few weeks of using Copilot in Dynamics 365, I must admit that it totally makes sense. With Copilot and Azure AI Studio, Microsoft has become (in my view) the company, simultaneously a Cloud player, possessing the most intelligent approach to artificial intelligence. This puts it in pole position to become (if it isn't already) the biggest Cloud player.
Think of all the people out there using Microsoft Word or Excel, they can now easily benefit from the Power of AI inside Office365. And what you need to achieve with word, is not exactly what you need in Outlook or Power Point. But anyone in the organization, citizen developer (using Low-Code), or pro developer, can enrich Copilot with new features taylored for its own company usine the same tenant.
With this strategy, which targets different users :
- Enterprise/Businness (Outlook, Excel ... Copilots)
- Développeurs (Github Copilot & Azure AI Studio)
- Citizen developer (Copilot Studio)
- Autres (Edge & Bing Copilot)
In comparing their approach with all the other players in the market, it's very clear that Microsoft has a significant advantage. Microsoft is likely to become the company that puts AI in the hands of the most users.
There's a lot of buzz around the comparison between Google's Gemini (formerly known as Bard) and OpenAI's ChatGPT. Knowing that GPT indirectly powers Copilot, it's easy to see that its usage in a broader sense is far more significant among users, thus better grasping future AI use cases.
