Microsoft really, really wants you to love Teams (ain’t gonna happen at Enterprise World Headquarters) and is rebranding Bing Chat as Copilot as it rolls AI across its core Office products.

We’ve long contended two things about Microsoft that we think are particularly relevant as we unpack the flood of announcements that made up last week’s Microsoft Ignite event:

  • Satya Nadella has remade Microsoft into a fierce competitor (his being blindsided by recent events OpenAI notwithstanding);
  • Like it or hate it, the operating system of big business is Microsoft Office. Not Windows. Not macOS, Android, iOS or ChromeOS. It’s not Slack or Salesforce or (sadly) Google Workplace. It’s Office.

Microsoft made that clearer than ever at Ignite, last week’s event for the IT professionals who will decide which tools you’re going to be using in the months and years to come. Here are the highlights you need to know about:

#1- Microsoft has officially launched Loop, its Notion clone. It’s just about as ugly as Notion, if less feature-filled …

…before you dismiss it: Loop is a message from the future. You can designate specific components (think: a table of financial indicators, a paragraph of boilerplate, or a to-do list with people @mentioned in them) and pull them into Teams or other Office apps. If you update the component in Loop, it automatically updates wherever else you’ve used it.

Yes, the numbers will update themselves — everywhere, automatically. Imagine that at scale in a PowerPoint as the tech behind it (branded fluid) rolls out. Now imagine how many 100s of hours your team is going to save updating an IPO / M&A / board / investor presentation as the numbers keep changing and changing and changing…

#2- Teams will redecorate your background. Didn’t need that, but thanks.

#3- Teams will turn you into a legless, Meta-style 3D VR avatar using Microsoft Mesh, a “solution that enables your distributed workforce to connect like never before in a 3D immersive space, helping virtual meetings and events feel more like face-to-face connections.” Take an antinauseant, then watch, runtime: 1:01.

#4- Microsoft is rolling its inchoate, half-baked planning tools into what looks set to be a single, smart, streamlined app sometime early in 2024. Microsoft Planner will absorb To-Do, Planner, and Project for the Web — and will include a Copilot AI integration.

#5- Bing Chat has been renamed Copilot — and it’s going to permeate everything from PowerPoint to Teams, Microsoft and Outlook. Copilot Studio is its version of the AI app store that OpenAI rolled out before Sam Altman got thrown under a bus.

Wait, wait: Where’s Microsoft 365 Copilot? The full integration of AI into Microsoft’s tools was announced months ago and is now rolling out to 600 big business customers around the world who (a) managed to get approved and (b) can shell out USD 30 / user / month for a minimum of 600 seats.

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