Last week, Microsoft hosted an event in New York City for a select group of press and analysts, including Moor Insights & Strategy CEO and chief analyst Patrick Moorhead and me. The event featured some annual fall product launches, plus a substantial focus on AI. Highlights included the introduction of new Surface laptops, a Windows 11 update (available September 26) with over 150 new features and the general availability of Microsoft 365 Copilot (on November 1). The event’s centerpiece was a unified AI-driven Copilot designed to work across different devices, applications and the web.
The event wasn’t small for exclusivity’s sake, but for the sake of clarity. Amongst all the clutter and noise around AI—What’s real now? What’s in the future? When is that future?—this event created a setting where the face-to-face conversations went well beyond the sound bites of press releases and blog posts from senior executives.
Microsoft’s event included a series of presentations from the senior leadership team. More importantly, it involved direct-access conversations with top executives, including Microsoft chairman and CEO Satya Nadella. In these conversations, we drilled down into the company’s AI strategy, responsible AI, and security and how a unified Copilot experience will boost productivity and streamline everyday tasks.
I’ll share some standout moments from the day and behind-the-scenes learnings that bring meaning and context to the announcements.
A unified Copilot for work and life
Microsoft has integrated AI-driven Copilots into its flagship products to enhance search, coding, productivity and more. Up to now, these Copilots have been disparate and inconsistent across apps. By contrast, the latest evolution is “Microsoft Copilot,” which now refers to a unified AI companion experience that harnesses web intelligence, enterprise data and real-time user context. This functionality will be accessible across Windows 11, Microsoft 365, Edge and Bing. As Microsoft expands Copilot’s capabilities and connections, the company aspires to provide a holistic AI experience throughout users’ lives, including not only work tasks but also shopping, quickly extracting things like flight data or delivery confirmations from email and more.
Microsoft was the first to use the term “copilot” for an AI assistant, and many other companies like Salesforce have since followed suit. Microsoft acknowledges it cannot trademark Copilot, but still sees value in the moniker. Yusuf Mehdi, corporate vice president and consumer chief marketing officer at Microsoft, said in a small-group discussion with analysts that the company hopes to “Kleenex it.” That’s not a precise comparison since Kleenex is the trademarked name that people call other tissues, but I see where he’s going in terms of connecting the Copilot name to the Microsoft brand.
Microsoft says it will continue to add capabilities and connections to the most-used applications for Copilot. The company also acknowledged the possibility of Copilot communicating with other non-Microsoft copilots to pull data from non-Microsoft CRMs, ERPs and other systems. As Copilot gains more entry points for the things that matter most in peoples’ work and lives, it should become smarter and more personalized. At that point, Copilot becomes an extension of the user—no longer a branding exercise, but rather an experience driven by a brand.
The unified Copilot rollout began with Windows 11 on September 26 and extends to Bing, Edge and Microsoft 365 Copilot this autumn.
Windows 11 update with over 150 new features
As of September 26, Windows 11 has been updated with many new features, including a Copilot preview for North America and parts of Asia and South America. Additional markets will launch “over time,” according to Microsoft.
Windows was the first PC platform to centralize AI assistance with Copilot in Windows. Copilot will now help with changing settings on your PC, summarizing documents or web pages and drafting emails. The Copilot icon will be in the taskbar or appear when a user right clicks or presses WIN + C.
One standout new feature from the Windows update is “Sound Like Me” in Outlook. If you’ve tried any GAI email generator, you may recognize how formal and robotic they often sound. Sound Like Me analyzes previous emails and picks up on tone and how users sign off to ensure that emails reflect users’ style. Microsoft also converted its Mail application to a simple version of Outlook, adding much-needed robustness that Apple has in its mail client.
Microsoft has prioritized accessibility in Windows 11 with expanded voice access capabilities and natural voices for more languages in Narrator. Voice access also works in more places throughout Windows, starting with login, and a new spelling experience allows users to dictate non-standard words and fix incorrectly recognized ones. The company introduced new accessibility features for Microsoft Surface devices as well—more on that below.
Updates to Microsoft 365 and Bing Chat
Microsoft also recently announced that Microsoft 365 Copilot will be GA on November 1 with a new “hero experience”: Microsoft 365 Chat. Previously called Business Chat, Microsoft 365 Chat delivers personal-assistant functionality through a chatbot. The chatbot purportedly understands a user’s job, priorities and organization while also including the full range of Microsoft’s security, compliance and privacy measures.
Microsoft 365 Copilot operates by leveraging data sourced from the Microsoft Graph, which serves as the central hub for data across all Microsoft 365 services and products. Microsoft takes strict measures to compartmentalize tenant-group and individual data, ensuring that data remains within predefined zones and preventing any sharing or transfer of data between different tenants (for example, between different companies). Microsoft 365 Copilot also avoids employing data inputs for training from beyond the organization’s boundaries, eliminating any possibility of unauthorized data access between different organizations.
Updates to Bing Chat include the DALL-E 3 model from OpenAI for images, which in the demo seemed to deliver a significant improvement to Bing Image Creator. Coming soon, Bing Chat will remember chat history and give more informed responses with something Microsoft calls Personalized Answers.
Responsible AI
Responsible AI was a central topic at last week’s event. Microsoft announced Content Credentials, which uses an invisible cryptographic watermark on AI-generated images in Bing that includes the time and date the image was created. Content Credentials for Paint and Microsoft Designer are coming soon. This is important for brands and creators because it helps them prevent misinformation and increase transparency around their use of AI.
During the event, the company dedicated a panel to discussing Microsoft’s responsible AI approach for security and governance. To some extent, that simply checks a box—it’s something any company putting AI in its products must address—but from what I’ve seen, I believe that the company’s responsible AI posture is generally strong and transparent. However, that belief comes more from what I have encountered in product and innovation conversations and by hearing from customers—not from the things that happen when Microsoft presents from a stage.
The company announced the Microsoft Copilot Copyright Commitment — which takes effect October 1—earlier in September. This extends the company’s existing IP indemnification support to commercial Copilot services, and I believe it underscores Microsoft’s commitment to its customers’ safe use of AI in its products. During the New York event, I spoke with Carl Wilson, senior director of service excellence at Lumen Technologies—one of the early-access Microsoft 365 Copilot customers. He told me that the safety measures, including indemnification, are significant to his company.
Let’s get to the Surface (devices)
Although AI took center stage this year, Microsoft also introduced several new Surface devices for business users as it has in previous years. You can read Moorhead’s analysis of last year’s event, which celebrated 10 years of Surface, here.
At this year’s event, the company introduced the “most powerful” Surface device ever built: the Surface Laptop Studio 2. This device packs some real processing heat with Intel’s 13th Gen i7 H-series processor, an Nvidia RTX 4050 or 4060 GPU and 64GB of RAM. The notebook can also run some GAI foundation models directly on the device. The demo showed this with a lower-parameter version of Meta’s Llama2 model. The Surface Laptop Studio 2 can run models like this because of significant advances in performance enabled by Intel’s “vision processing unit” (VPU, which is a type of neural processing unit, or NPU), including better offline functionality, lower latency and improved data efficiency for AI applications. It also reflects Microsoft’s commitment to bolstering user privacy and security because running the models offline is inherently more secure. On-device AI will become very important in the future for both smartphones and PCs. and I urge you to keep your eye on 2024 as the hardware, operating system and applications come into alignment. You haven’t seen anything yet!
The Surface Laptop Studio 2 looks great in the platinum colorway and has three separate configurations for laptop, stage and studio modes. New customizations to the haptic touchpad for accessibility make it what Microsoft calls its “most inclusive” device yet. The Surface Laptop Studio 2 will be available on October 3, starting at $1,999.
Microsoft also announced the Surface Laptop Go 3—a lighter-weight device on all fronts but still an impressive machine that the company says is now 88% faster than the previous model. It has a 12.4-inch touchscreen, a fingerprint power button and a battery life of up to 15 hours. It has a built-in adaptive touchscreen and is fully compatible with Microsoft Adaptive Accessories and the Surface Adaptive Kit. The Surface Laptop Go 3 has a sleekness and many features that could attract Mac users—or Mac coveters—but also has the convenience of USB-A and USB-C ports and a headphone jack. At $799, it’s also a fraction of the cost of its direct competitor, the M2 MacBook Air. If money’s no object, there are some features where the M2 MacBook Air wins out. However, the Surface Laptop Go 3 is a solid machine that beats the Apple product in two areas that are increasingly important for modern work: price and accessibility. The Go 3, like all Surface devices, supports both display touch and pen use, something that Apple supports only on its iPad.
Microsoft also showed the Surface Hub 3 at the event—an addition to the Microsoft Teams Room family and an all-in-one Teams Room board for collaboration and hybrid meetings. The Surface Hub 3 has a 60% CPU performance increase and 160% GPU graphics performance increase from the previous generation, so Microsoft has clearly prepared this device for future software upgrades. As I have said for a while now, we have just scratched the surface on delivering the optimal hybrid work environment, and Surface Hub is playing an increasingly important role in conference and huddle rooms.
My analyst take
GAI advancements have happened at a breakneck speed not seen in previous consumer-facing technologies. In 10 months, we’ve seen Microsoft go from announcing ChatGPT in Bing to making Microsoft Copilot accessible across multiple apps and devices. Enterprises are looking to AI to leverage the massive amounts of data generated daily by their organizations in increasingly productive ways. If it’s truly capable of what Microsoft showed in demos, Copilot can help with that. To date, no GAI copilot has lived up to the fancy demo hype of launch videos and sizzle reels.
Some of the essential functional updates in Microsoft’s most recent announcements are truly meaningful. The accessibility improvements on devices and in software upgrades are significant for the many users who will get more out of Microsoft products because of them. Small advancements in personalizing GAI with features like “Sound Like Me” also show the potential for AI assistants to understand a user’s unique attributes.
The “AI race” that Nadella declared in February is no longer a race. It is about more than speed; there is no finish line and no definitive winner. However, to stick with a relatable analogy, if there’s an AI contest—at least in the area of “modern work”—Microsoft has earned a spot at the top of the leaderboard with last week’s announcements.
Note: Moor Insights & Strategy CEO and chief analyst Patrick Moorhead contributed to this analysis.
