Copilot Fundamentals

(Last update: May 2, 2024)

Microsoft Copilot is a brand that represents a set of artificial intelligence (AI) services, tools, and features available in several product groups. There are many different Microsoft Copilots that work in different applications, and they are not all the same. Each Copilot is trained (through grounding data) to perform specific processes for a domain, which is an area of functionality or a set of applications. Microsoft product groups are implementing Copilots somewhat differently, and there is no overall Copilot that performs functions across all applications.

User Interface and Clients

Microsoft Copilots use one of two main UIs that differ in how users interact with them and the functions they perform:

Conversational Copilots. Most Copilots utilize a chat UI to conduct natural language conversations with users and generate content in response to user prompts. The chat UIs are generally embedded in the applications (typically on the right side) or in a separate window. For example, users can prompt conversational Copilots to compose e-mails and documents on specific topics, summarize Teams conversations and Web pages, and write code. Like other generative AI systems, conversational Copilots use large language models (LLMs) and are trained with data for a specific domain. For example, GitHub Copilot is trained using publicly available open source code, while Microsoft 365 Copilot is trained on the Office client, Exchange, and SharePoint applications and uses customer data through Microsoft Graph.