Microsoft’s AI assistant, Copilot, is already a pretty useful tool for some people and some functions.
What Is Copilot, Again?
If you could use a quick refresher, here you go: Copilot is Microsoft’s generative AI assistant. It works a lot like other generative AI tools like ChatGPT or Gemini, but the difference is that Copilot is built into the Microsoft ecosystem. That means it understands many of your Microsoft apps, like OneDrive, Word, Outlook, and Excel, and it can actually do things inside those apps.
ChatGPT and the rest are usually confined to a web browser tab, and they can’t reach out and interact with your files and systems directly. (And hey, you might not want them to: that level of access seems kind of intrusive.)
But in a way, Microsoft already has that level of access: it’s the company you’re paying for cloud storage, hosting, office applications, and more. So giving the company’s AI assistant access to all that same stuff isn’t that big of a jump.
So, like ChatGPT and the rest, Copilot can summarize long documents, generate a first draft of text (like email replies), and help you clean up a report you wrote. But it does all of this with a clearer understanding of everything else that’s going on in your Microsoft ecosystem.
The Problem: AI Amnesia
One big limitation so far with AI tools like these is memory. They more or less don’t have it. Sometimes they forget what you’ve told them during an active conversation, and every time you leave and come back, it’s like starting from scratch. They don’t remember much of what you told them before, at least not reliably. Worse, sometimes they act like they do remember when the results show they definitely, definitely don’t.
Other products have started to try to address this. ChatGPT now remembers a limited number of conversations, and if you return to one of them, it seems to remember some of what was previously discussed. But still, this memory doesn’t extend systemwide.
Microsoft’s Solution: “Remember This”
Microsoft is working on adding memory management to Copilot. Essentially, what this looks like is that Copilot will “remember” anything you explicitly tell it to (with a “remember this” command). You might use this for things like client names, preferred report styling/formatting, and details about how your products and services work.
This last one’s important: Using genAI tools to talk about your own products or business can be frustrating because the tools don’t seem to know as much about you as they do about widely available information. They get the details wrong, and if you aren’t careful, you might just hit “publish” on something promising features that don’t exist or services you don’t offer. If Copilot’s memory management works as well as promised, you’ll be able to solve issues like these once and for all.
What About Privacy and Control?
The big reason why these tools have lacked memory has to do with privacy and control: you don’t want ChatGPT to store away company secrets and have them end up in someone else’s AI responses. (Side note: don’t feed company secrets to any of these tools!) So the AI software makers limit how much information their tools retain about you.
So what about Microsoft? Well, the company promises transparency. You’ll have access to a memory management page where you can see what Copilot is remembering. From there, you can remove information you don’t want it to keep, or edit details that have changed (like client contact info or product names).
Bonus Feature: Connectors
Copilot is also gaining the ability to connect to more apps, like Google Drive. Soon, Copilot will be able to fetch and use documents stored on both OneDrive and Google Drive, extending its capabilities even further.
Coming Soon
All of these features are currently in the pipeline, coming soon. We don’t know yet which ones are coming to all Microsoft 365 accounts, which are reserved for Copilot’s paid tier, and which will require Copilot+ hardware. It looks like it will be a mix.
But at the end of the day, everybody will benefit from at least some of these changes.
Need guidance on how to make the most of Copilot at your business? Reach out to our team anytime.