Microsoft Brings Copilot to Viva Engage, Google Releases Bard, More News
Microsoft's OpenAI integrations are coming fast and furious at this point. First came the general availability of Azure OpenAI service. Soon after ChatGPT's integration into Microsoft 365 arrived. Just last week, the launch of Copilot pulled GPT-4 into (formerly known as) Office applications.
This week we got further details on how Copilot will integrate with the Viva platform, notably, Viva Engage. Engage was launched last year as part of the Viva employee experience platform. At the time, Microsoft described Engage as a social-community app, with its roots in the Communities app for Teams. At the time, many people noted that it all sounded a bit like Yammer. Clearly, Microsoft thought so too because in mid-February it fused Yammer and Engage and officially retired the Yammer name.
Engage is now evolving again. The addition of Copilot to Engage in the coming months will provide prompts and suggestions to managers and organization leaders to help them connect with their employees more effectively. It will also offer insights into what is happening across the workplace.
In a blog about the addition, Jason Mayans explained that Copilot gathers context from existing organizational content to suggest potential topics for posts. A good example of how this would work is with campaigns and topics. According to the blog, when users select a subject, Copilot analyses sentiment across the organization on that topic and provides a prompt to start off the conversation after which users can start to develop a post. The post will then include all the details about the subject as it is being discussed across the organization as well as suggestions about how to contribute to the ongoing conversation.
Keep in mind here that Viva runs on top of Teams, and pulls together Viva Learn, Topics, Connections and Goals. Microsoft has also said that it will add Glint HR tools into the Viva suite later in the year.
With Copilot now part of the mix Viva will be able to reach wider and deeper in the enterprise and – at least in theory – improve employee engagement considerably.
Microsoft Loop in Public Preview
We're not quite done with Microsoft this week. The company also pushed its Loop app into public preview following the app's unveiling in November 2021.
Loop is designed for users to collaborate on Word and Excel content within established apps in the Microsoft 365 suite like Teams, Outlook and OneNote without needing to switch between apps.
Last May, Microsoft announced it would let third-party developers create snippets of live text, spreadsheet and forms in Teams and Outlook to make it possible for workers to carry out more tasks without leaving the app. These new “blocks” were named Components.
According to a blog about the public preview, Loop lets workers and teams pull projects into a single workspace and can also search for the content necessary to make it all work. The release will see the Loop app in public preview on the web, Android and iOS.
While there might have been vague notions about adding AI into the mix when Loop first emerged, this week's announcement clarified its role, with Loop also being pulled under the new Copilot umbrella. "Copilot in Loop gives you AI-powered suggestions to help transform the way you create and collaborate. It guides you with prompts like create, brainstorm, blueprint and describe," wrote Loop general manager Wangui McKelvey.
She added that like the rest of Microsoft Loop, Copilot in Loop was built for collaboration and teamwork. With it, team members can go back to earlier prompts, add language to refine the output, and edit the generated responses to get better, more personalized results. The person can then share the results as a Loop Component in whatever app they are working in, including Teams, Outlook, Whiteboard or Word for the web. Copilot in Loop is currently in private preview.
The addition of Copilot to Loop and Engage is part of a wider strategy outlined by Microsoft Satya Nadella and Jared Spataro in the middle of March. The vision is built on Copilot, which combines large language models (LLMs) with data in the Microsoft Graph calendar, emails, chats, documents, meetings and other kind of workplace content.
We can all expect to see more Copilot related announcements in the months to come.
Google Bard Release Aims to Optimize Collaboration Possibilities
Microsoft isn't the only company pushing out generative AI announcements at a rapid clip. Following an embarrassing AI 'hallucination' last month, Google is now releasing the Bard chatbot to a select group of reviewers.
According to Google, the bot is a standalone AI product that will run as a separate entity to the Google Search engine. For now, Bard will be limited to answering questions in English rather than in other languages including computer code.
Keep in mind that Bard is only the chatbot, and that Google has already announced the integration of generative AI into Google Workspace.
At the time of its release in February, Google CEO Sundar Pichai explained Bard was powered by the Mountain View, Calif.-based company’s Language Model for Dialogue Applications (or LaMDA for short), which in turn was released two years ago. The company also trained it on text data taken from across the web.
The release is also limited to what Google describes as a "lightweight model version of LaMDA," which is a much smaller model and does not require as much computing power as the full version.
According to Pichai's blog, Google was due to onboard individual developers, creators and enterprises so they can try our Generative Language API, initially powered by LaMDA with a range of models to follow. More to the point, he also announced that it would create tools and APIs to make it easier for other organizations to build applications with AI. "Over time, we intend to create a suite of tools and APIs that will make it easy for others to build more innovative applications with AI,” he wrote.
The company rolled it out to the public earlier this week. Anyone with a Google account can join the waitlist to get access.
In a blog about the release during the week — a static document from Google about Bard — James Manyika, SVP, Technology and Society, explained how Google sees the role of Bard now: "We believe users will be able to maximize their time by collaborating with Bard. For example, say a user is planning a party, Bard can help them come up with their to-do list and draft an outline of the invitation — helping free up the user's time and brainspace to dedicate to higher-level tasks.”
In terms of using it, he added: "Once a user provides a prompt, Bard uses the context in the prompt and the interaction with the user to draft several versions of a response. Bard then classifies and checks its responses against predetermined safety parameters."
Learning Opportunities
It added that the company is current carrying out “adversarial testing” with internal “red team” members — product experts and social scientists who intentionally stress test a model to probe it for errors and potential harm.
Bard appears to be as powerful and as efficient as Copilot, even if some of the people involved in testing Bard (including Google employees) say it’s a little bit "duller” according to reports in Vox.
However, the real issue is that while Microsoft, at least in this respect, is fully focused on enhancing its productivity tools, Google is focused on its productivity tools but also has to ensure that Bard works with its search engine from which Google makes the lion’s share of its income.
Lawyers to Get Down With Disco Chatbot
The developments in AI are not confined to the computer science laboratory, but are already being applied in different workplace settings. There are numerous examples of this, not least of which is the legal profession.
Take the example of Austin,Texas-based Disco. It has just announced the release of Cecilia, an AI chatbot that is designed to allow lawyers find legal documents faster and more easily.
According to a statement from the company, Cecilia was designed to enable legal professionals find documents and other content quicker as well as improve the kind of content that they are able to find.
According to the company, which demoed Cecilia at Legalweek New York 2023, Cecilia enables legal professionals carry out question and answer sessions about the content and evidence that they stored in legal databases.
If this sounds a bit like overkill, for large legal firms dealing with millions of documents, the ability to find those documents using specific citations, for example, or querying the database of content that is contained in private repository, is a huge advantage.
The access to internal and often private documents is where the chatbot differs from many others. Cecilia can cite evidence from the user’s private documents stored in Disco ediscovery. The company notes that in some instances this means searching millions, or even tens of millions of documents.
Disco was founded in 2012 and has raised $233 million in seven funding rounds, according to Crunchbase.
Cast AI Raises $20M for Cloud Optimization
Finally this week, Miami-based Cast AI has announced a successful $20 million funding round led by Creandum, an early-stage venture capital investment firm with existing investments in companies like Spotify and neo4j.
The Cast AI platform uses AI combined with automation to analyze computer resources in the organization and distribute them according to needs.
The firm's recent State of Kubernetes report indicates that many companies have overspent by up to 60% by overprovisioning containerized applications. The Cast AI platform manages this by analyzing the resources available so organizations can reallocate them quickly. One other point from the research worth noting is it found that up to 37% of cloud capacity goes unused.
The funding comes at a time when cloud computing costs are a major concern for organizations. For example, a 2022 report found that nearly half of companies have difficulty controlling cloud costs. This comes at the same time that over 80% of companies have been instructed to cut back on cloud spending.
Public cloud spend was over budget by an average of 13% of surveyed companies in Flexera's 2022 report, with cloud spend predicted to increase by 29%. It also found wasted cloud spend was on the rise, with 32% of cloud spend identified as wasted, up from 30% in 2021.
The result is that Cast AI claims quarter-by-quarter revenue growth of over 220%, based on the company's ability to provide a solution to this problem. It will use the money to expand its market reach.
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About the Author
David is a European-based journalist of 35 years who has spent the last 15 following the development of workplace technologies, from the early days of document management, enterprise content management and content services. Now, with the development of new remote and hybrid work models, he covers the evolution of technologies that enable collaboration, communications and work and has recently spent a great deal of time exploring the far reaches of AI, generative AI and General AI.
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