But now that it's been officially unveiled, it's worth diving into what they offer and what their potential impact could be. There were some who wondered why Microsoft didn't bring these capabilities to Office first.

You could argue this latest Microsoft news were widely telegraphed by the company with the release of Bing's AI chatbot a few weeks back. The company is using GPT-4 to power Microsoft 365 Copilot as well.

In between, Microsoft also confirmed that it had been using an early revision of GPT-4 in Bing Search. Now, less than 48 hours later, Microsoft is debuting Microsoft 365 Copilot, offering generative AI capabilities for Office, as well as related updates for its Power Platform for low code/no code development. No sooner had Google introduced an impressive raft of AI capabilities for its cloud platform and Workspace productivity suite - or more likely, that was Google trying to steal some of its competitor's thunder - then OpenAI unveiled the latest version of the GPT-4 large language model. In my nearly 25 years as an analyst, I have to admit that I've never seen advances move faster and competition get more intense than we've seen in the world of generative AI over the last few weeks.

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