Microsoft 365 Copilot At Work

CHAPTER 6Microsoft Copilot Business Chat

What is Microsoft 365 Copilot Business Chat? The current name Microsoft uses to refer to its generative artificial intelligence personal assistant chat product is “Microsoft Copilot Business Chat” or, alternatively, “BizChat.” It’s gone through a couple of iterations of its name, and we suspect that will continue. In this chapter, we’ll refer to it as “Business Chat.”

Business Chat is Microsoft’s product that is closest to the tool most often referred to in the personal AI assistant chat space, ChatGPT. If you’ve heard of and are familiar with the functionality of ChatGPT, Business Chat is its most direct competitor in the Microsoft space. Think of “Copilot” as the overarching suite of productivity tools across Word, Excel, Teams, etc., while Business Chat is specifically the chat-based interface through which you can access Copilot, ask it questions, and have an ongoing, context-aware conversation.

Now that we have a name and a product that is hopefully familiar nailed down, let’s talk about what it does. At a very high level, Business Chat accepts questions or requests and responds to them with an appropriate answer or response. Which, yes, feels kind of like what most search engines do. The difference, however, is twofold. Not only can Business Chat answer questions, but it can also build things, like an outline or a table of contents for a topic. While search may be able to find you an existing table of contents (TOC) or outline, ...