Satya Nadella is in India and he is not failing to add Copilot in all his conversations. The Microsoft man, during his CEO Connection event in Mumbai, highlighted how Microsoft Copilot — and other AI solutions from the company — is offering measurable productivity gains for organisations as well as users by allowing them to complete work faster without compromising on quality.

In fact, the focus appears to be more on Copilot than on Bing, the company’s search engine. A year ago, Microsoft gave Bing a big push to increase AI usage. Even though the launch did make Google sit up, Google remains on top of the search game. But when it comes to Copilot, it’s very much in conversations.

In simple terms, Microsoft’s Copilots are the company’s AI companions and each of them can take care of a different task. “We are the Copilot company. We believe in a future where there will be a Copilot for everyone and everything you do,” Nadella had said at the company’s Ignite event last year.

Copilot can be found in Windows, in Microsoft 365, Github and every Microsoft product. Such is Microsoft’s bet on Copilot that in January it made the biggest change to Microsoft keyboards in 30 years by adding a Copilot key.

Agreed that Google still dominates over 91 per cent of traditional search market share, according to StatCounter, but Copilot is something we are hearing about more than ever before.

Microsoft has even launched a Super Bowl ad, which focuses on the idea of using AI to be creative and how Copilot empowers users to move beyond concerns over AI replacing jobs.

Microsoft’s chairman and CEO, Satya Nadella on stage at the CEO Connection event in Mumbai on February 7

In Mumbai, Nadella highlighted the power of Copilot. For instance, recent research on early users of Copilot for Microsoft 365 found that they were 29 per cent faster in a series of tasks, including searching, writing, and summarising.

‘Everyday AI companion’

In the ad titled ‘Copilot: Your everyday AI companion’ there are plenty of surprises. Microsoft is known for spreadsheets, docs, et al. There is none of the “old” stuff here. People, especially those in creative fields, with a simple tap, are using Copilot on their phones. And this makes sense because instead of sending out a message about how it’s battling Google search, there is the hope that Copilot will make lives easier for anyone with a device. Copilot is the product and the message.

There is a new redesign for Copilot and it extends to Android, iOS and the web. The product now looks cleaner. At the centre of the new look is a carousel of suggestions for what you can do with the AI, like create an image, develop a unique menu or generate ideas for wacky new products.

Yusuf Mehdi, executive vice-president, consumer chief marketing officer, has — through the company’s official blog — spoken about the year during which Microsoft entered AI-powered experiences with Bing Chat. “In that year we have learned so many new things and seen the use of our Copilot experiences explode with over five billion chats and five billion images created to date which have led to sustained growth in Edge and Bing share. Now with Copilot as our singular experience for people looking to get more out of AI creation, we are today introducing further image creation capabilities.”

With Designer in Copilot, you can go beyond just creating images to now customising your generated images with inline editing right inside Copilot (available in English in the US, the UK, Australia, India and New Zealand). If you’re a Copilot Pro subscriber, you can also now easily resize and regenerate images between square and landscape without leaving the chat. Microsoft will soon roll out its new Designer GPT inside Copilot, which “offers an immersive, dedicated canvas inside of Copilot where you can visualise your ideas”.

Meanwhile, Nadella believes that“India is uniquely positioned to make the promise of AI a reality”. He said: “We are committed to partnering broadly across the public and private sectors to help close the nation’s AI skills gap and create new opportunities throughout the country.”