Microsoft expanded the capabilities of its Copilot AI technology beyond serving as a personal assistant to playing a larger role inside organisations by performing functions including managing large projects and assigning tasks.

Team Copilot is one of a slew of AI-related products and services the tech giant announced at its Microsoft Build developers conference yesterday (21 May).

It was designed to free up personnel from time-consuming duties including managing meeting agendas or taking notes which group members can amend as needed.

Team Copilot can also create and assign tasks, track the deadlines and notify team members if they need act.

Microsoft noted employees are empowered to override Team Copilot’s suggestions or assignments and can give the AI their own tasks.

Corporate users require a Microsoft 365 Copilot licence to access the AI features.

It will be available in preview mode later this year across Microsoft Teams, Loop and Planner, among other programmes.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella (pictured) also announced a new member to the company’s Phi-3 small language model.

He stated the multimodal Phi-3-vision can generate insights and answer questions about real world images. It also supports chart, graph and table reasoning across 4.2 billion parameters.

Microsoft made Phi-3 small, with 7 billion parameters, Phi-3 medium (14 billion parameters) and Phi-3 mini (3.8 billion parameters) available to developers.

“With Phi you can build apps that span the web, Android, iOS, Windows and the edge,” Nadella said. “They can take advantage of local hardware when available and fall back on the cloud when not”.