The AI battle keeps heating up, and both Google and Microsoft have launched their generative AI products that integrate deeply with their respective office suites. Microsoft’s Copilot has been a part ofOffice 365 appslike Word, PowerPoint, and Excel for a while now. It now looks like the company is bringing similar AI capabilities to its cloud storage service,OneDrive.
Microsoft 365 Copilot combines the best of modern generative AI andClippy the Office Assistantfrom the good old days. It wasintroduceda few months back and has been available as an add-on for a bunch of Microsoft productivity apps, including Team and Outlook, but not for OneDrive. According to a leaked teaser video, OneDrive could get similar generative AI features as soon as next month.
The video included above shows a sample AI search in OneDrive: “Help me get organized.” While the video doesn’t reveal the AI’s response or how exactly Copilot will organize the files on OneDrive, it does indicate the kind of AI use cases Microsoft wants to promote for OneDrive. Besides organizational features, one can guess Copilot can also look up files more efficiently even if you have forgotten their location or name.
Towards the end of the video, you may see that the announcement will supposedly be made on October 3. Incidentally, Microsoft is holding itsPower Platform Conferenceon the same day to talk about its various enterprise and business applications. There is a good chance that Microsoft will showcase the new Copilot features for OneDrive during this event.
Currently, even if you already have a Microsoft 365 subscription for your team, you may’t directly access Copilot in Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. The company requires you to cough up another $30 per month per user to access these advanced AI tools. While they do help boost your productivity, the price is still steep.
Following in the footsteps of Microsoft, Google also priced itsDuet AIfor Workspace accountsat the same $30 a month. With Duet AI enabled, you’re able to create emails in Gmail or write drafts in Google Docs with just a few prompts. However, Google has yet to bring these smart Duet AI-powered features to Drive.
