Generative AI models are ushering in the following frontier in interactions between humans and computers. Identical to graphical user interfaces brought computing within sight of tons of of hundreds of thousands of individuals three many years ago, next-generation AI will take it even further, making technology more accessible through essentially the most universal interface—natural language.

Microsoft’s approach to generative AI is targeted on keeping humans at the middle and augmenting human agency. It’s not an autopilot approach, but fairly a design ethos that we call to tackle the growing volume of digital debt that’s taking attention away from innovation and sapping our productivity. Based on Microsoft’s latest Work Trend Index research, the inflow of knowledge, emails, meetings, and notifications has outpaced our ability to process all of it. Employees are spending two full days of the work week managing email and attending meetings—just to maintain up. While 49 percent of individuals said they’re anxious that AI will replace their jobs, much more—70 percent—would delegate as much work as possible to AI to minimize their workloads.

Today, I’m excited to announce extensibility for Microsoft 365 Copilot with plugins. With this announcement, we’re empowering every developer to integrate their apps and services into Microsoft 365 Copilot. Together, we will reach tons of of hundreds of thousands of individuals where they work day by day to create an entire latest way of labor.

Microsoft 365 Copilot: Your copilot for work

Earlier in March, we announced Microsoft 365 Copilot which brings the facility of next-generation AI to Microsoft 365 products like Microsoft Teams, Outlook, and more. Microsoft 365 products are among the many leading productivity, communications, and collaboration solutions available in the market today.

Microsoft 365 Copilot combines the facility of foundation models together with your data in Microsoft Graph and Microsoft 365 apps to show your words into essentially the most powerful productivity tool on the planet. You experience Microsoft 365 Copilot in two ways: in-app assistance and cross-app intelligence to unleash creativity, unlock productivity, and uplevel skills.

The success of our products, like Teams, with greater than 300 million energetic users, wouldn’t be possible without our vibrant community of developers and partners. You’ve been a key a part of this journey, constructing the ecosystem with us, with apps that run on and extend our products. As I have a look at this next-generation AI opportunity, I’m most enthusiastic about what we will do together.

Plugins for Microsoft 365 Copilot

At Microsoft Construct 2023 today, we’re announcing a joint commitment from Microsoft and OpenAI to support and grow the AI plugins ecosystem. We’re embracing an open standard for plugins that integrates across OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s copilot offerings, including Bing Chat, Dynamics 365 Copilot, Windows Copilot, and Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Today, we’re announcing the extensibility model for Microsoft 365 Copilot with plugins. Developers can now integrate their apps and services into Microsoft 365 Copilot with plugins to succeed in tons of of hundreds of thousands of individuals where they work day by day. Plugins are tools that augment the capabilities of AI systems, enabling them to interact with APIs from other software and services to retrieve real-time information, incorporate company and other business data, and perform latest varieties of computations.

There are three varieties of plugins for Microsoft 365 Copilot: ChatGPT plugins, Teams message extensions, and Microsoft Power Platform connectors—enabling developers to make use of existing software and tooling investments and skills.

Customers within the Microsoft 365 Copilot Early Access Program could have access to greater than 50 plugins from partners including Atlassian, Adobe, ServiceNow, Thomson Reuters, Moveworks, and Mural. Hundreds of additional line-of-business and third-party plugins will probably be enabled in the approaching months as we integrate existing Teams message extensions and Microsoft Power Platform connectors with Microsoft 365 Copilot. This extensive ecosystem of plugins for Microsoft 365 Copilot surfaced within the tools used day by day for work will bring unprecedented value to our mutual customers as we transform how work gets done together.

With Teams Toolkit for Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, and CLI, developers can create Teams message extensions today that may function as plugins for Microsoft 365 Copilot. We’re introducing latest capabilities in Teams Toolkit to make it easy to create, test, and debug plugins. Developers can bring any API described by the OpenAPI specification to Microsoft 365 Copilot quickly with the plugin creation experience in Teams Toolkit, available in private preview today.

Developers can control and customize the user experience when their plugin is invoked through Adaptive Cards. Based on the metadata within the OpenAPI specification, Teams Toolkit scaffolds a plugin containing a manifest and declarative Adaptive Cards that outline the Copilot user experience. Developers can further customize the manifest and cards to suit their scenario, comparable to configuring authentication settings, before testing their plugin in Copilot.

See the brand new tooling in motion below, and enroll for the developer early access program to try it out.

Supercharge your data with Semantic Index for Copilot

Microsoft Graph is the gateway to customers’ productivity and collaboration data, in addition to their compliance, security, and privacy policies. Copilot grounds the user prompts and responses with the Microsoft Graph data and inherits security and permissions at runtime. This allows an approach to security and governance that our customers control. Moreover, the info stays in the shoppers’ tenant and is just not used for training Microsoft’s foundation Models.

The recently announced Semantic Index for Copilot is a complicated map of user and company data and powers how Microsoft Graph data is surfaced to Copilot. It computes vector embeddings from Microsoft Graph data to capture semantics and similarities around content and users and enables fast semantic search by Copilot across billions of things in a vector index. Developers can bring their data to Microsoft Graph with Graph connectors to reap the benefits of the Semantic Index for Copilot to deliver more personalized and actionable responses.

Along with productivity and collaboration data in Microsoft Graph, Microsoft 365 Copilot can now also access structured data from Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform stored in Microsoft Dataverse. This implies copilot responses will probably be grounded in your small business data along with user data in Microsoft Graph. Customers within the Microsoft 365 Copilot Early Access Program will give you the option to check out this capability as we roll out Microsoft 365 Copilot in this system. Developers can import data into Dataverse through Microsoft Power Platform connectors. Watch a demo below of what’s possible with access to business data in Dataverse. Read this blog to learn more.

Microsoft 365 Copilot extensibility in motion

Developers will play an important role in defining latest patterns of labor as users experience Microsoft 365 Copilot with their integrated apps and services. The demo below shows the simulated scenario of a user at Dentsu Inc., an integrated marketing solutions and agency service company, harnessing the facility of Microsoft 365 Copilot along with a plugin for Atlassian’s Jira, a line-of-business Dentsu app plugin for sourcing media assets, and data from Atlassian’s Confluence integrated using a Microsoft Graph connector. Microsoft 365 Copilot used Teams message extensions for Jira and Dentsu’s line-of-business app—no latest code was written. You may see the total demo here:

Accelerating success for each developer

With the brand new extensibility model for Microsoft 365 Copilot with plugins, we’re enabling developers to simply take part in the AI opportunity and reach tons of of hundreds of thousands of Microsoft 365 users, using their existing expertise, code, and tools. Microsoft is committed to making sure your success across the whole app life cycle. That’s why we’re bootstrapping extensibility for Microsoft 365 Copilot by grounding it with the Teams and Microsoft 365 platform and programs. Developers extending Microsoft 365 Copilot will profit from tooling, distribution, management, commerce, and enterprise readiness of the Teams and Microsoft 365 platform.

Our goal is to maximize developer productivity, app reach, app discovery, and revenue. Developers with existing Teams message extensions won’t have to put in writing latest code to increase Microsoft 365 Copilot, and developers can easily create latest plugins with Teams Toolkit for Visual Studio. Plugins may be configured, published, and managed within the Developer Portal for Teams. Developers can reap the benefits of the App Compliance Automation Tool and Microsoft 365 App Compliance Program to hurry up IT approvals and reach more users. To extend user discovery, developers can reap the benefits of platform capabilities like link unfurling and contextual app exposure in surfaces comparable to chat, channels, and meetings in Teams. Finally, our business marketplace enables developers to monetize their plugins.

Learn more about Microsoft 365 Copilot

We’re excited for this chance we’ve got along with developers and partners to shape the longer term of labor with AI. Microsoft 365 Copilot is entering the Early Access Program and customers will soon give you the option to try the extensibility we’re announcing at Microsoft Construct. Here’s what developers and partners can do today to prepare for Copilot:

Access all of the resources and tools mentioned above.

More innovations to construct apps

We have now many exciting announcements beyond Copilot extensibility that show you how to construct apps for all the brand new ways to work. Listed below are just a few highlights.

Effective collaboration and cocreation may be difficult in hybrid work. With the Live Share SDK, now generally available, developers can construct Live Share capabilities into their apps without writing any dedicated back-end code, taking real-time collaboration in Teams meetings to the following level. When apps are built for Live Share, meeting participants can annotate, edit, zoom out and in, and interact with shared content in quite a lot of other ways within the Teams meeting stage.

It’s easy to feel disconnected out of your colleagues in distant and hybrid work. Avatars for Microsoft Teams is rolling out to general availability in phases starting this week and offers a substitute for the binary option of video or no video and features customizable avatars and reactions. Avatars give users the choice of a camera break, while encouraging engagement and fun together with your coworkers. You may transform your on a regular basis meetings to have a way of natural copresence with immersive spaces for Microsoft Teams, now in private preview. Immersive spaces for Microsoft Teams may be accessed through a laptop computer (PC) or virtual reality (VR) headset, with the flexibility to simply connect with other participants no matter whether or not they join a Teams meeting using video or as an avatar, or within the immersive space directly. Developers and creators can construct custom, immersive experiences for the workplace with Microsoft Mesh, available in private preview starting today. Mesh gives developers the tools to create shared experiences that reach beyond the bounds of the physical world and help foster a way of connection and belonging no matter where employees are positioned, using a PC or VR headset.

To read more about these and other announcements, please visit our developer blog.