There's a new Microsoft Copilot feature now in preview, and it might actually be the first actually useful feature the team has added since Copilot debuted.
Microsoft Copilot is what you might call the redheaded stepchild of artificial intelligence chatbots. ChatGPT is still the top player, despite a huge and ongoing campaign to ditch OpenAI following the platform's capitulation to the U.S. Department of War. Anthropic's Claude is on the up and up, buoyed by a principled stance against autonomous AI weaponry and mass surveillance of citizens. Google Gemini has had a big boost in recent months owing to deep integration with existing Google monopolies, and even xAI often finds itself far more capable than Microsoft Copilot. Is that about to change?
As of writing, Microsoft Copilot doesn't have broad access to the web, at least in Europe. I asked it just this weekend to pull the top ten stories and URLs from Windows Central so I didn't have to navigate and find them manually, but it disappointingly told me that it wasn't able to search the web to find those URLs, asking instead for me to provide them (lol). Previous research attempts I've made offered similar denials. I asked it to find historical share prices for certain tech companies for research I was doing, only to be told Copilot once again can't search certain websites or parse certain data types. This new feature might be gearing up to change that — and much more.
Similarly to how tasks are structured in Claude and xAI's Grok, Copilot Tasks will create step-by-step prompts to itself for how to achieve your requests, including being able to browse the web, apps you've given it permission to connect with (such as OneDrive and Outlook), and even leverage Microsoft apps like Word and Excel. Additionally, like Copilot 365, you'll be able to schedule these tasks to run at specific intervals. I could ask it to generate a report on the latest stocks, for example, and put them into a spreadsheet.
Task bots are becoming a big deal. OpenAI purchased agent-focused OpenClaw almost immediately after it went viral, and other platforms are also exploring this "agentic" approach to AI with mountains of investment. However, they can also come with big risks. OpenClaw bots, for example, recently deleted a Meta VP's entire email inbox without her permission.
Microsoft says Copilot Tasks will wait for human intervention before acting on "anything sensitive." Indeed, Microsoft has generally moved more slowly in this space, particularly after the Windows Recall backlash, but perhaps it'll lead to safer products as a result ... maybe?
In any case, this is the first Microsoft Copilot feature I've seen that, if it worked as advertised, might be something I'd actually want to actively use. I already use IFTTT to automate a lot of tasks for Windows Central and my XB2 Podcast, even before LLMs existed. If Copilot Tasks is basically IFTTT on steroids, I'm eager to see if it'll actually give me the productivity boost all of these AI companies claim their products are supposed to enable. What do you think?
If you want to check out Copilot Tasks, you'll need to join the preview waiting list over here.
Poll: Does Copilot Tasks seem like something you might use?
Being able to schedule laborious tasks like collecting URLs or finding timestamps in my podcast seems like something that I might find useful in Copilot Tasks, but I'm not sure I'd trust it with access to my emails and the like ...
Is Copilot Tasks something you might be interested in using? Let us know in the comments.
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