I do not know the add-on on Outlook which Johns Hopkins baked in; they provide that to all alumni, for life. What I like about that add-on is that it has the capacity to “parse” emails and come up with briefings and summaries for the day. People, Microsoft Viva which sends those notes with “Your daily briefing” is pretty cool – it has never missed any important issue from my emails.

Now, the news that Microsoft is baking OpenAI in Teams, its collaboration ecosystem, will take this to the next level. In other words, people can have discussions, meetings, etc and AI will send summaries with Action Plans:

“Microsoft has announced the incorporation of OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 into its Teams Premium, expanding the office tool’s features with AI-powered capabilities. The incorporation of the GPT-3.5 AI language model means the premium tier of Microsoft Teams now has an ‘intelligent recap’ feature that automatically generates notes, tasks, and highlights of meetings.

[..] “Built on the familiar, all-in-one collaborative experience of Microsoft Teams, Teams Premium brings the latest technologies, including Large Language Models powered by OpenAI’s GPT-3.5, to make meetings more intelligent, personalized, and protected—whether it’s one-on-one, large meetings, virtual appointments, or webinars,” the company said.”

Google, as Microsoft expands the powers of OpenAI across its products, if you do not reposition, what you did to Yahoo may suddenly happen to you. This is now an asymmetric attack on your core products, from search to collab systems.

Category-king companies create a new basis of competition, by providing orthogonal competitive paths, different from what any other firm does. In the world of search, Google unleashed one many years ago, taking Yahoo down in the process. For years, no other company has come to challenge the brilliance and absolute dominance of Google search.

But there is a redesign on the way – and Microsoft is part of it. When it provided truckloads of money to the guys in the OpenAI, I noted that Microsoft would possibly have the rights to first commercialize inventions out of the organization. Yes, it is called OpenAI but when it comes to money, not everything is “open”.

Meanwhile, ChatGPT has unveiled a subscription plan as it deepens it competitive and revenue playbooks: “ChatGPT is launching a paid subscription service, in which subscribers will get access to the AI at peak times. Parent company OpenAI announced that for $20 a month, subscribers will get an upgrade from the limited, free service provided during busy periods. The plan will initially roll out across the U.S., later expanding to other countries, with the company mulling business and lower-cost subscription options. The bot is already being used by many companies, including digital publisher Buzzfeed, which recently announced it would use ChatGPT to help generate content. However, there are also concerns around its safe use in business and education.”

As Microsoft rises, Google is having stress in its core advertising business: “Slowing YouTube advertising revenue and sluggish sales growth in other ad businesses led Google’s parent company Alphabet to log its first ad sales decline of the pandemic era. Alphabet reported a 1% dip from the year before, to $59 billion. ”

 The company’s latest quarterly results were also denoted by just its second decline in ad sales since 2004 and its fourth consecutive drop in quarterly profit. Alphabet has sought to rein in costs to mitigate an ad spending slowdown driven by rising interest rates and inflation. Net income plunged by 34% to $13.6 billion, well short of Wall Street expectations.  Alphabet is now planning “significant” work to improve its spending and growth, Alphabet and Google chief financial officer Ruth Porat told investors, just weeks after laying off 12,000 employees due to economic uncertainty.

Microsoft has announced the incorporation of OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 into its Teams Premium, expanding the office tool’s features with AI-powered capabilities.

The incorporation of the GPT-3.5 AI language model means the premium tier of Microsoft Teams now has an ‘intelligent recap’ feature that automatically generates notes, tasks, and highlights of meetings.

Microsoft indicated that the move was spurred by the growing need for organizations to adapt to change, improve productivity, and reduce costs.

“Fortunately, modern tools powered by AI hold the promise to boost individual, team, and organizational-level productivity and fundamentally change how we work,” Microsoft said.

“This promise is rapidly becoming a reality. At Microsoft, we’re working to incorporate new, AI-powered capabilities across our consumer and enterprise products, including Microsoft Teams,” it added.

Microsoft Teams Premium, which was launched as a 30-day trial in December, is now available to everyone and has AI-enabled features such as branded meetings, custom meeting templates, and features like watermarking to better protect meeting contents.

“Built on the familiar, all-in-one collaborative experience of Microsoft Teams, Teams Premium brings the latest technologies, including Large Language Models powered by OpenAI’s GPT-3.5, to make meetings more intelligent, personalized, and protected—whether it’s one-on-one, large meetings, virtual appointments, or webinars,” the company said.

The biggest addition to Teams appears to be the ‘intelligent recap’, available in Teams Premium. Microsoft said customers can get these advanced meeting capabilities and more for one low cost of $10 per user per month. It added that “for a limited time, you can get Teams Premium for just $7 per user per month or 30 percent off the standard price.”

This move follows OpenAI’s decision to create and monetize a professional version of ChatGPT, a chatbot that Microsoft has invested billions of dollars in, and intends to incorporate into its web search engine Bing.

‘Intelligent recap’ offers several tools that make meetings easy. The feature uses OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 model to generate meeting notes and highlights even for those who weren’t present in a meeting.

“With intelligent recap in Teams premium, you’ll get automatically generated meeting notes, recommended tasks, and personalized highlights to help you get the information most important to you, even if you miss the meeting,” Microsoft said.

Other new features include the ability to review meeting recordings in shortest period, which is available for PowerPoint Live meeting recordings. AI-generated chapters divide the meeting into sections, making it easy for users to pick and choose the most relevant content. ‘Intelligent recap’ is designed to automatically generate meeting chapters based on the meeting transcript as well.

Another interesting feature is the ‘personalized timeline markers.’ It gives users the ability to privately catch up on the things they missed in a meeting using the ‘meeting recording.’ So you can quickly click and listen in on what you missed. Personalized timeline markers will expand to include when your name was mentioned and when a screen was shared.

“Soon, these personalized meeting highlights will expand to include speaker timeline markers that show you who spoke during the meeting, when they spoke, and allows you to jump to that moment,” Microsoft said, adding that “speaker timeline markers are intelligently organized by who you work most closely with, so you’ll never miss feedback shared from your manager in a meeting again.”

In addition, ‘intelligent recap’ helps users to focus on the meeting discussion itself and not on capturing notes. Microsoft said in the coming months, you’ll see key points and takeaways after the meeting, with AI-generated notes automatically created and powered by GPT-3.5. Follow-up is easy with AI-generated tasks and action items automatically suggested for you.

The company is also using the AI language model to solve one of the toughest collaboration challenges—working with people who natively speak different languages. With live translations, users can turn on live captions in Teams and see real-time captions in the spoken language.

“With live translations (for captions) now available in Teams Premium, you get AI-powered real-time translations from 40 spoken languages. Meeting participants can read captions in their own language, saving money and making meetings more productive and effortless,” Microsoft said, adding that only the meeting organizer needs to have Teams Premium for all meeting attendees to enjoy live translations.

Microsoft said the additional intelligent recap capabilities will be available in the second quarter of 2023. The company is keen on broadening its businesses with OpenAI. In addition to the Teams Premium’s AI incorporations, the company is reportedly moving to bring OpenAI technology to Word, PowerPoint, and Outlook.