Microsoft announced on Thursday its latest plans to put artificial intelligence in the hands of more users, by supporting its office programs used in the package "Microsoft Office" (Microsoft Office) widely known as artificial intelligence.

This came in response to rival Google launching a range of artificial intelligence products this week, according to a report published by Reuters.

The technology company reviewed the new Copilot program for Microsoft 365, a product suite that includes Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations and Outlook.

Microsoft said artificial intelligence, which was first opened to about 20 companies for testing, would speed up content creation and save employees time.

The Washington-based U.S. company, which has outperformed its peers through investments in ChatGPT creator OpenAI, also offered a new "business conversation" experience that can pull data and perform tasks across apps based on a written command to the user.

In an online presentation, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said, "We believe this next generation of AI will pave the way for a new wave of productivity-boosting programs."

Microsoft's share price rose about 4% on the back of the news.

Microsoft introduced the new CopyPilot AI software package Microsoft 365 (Microsoft website)

This week's developments, including new funding for artificial intelligence startup Adept, reflect fierce competition between companies large and small to deploy software that could reshape the way people work.

Microsoft and Alphabet, owner of Google, are leading in this competition, and the latter last Tuesday promoted artificial intelligence features for Gmail and the "magic wand" program to craft paragraphs in its word processor.

The capabilities offered by Microsoft and Google are arguably similar, according to the Reuters report.

The investment craze in building new products began with the launch last year of ChatGPT, a chatbot that showed the audience the potential of so-called large language models (artificial intelligence tools that can read, summarize, and translate text).

The Reuters report says the technology is learning from previous data how to create content anew, and has evolved at an astonishing speed.

OpenAI just this week began releasing a more powerful version known as the GPT-4.

Microsoft said this partially supports Microsoft CoupLot's features, along with the older GPT-3.5 model.

Microsoft on Thursday made the biggest updates to Excel, with the company saying that artificial intelligence could open doors to its spreadsheet program, an important program for analysts and trainers, where anyone can get complex calculations if they are able to describe them in plain text.

Similar to the live notes Google showed reporters this week, Microsoft said its CopyPilot software can summarize virtual meetings as they happen in collaborative Teams.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella believes next-generation artificial intelligence will pave the way for a new wave of productivity-boosting software (Reuters)

In an interview with Reuters, Microsoft Vice President John Friedman demonstrated this capability, while Kobaylot AI created points summarizing the questions posed by Reuters.

Friedman said Microsoft would make the deployment of AI-powered software economically feasible, adding that fine-tuning the technology and making sure its answers are realistic is why Microsoft is testing the AI CoupLott with some customers before rolling it out more widely.

Friedman pointed to Microsoft's business chat experience as being more sophisticated because it can handle tasks across applications.

For example, a user could ask "Tell my team how we updated the product strategy," and the AI will take cues from emails, meetings, and morning chat conversations and summarize the answer, Microsoft said.

Friedman said the long-term vision is more personalized AI, adding, "We often make people adapt to the machines and systems we build. But it's this thing — AI technology — that's going to start adapting to you."