Copilot automated assistants from Microsoft and GitHub are getting lots of fresh attention as both companies are updating their Copilot tools with new features aimed at giving developers more ways to grow their value for users.
In separate announcements on opening day at the Microsoft Build conference in Seattle on May 21, Microsoft unveiled new Team Copilot features that expand its existing Copilot personal assistant into a broader offering that can now serve entire teams, departments, and organizations. Developers will gain new capabilities to build custom Copilots that have agent capabilities to allow customers to bring business process automation into their work, while new Copilot extensions and connectors will be available that will allow developers to tailor and extend Copilot to meet the individual requirements of the businesses that use them.
Meanwhile, GitHub’s Copilot is getting its first GitHub Copilot Extensions that will give developers the ability to build and deploy to the cloud without leaving the IDE or GitHub.com, along with the added benefits of using their natural language and their preferred tools and services. GitHub said that the new Copilot Extensions capabilities will allow developers to innovate faster while boosting their skills.
Microsoft Team Copilot Unveiled
With its latest Team Copilot features, Microsoft said it is incorporating more process automation to drive developer capabilities while saving them time in building the collaboration and project management tools needed by users. The strength behind Copilot continues to be its use by developers to take on administrative tasks that can free up teams and users to be more productive in more worthwhile, business-focused tasks.
With the new features, Copilot will be able to serve as a meeting facilitator in Teams meetings by managing the agenda and taking notes; as a group moderator in Teams chats to keep the meeting documented and moving; and as a project manager in everything from task assignments to deadline tracking, getting input and more.
The new Team Copilot capabilities will be available in preview later this year for customers that hold licenses for Copilot for Microsoft 365.
New Developer Tools in Microsoft Copilot
To customize and advance Microsoft Copilot for users, developers are getting added tools that will now let them build new Copilot connectors using Copilot Studio. The all-new connectors will make it easier to create Copilot extensions, which can already be built using Copilot Studio and the Teams Toolkit for Visual Studio Code. By improving and expanding the creation of connectors, new Copilot extensions will allow developers to enable and extend Copilot across all lines of business within companies.
Later in 2024 developers will also gain the ability to embed Microsoft Copilot in a preview of the Copilot Trust Platform. The platform will include programmatic access to the enterprise-grade trusted services built throughout Microsoft Copilot, including broad features such as responsible AI checks, enterprise data protection enforcement, and more.
- Ray Wang, principal analyst at Constellation Research, told The New Stack that customers need these new features and development tools to help them automate their business processes.
“The new announcements make it easier than ever for customers to use pre-built Copilots, build their own Copilots, or customize what is out there,” said Wang. “This is more than just for developers. It also helps business users.”
In addition, said Wang, “Customers want a way to build on top of existing applications and systems to get more work done. In AI, the key is to augment, accelerate, automate, advise, and deliver autonomy. These announcements allow Microsoft customers to progress through the AI maturity models.”
GitHub Unveils Its Own Copilot Extensions
The first GitHub Copilot Extensions to help developers build and deploy their newest innovations will come from GitHub partners including DataStax, Docker, LambdaTest, LaunchDarkly, McKinsey & Company, Microsoft Azure and Teams, MongoDB, Octopus Deploy, Pangea, Pinecone, Product Science, ReadMe, Sentry, and Stripe. The Extensions are supported in GitHub Copilot Chat on GitHub.com, Visual Studio, as well as VS Code.
The GitHub Extensions are designed to help developers better respond to code problems by using GitHub Copilot Chat to bring in the right tools that will provide context, perform actions, and generate files and pull requests to find the underlying cause of the issues, according to GitHub.
Companies will be able to create private Copilot Extensions for their use only, or they can go to the GitHub Marketplace to get extensions that will be open to all users.
Access to the Extensions from the partners will arrive over the coming months.
GitHub said the Extensions ecosystem will continue to be expanded through the hundreds of partners in the Copilot Partner Program as the company works to further boost the GitHub Copilot integrated, intelligent AI platform.
Analysts Weigh In on the Microsoft Copilot Developer Advancements
Ryan Duguid, an analyst with Analysis.tech, said that many of the new Microsoft Copilot features appear to focus on low-code additions to generate the process improvements for users. “Think about how many developers out there do not have specialist AI skills or training, but now with something like Copilot Studio they can easily harness that power into their own solutions,” he said.
“Ultimately what Microsoft is trying to do is span the divide between experiences like ChatGPT … and similar natural language-based offerings, and more specialized copilots that have unique understandings of your business and the context that it operates within,” said Duguid. “To make all this possible, Microsoft needs to provide a way for developers and low-code makers and builders to create little copilots or agents which can be embedded into custom apps and websites, and ultimately be rolled up into a higher level enterprise copilot that can effectively direct users to the right agent to help them out.”
Microsoft has brought in its deep experience in security, he said, which is something that Microsoft is uniquely positioned to deliver on throughout enterprise computing.
“All of these investments make it really easy for developers and makers alike to tap into the power of AI and Copilot to deliver powerful capabilities to deliver agents in their own apps regardless of whether they build those with code or low-code tools,” said Duguid. “What’s more, they are not limited to being deployed into Microsoft-specific environments so any developer or maker on any platform could harness these capabilities.”
What is even more interesting, he added, are the expanded process automation capabilities and faster time to value that come with the latest Microsoft Copilot improvements.
“Microsoft is looking beyond the current paradigms for building cloud and desktop processes and automations,” he said.
Overall, these new features will help developers boost their applications by giving developers far easier ways to consume the power of AI and LLMs into their applications, while delivering new user experiences in the process, said Duguid. “They will be able to build these experiences on a safe, secure, trusted, scalable platform in a fraction of the time and cost and open new use cases in the process. What is more, these tools will bring power to those without specialist AI skills, both developers and low-code makers without the need for extensive training.”
Another analyst, Dan Olds, chief research officer at Intersect360, agreed.
“These new features open the door for developers to build applications that integrate with Microsoft Copilot and thus give them access to a large number of new potential customers,” said Olds. “It is hard to say how easy or difficult it will be for developers to modify their code, add features, and ensure their app is fully functional. A lot of this will depend on the complexity and scope of the actual application, how well it can take advantage of generative AI, and how fully baked the new Copilot extensions are when released.”
Olds said he expects that the new tools will save time for developers, “but it might add a bit more work for their support organizations as their products become available to a large new audience who will have varying degrees of expertise with Copilot or generative AI in general.”
The post MS, GitHub Boost Copilots with Advanced Dev Features and Tools appeared first on The New Stack.
Microsoft offers Team Copilot and Extensions to provide developers with new capabilities to build custom Copilots that have agent capabilities and more.