The Battle of the Copilots: Microsoft 365 Copilot vs. Google Duet AI
Place your bets
📣 Ladies and gentlemen, tech aficionados from every corner of the globe, brace yourselves for a showdown of epic proportions. In the left corner, we have the reigning heavyweight champion of the world—Google! And in the opposite corner, we have our challenger determined to upset the balance—none other than Microsoft! 📣
For those who have been living under a rock, or just not so on top of the AI news cycle, both Google and Microsoft have now announced their respective copilots.
Microsoft was quick to announce their Microsoft 365 Copilot in March this year. In an attempt to take some wind out of their sails, Google scheduled a counter-event the same week to remind the world how much they’re already doing with AI…
A few months have passed since, but last week the big news dropped that Google is making Duet AI, their take on the copilot concept, generally available for the Google Workspace. With 365 Copilot still in early-access that means Google was not only able to catch up, but is arguably even outpacing Microsoft with regards to the roll out of their AI tools for the workplace.
It raises the question: did Microsoft waste a solid head start? Or did Google rush to launch and cut some corners in the process?
What better time than now to see how their copilots stack up, lay them side-by-side, and decide who has the better chances of taking the upper hand.
Two brands, two very different flavors
Branding and messaging are quintessential to any product or company’s success. Or, in the words of marketing legend
, marketing is no longer about the stuff that you make but about the stories you tell, now more than ever.So let’s start by taking a look at the stories that Google and Microsoft are trying to sell. First up, Microsoft:
Introducing Microsoft 365 Copilot — your copilot for work
Humans are hard-wired to dream, to create, to innovate. But today, we spend too much time consumed by the drudgery of work, on tasks that zap our time, creativity, and energy. To reconnect to the soul of our work, we don’t just need a better way of doing the same things. We need a whole new way to work.
Next, Google:
Introducing the next wave of AI innovation in Workspace
Sometimes it feels like there isn’t enough time in the day — with so much email, so many meetings, and countless action items to follow up on, work can feel daunting. What if you had an intelligent, real-time collaboration partner that dramatically reduced that burden? With Duet AI, you get to focus on what really matters while it can take care of the rest.
In terms of style, I would say Microsoft’s pitch is written in language that can only be described as lyrical, with phrases like “hard-wired to dream,” “the drudgery of work”, and “tasks that zap our time, creativity, and energy”. It’s clear that their primary goal is to inspire and to get you excited for the future of work.
Google, on the other hand, keeps it down-to-earth and frankly more relatable. They are speaking to anyone and everyone when they say “Sometimes it feels like there isn’t enough time in the day” and ask a simple rhetorical question: what if we all could save some time throughout the day, just be a little bit more efficient, wouldn’t that be great?
In Google’s view, generative AI is going to enable us to work smarter, whereas Microsoft tries to convince that it is much more than that, part of a bigger shift, a new way of thinking about work.
Whichever pitch you find most appealing I leave up to you, I am but an arbiter in this match up and as an arbiter I refrain from picking sides.
Duet AI vs. 365 Copilot
What I’m not going to do (because it’s boring) is list all the copilot features side-by-side and see who squeezed the most into their workspace.
Instead, I’ll share with you some first impressions based on all the information that’s available right now. I’ll be relying on excellent generative AI news coverage done by
and videos of demo-ed features by Microsoft and Google themselves.First impressions Duet AI:
Duet AI is serving many purposes across all of Google’s Workspace apps, including Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Slides, etc. It can help you brainstorm, summarize meetings, pulling together information from recent emails, make charts for presentation slides or even create complete presentations from scratch.
It’s definitely more than a gimmick. If anything, Duet AI has the potential to bridge the gap between apps, become the glue that binds them together. Creating a presentation from a Google Doc and visa versa introduces a new kind of media fluidity that we haven’t seen before. It lets you effortlessly transform one kind of media into another and makes drafting new documents super easy.
It almost makes it too easy. I personally struggle with organizing my files already, and I don’t know if being to able to create new documents with zero effort is going to have a positive effect on that to be honest. On the upside, never again will you have to start from a blank page.
I predict the enhanced Google Meet experience is going to be popular, too. Duet AI can give you a snapshot of what has been said so far in case you drop in late for a meeting, or you can have Duet AI attend on your behalf and provide you with a recap afterwards. It will most likely put external tools like Otter.ai out of business, sooner rather than later.
That said, having an AI attend a meeting for you removes the need to rely on others for a catch up sounds like a clear time saver, but it’s also a little creepy and big brother-y to eavesdrop on your colleagues all the time. I don’t know how you feel about this, but new etiquette for the (virtual) workplace might be required.
First impressions 365 Copilot:
Now, let’s see if Microsoft can materalize their grand vision for 365 Copilot. So far it’s been demos only, as the product is in early testing with a limited number of customers, but that shouldn’t hold us back from doing a preliminary review.
Similar to Duet AI, there are two primary ways to interact with your copilot: within apps like OneNote, OneDrive, SharePoint — to create PowerPoint slides, draft emails etc. — or directly via Microsoft Teams, where it operates as your personal virtual assistant that has access to all your proprietary data.
On top of that, Copilot will be available in your the Edge browser, which, in a weird way, feels like it will compete for attention with Bing Chat. It’s not completely clear to me how they envision that and where Bing Chat fits into the bigger picture. But what’s for sure is that Google hasn’t got anything like that planned for Duet AI, which means the Chrome browser remains copilot-free for the time being (we’ll still have Bard, of course).
Microsoft also plans to extend Copilot’s reach with plugins (embracing the same open plugin standard that OpenAI introduced for ChatGPT). Here’s where things get really interesting: it allows 365 Copilot to tap into data held in third-party apps, like Atlassian, ServiceNow, and Mural. Fifty such plugins have been already made available to early access customers to test and “thousands” more are expected, according to Microsoft.
If you ask me, the plugins are the only major thing separating Duet AI from 365 Copilot in any meaningful way.
That, and the quality of the generated output. Beyond all the chatter about integrations, neither Google nor Microsoft have zoomed in on the quality of generative AI output, which is telling, since what all this is powered by.
Surprisingly little has been said about whether or not hallucinations will be common occurrence when using Duet AI or 365 Copilot. But if Bing Chat and Google Bard serve as a forecast, chances are pretty high the output is going to be far from perfect.
What’s going to be the impact of that? If you generate a Q4 Earnings Report but you have to double-check every single number in there, would you still be faster than when you had done it all by yourself from scratch? Maybe, maybe not.
Finally, let’s talk about the price tag
Even though there’s a clear business case — save small bits of time, many times a day — it’s not a given that these tools will deliver on their promises from day 1. People will have to learn to use these tools for their own benefit to see how much value can be extracted, something that may differ greatly per individual depending on your role and set of daily tasks.
Some features will prove to be more valuable than others, but it’s hard to imagine they aren’t going to be valuable at all. The quality of outputs will improve over time, even if they turn out to be underwhelming at first. With the limited visibility that we have right now, I refrain from making any conclusive statements.
Let’s end things with a final note on pricing. Not entirely unimportant, as someone has gotta pay and that someone is most likely going to be your boss (or you, if you’re the boss).
Duet AI for Google Workspace will cost enterprises $30 a month per person on top of what they’re already paying, the same price Microsoft plans to charge for 365 Copilot. To earn that money back as an employer, you want employees to save somewhere between 1-2 hours per month using these new and shiny AI tools. Is that realistic? Well, I don’t see why it isn’t.
You skip a meeting here and there and let your copilot take notes, you auto-draft a handful of emails every week, you generate a first draft of a presentation which would’ve taken you a lot longer if you had to start from scratch… and there you have it.
I’m almost tempted to ask: what are we going to do with all that free time?
Join the conversation
Leave a comment with your thoughts. Please let me know what you think of the battle between these technology behemoths Google and Microsoft. Do you think copilots are worth their money? 💬
One thing that's kind of interesting is how many small businesses in particular (but large ones as well) are going to be sort of grandfathered into picking MSFT or GOOGL here. What I mean is that one of my small businesses already has some exposure to Google via spreadsheets and the like in Google Docs, so it's kind of a no-brainer to stick with Google's version, provided it's comparable to Copilot.
I've been eager to do deeper analytics on my companies, but have been really hesitant due to security concerns. I know this doesn't eliminate them, but it does seem to... corral? them a bit. I'm sure others are in my situation.
Will be interested to see when they roll out Copilot to us where I work. Just started activating Google Labs for some of their generative AI things at home.