Copilot adds new value to Word and Excel

Microsoft has integrated AI with its office applications and business systems.¹ More than 450 million people use them at work as you read.²

Office now opens inside Copilot: text documents, spreadsheets and presentations can be edited there and stay in sync with the desktop applications.¹ Outlook and Teams carry the same assistant.¹

The AI screen is new. The files and apps behind it are years old.

Underneath, Copilot reaches the meetings, documents, emails and business records a company holds, including data from Dynamics 365 and Power Platform.¹ Its agents act under the company’s permissions, audit and governance.¹ WordPress did this for websites in spring 2026: it built AI into the core of the platform,³ and all WordPress sites, about 40% of the internet,⁴ got it in one update.

Google brings Gemini to its users with a different approach

AI in Google services comes inside the Workspace plans and works as an assistant in a side panel of Gmail, Docs, Slides, Drive and Chat.⁵ Customers pay for it through the plans they hold, as they do for Copilot.

The interface is where the two differ:

Copilot brings people to a new starting point, while Gemini appears on the screens they know.

Anthropic and OpenAI build their own screens

Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s ChatGPT reach people through apps of their own, for computers and phones.^{6 7}

The two companies began with AI itself, so they designed a separate interface for the model.

Old software gives AI a head start

The approaches differ at the root. Microsoft, Google and WordPress add AI to software already in use. Anthropic and OpenAI create AI systems from the ground up, and each one needs a whole product built around the model: the interface, the features, the ways into the files people work on. Microsoft and Google already have them in their applications, and WordPress in the sites running on it.

Over the long run, the user base matters: the files, messages and processes people keep in Microsoft 365, Google Workspace and WordPress are current and in real use. That puts the platforms holding them ahead, because AI is as useful as the material it works on. Their own AI reaches all of it from day one, inside the apps people already use. Other AI tools have to be given access first.

AI goes where the content is

The practice of Anthropic and OpenAI leads to that same material. Linked to a Microsoft 365 account, Claude reads mail, chats and documents in Outlook, Teams, SharePoint or OneDrive,⁸ and ChatGPT searches SharePoint.⁹

Built in or linked, AI ends up in one place: the software that holds a company’s knowledge and runs its operations.

That is where AI in business is heading. For an organisation applying AI, the first decision is which of its systems, records and processes AI should work on.