Microsoft’s new ‘Team Copilot’ is awfully similar to Google’s ‘AI Teammate’

Microsoft held its annual Microsoft Build event on Tuesday, just one week after Google held its equivalent event, Google I/O.

Microsoft and Google have similar ambitions based on the AI focus of each company's respective event. Both companies are clearly of the same mind when it comes to what they believe AI should be – to the point where Microsoft announced a feature that's incredibly reminiscent of a feature Google just announced last week.

According to Microsoft, Microsoft 365 will eventually get a new Copilot feature, Team Copilot. This will bring all of the AI capabilities that Copilot brings but into a multi user shared environment.

Microsoft's 'Team Copilot' sounds familiar

Microsoft described Team Copilot as an "expansion of Copilot for Microsoft 365." It's an AI personal assistant for entire teams, departments, or a company as a whole.

Team Copilot dropping in on a Microsoft Teams call Credit: Microsoft

Microsoft provided some examples of use cases for Team Copilot. For example, Team Copilot could manage meetings by tracking time and taking notes. In Teams chats, Team Copilot can summarize what's being said and use that information to answer questions from the group.

Team Copilot is basically a way for AI to consume knowledge from multiple people and then use that information to interact with these users. In addition, being that Team Copilot sessions are available to multiple individuals, the AI can engage with numerous users at once in the same chat.

If that sounds familiar to you, it's because Google announced pretty much the same thing at Google I/O with AI Teammate.

AI Teammate presentation at Google I/O Credit: Google

It's unclear if Google or Microsoft was actually first to work on the idea, but Google certainly benefits from being the first to announced the feature.

Not ready for market yet

But one major aspect that both Team Copilot and AI Teammate share is that neither are actual products for public use yet. Both Microsoft and Google simply shared information about the feature and presented visuals showcasing how these features are expected to work.

Microsoft says that "these initial experiences" are "coming in preview later this year." That wording makes it sound like the Team Copilot vision Microsoft shared at Build is even further away than that.

Who will be the first to actually ship these features: Google or Microsoft? And when each company's respective product does get released, will they live up to the hype? Stay tuned to find out.