Copilot as a service: Microsoft wants to be your cloud helper

SEATTLE — On Monday, the day before its Build developer conference, Satya Nadella hosted a press conference at Microsoft's newly remodeled East Campus to show off the consumer-oriented Copilot + PC concept. But the signs directing attendees to a makeshift tent were not marked with Microsoft's traditional four-color square logo; almost everything was branded with its much newer Copilot logo.

Build itself opened along more traditional lines on Tuesday, but delivered a similar message to enterprise tech: Microsoft is bent on installing Copilots into all of its services across Azure, Microsoft 365, and GitHub, which continues to enjoy the most visible success of Microsoft's AI kick. Feel free to dive into Microsoft's lengthy Book of News for the dozens of updates released Tuesday, but here are a few that stood out.

Github Copilot Extensions will allow third-party companies to create plug-ins for accessing their services directly through GitHub using natural-language queries. Launch partners included Docker, LaunchDarkly, MongoDB, Sentry, and Stripe.

Companies that have built internal development platforms will also be able to publish private extensions for their developers to access those services directly from GitHub. But Microsoft also built an extension called GitHub Copilot for Azure that will allow Azure customers to deploy applications from GitHub using the chat interface.

"What Copilot did for coding, we're now doing for infra and ops," Nadella said Tuesday, although the Copilot for Azure service is only available as a private preview at the moment.

New Copilots for the enterprise software side of the house were also introduced at Build, bringing more and more automation to the office.

Microsoft announced Team Copilot, which is a department-level version of the personal Copilot that can be used with Microsoft 365 and, of course, Microsoft Teams. Managers could use Team Copilot to track chats across their organization to figure out which issues are causing the most frustration or to snuff out a budding mutiny before it's too late, depending on where you work.

The service can also assume the role of a project manager "by creating and assigning tasks, tracking deadlines, and notifying team members when their input is needed," Microsoft said in a blog post.

Companies will be able to use new capabilities in Copilot Studio to build agents, which Microsoft likes to call custom copilots: "For example, an “order taker” copilot can handle the end-to-end order fulfillment process—from taking the order, to processing the order and making intelligent recommendations and substitutions for out-of-stock items, to shipping it to the customer," Microsoft said.

Assuming they work as advertised, Microsoft's Copilot push should make it easier to handle the complexity of the modern enterprise across both infrastructure and business processes. But it wasn't hard to notice that Copilot adopters will be hitching themselves to a decidedly Microsoft-centric approach to infrastructure and operations.

Cloud customers have long weighed the tradeoffs between building things themselves around basic services with flexibility in mind, or adopting managed services that limit flexibility but were designed with convenience in mind. It's much, much easier to move away from a given cloud provider if your applications were built around basic services, which differ slightly from cloud to cloud but not nearly as much as their managed services differ.

Will AWS or Google Cloud be able to build a Copilot for EC2 or Compute Engine, given how many of their customers use GitHub? Microsoft didn't say either way Tuesday, although GitHub clearly has the freedom to engage with other cloud providers.

But even if customers aren't worried about vendor lock-in, adopting Copilots across an organization will require giving Microsoft a lot of control over your infrastructure and business operations.

(This post originally appeared in the Runtime newsletter on May 21st, sign up here to get more enterprise tech news three times a week.)