By launching Copilot Academy for all Microsoft 365 Copilot subscribers, Redmond wants folks to use Copilot better

It’s been a while since Microsoft first launched the Copilot Academy. At that time, it was first accessible via the Viva Learning platform for folks with a Microsoft 365 Copilot subscription and a Viva license.

And now, Microsoft is ready to expand the learning platform to all Microsoft 365 Copilot users, even those without a Viva license.

Copilot Academy, as you may have guessed, can help you master Microsoft’s AI offering, Copilot. It has courses from basic introductions to advanced usage to help you be better at prompt engineering, and you can access it via the Viva Learning web app or Teams app without the need for a paid Viva license.

Admins can also disable the academy if desired, but it will soon feature updates and premium options for more customization.

AI tools are abundant around. Besides Copilot, which will soon include OpenAI o1, its latest model that excels at reasoning, we also have ChatGPT, Gemini by Google, and many more. Even more so Gemini is well integrated within Workspace apps, which poses as a direct competitor to Copilot in Office apps.

So, of course, the race to be people’s number-one go-to AI tool is heating up—so much so that Microsoft is rebranding “Copilot” into “Microsoft 365 Copilot” so that people would remember it as a tool for Office apps.

The recent Copilot-centric “Wave 2” live stream also introduced us to a lot of new AI smarts inside Office apps, besides Copilot Pages and Copilot agents. In Outlook, for example, you’ll soon be able to ask the AI to prioritize your piling emails and sort them based on that.

There are also updates for PowerPoint with a narrative builder, OneDrive, and Excel. All in an attempt to make Copilot the go-to AI for productivity.