Microsoft introduced an updated Copilot app as it seeks to challenge the top AI companies. Its stock is climbing on Friday, gaining almost 3% at 10:31 a.m. ET.
The tool can code and handle productivity tasks, with the company seeking to get more customers to pay for advanced tools. CNBC noted that fewer than 7% of the 450 million existing commercial Office 365 seats have licenses for AI tools.
"This product is at its best when it's just optimizing for user value and for the quality of the output and what it's able to deliver." Cost efficiency is less important, Jacob Andreou, the company's executive vice president for Copilot, told the outlet.
The app allows users to create custom agents and communicate in Teams and Outlook. However, the agent field is getting increasingly crowded, with Meta's Muse tool taking a leading place. In fact, JPMorgan is betting that it could become the most widely used consumer AI application since ChatGPT.
JPMorgan analyst Doug Anmuth raised the bank's price target on Meta to $920 from $820 on Thursday while maintaining an overweight rating on the stock. The new target represents roughly 24% upside from Wednesday's closing price.
"Meta continues to move towards superintelligence with Muse off to a strong start, quickly iterating, improving, and expanding, with the potential to bring an extremely capable personal agent to billions of users," Anmuth wrote in a note.
"While it is still early, we believe that Muse has the potential to become the most widely used consumer AI application since ChatGPT," he added. That would represent a significant shift in the AI race.
While OpenAI's ChatGPT helped introduce generative AI to a mass audience, Meta is positioning Muse as something beyond a chatbot. The agent is designed not only to answer questions but to take actions on a user's behalf, including sending emails, booking travel, filling out forms and making purchases.
Muse, launched in the U.S. earlier this month, runs on Meta's multimodal Muse Spark model and can operate across a user's apps and online services. Meta says the agent can continue working after the user closes the app and seek approval when necessary before completing sensitive actions such as purchases or sending messages.
