AI in Apps You Already Use
Lesson 5.5 — AI in the Apps You Already Use
You don't have to adopt a new tool to start using AI. The software many of us use every day — Microsoft Office, Google Workspace, Notion, Grammarly, Canva — has been adding AI capabilities at a rapid pace. Some of these are genuinely transformative; others are more modest. This lesson gives you an honest assessment of what each tool's AI features actually do, so you can decide what's worth exploring.
Microsoft Copilot: AI Across the Office Suite
Microsoft has integrated its Copilot AI assistant across Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, Teams, and OneNote. The integration uses GPT-4 as its underlying model and has direct access to your documents, emails, and calendar.
Availability and cost: Copilot for Microsoft 365 requires a Microsoft 365 subscription plus a Copilot add-on. As of 2025, this costs around £25–30 per user per month on top of standard 365 pricing. There is also a free Copilot experience in Bing and the web app with more limited features.
Copilot in Word
What it does:
- Drafts documents from a prompt: "Write a project brief for a new employee onboarding programme, formal tone, 500 words"
- Rewrites selected text for different tones or lengths
- Summarises long documents
- Generates a table from a description
Honest assessment: The drafting capability is genuinely useful for getting a first draft quickly. The quality is comparable to ChatGPT or Grok in a separate tab. The key advantage is that it can reference documents already in your Microsoft 365 environment — so "draft a proposal based on the requirements in the brief I uploaded last week" is possible without manual copy-paste.
Limitation: Like all AI drafts, outputs require careful editing. Do not use Word Copilot to produce client-facing documents without thorough human review.
Copilot in Excel
What it does:
- Analyses data and answers questions: "What were the top 5 performing products by revenue in Q3?"
- Creates charts from natural language descriptions
- Writes and explains formulas: "What formula would calculate the year-on-year percentage change between column C and column D?"
- Highlights insights: "Are there any unusual patterns in this data?"
Honest assessment: The formula explanation feature alone justifies trying Copilot in Excel. Most Excel users encounter formulas they don't fully understand; being able to ask "what does this formula do?" in plain English removes a real friction point. The natural-language data queries are impressive but work best on clearly structured, clean datasets.
Limitation: Complex analyses requiring specialist domain knowledge still need a human. AI can tell you what the data says; it cannot always tell you what it means.
Copilot in Outlook
What it does:
- Drafts email replies from a brief instruction: "Draft a polite reply declining this meeting request, citing diary constraints"
- Summarises long email threads: "Summarise this thread — what has been decided and what is still open?"
- Suggests meeting times based on your calendar
- Flags emails that need a reply
Honest assessment: The thread summary feature is immediately and obviously useful. Long Outlook threads — especially in large organisations where you've been CC'd on a thread you didn't follow — can now be understood in 30 seconds. The drafting is solid for routine replies.
Gemini in Google Workspace
Google has integrated its Gemini AI across Docs, Gmail, Sheets, Slides, and Meet. The features broadly mirror Microsoft's, with some differences in implementation.
Availability: Gemini features are included in Google Workspace Business plans (from around £10/user/month); some features are available in free Google accounts.
Gemini in Google Docs
- Help me write: Generates text from a prompt inside the document
- Summarise: Creates a summary of the document
- Proofread: Goes beyond grammar checking to suggest structural improvements
- Transform text: Formalise, simplify, or bullet-point any selected passage
Honest assessment: Very comparable to Copilot in Word. If you are already in the Google ecosystem, these features are convenient — no need to switch to a separate AI tool for document work.
Gemini in Gmail
- Help me write: Drafts emails from a short description
- Summarise email: Creates a brief summary of long emails
- Smart replies: Context-aware reply suggestions (a more advanced version of the feature Gmail has had for years)
Honest assessment: Smart replies remain mostly useful for very brief acknowledgements. The full Gemini drafting is more capable. For people who spend significant time on email, this is a genuine time-saver.
Grok in X (Twitter)
If you use X (formerly Twitter), Grok is already built in — no separate account needed beyond your X login.
Availability: Free access at grok.com; deeper integration with X Premium ($8–16/month).
What Grok does inside X
- Ask questions about trending topics — Grok can summarise what's happening on X right now, pull related posts, and give you context on breaking stories
- Analyse posts and threads — paste a thread or topic and ask Grok to summarise or explain it
- Generate images — Grok's Aurora image model is built in; type a description and get an image directly in the chat
- Real-time web answers — ask anything and Grok searches the live web, not just its training data
Honest assessment: Grok's biggest advantage over the other tools in this lesson is its live X/Twitter access. If you want to know what people are saying about a brand, a news story, or a product launch right now, Grok is uniquely positioned to answer that. For general writing and analysis tasks, ChatGPT or Claude will often produce better results — but for social listening and real-time awareness, Grok is the tool to reach for.
Best for: X/Twitter users, journalists, marketers, anyone tracking public sentiment or breaking news.
Notion AI
Notion is a popular all-in-one notes and project management tool, and its AI integration is one of the more elegant implementations available.
Key features:
- Generate: Creates content inside any Notion page from a prompt
- Summarise: Summarises any page or block
- Ask AI: A sidebar where you can ask questions about any document or database in your workspace
- Autofill in databases: Automatically fills a property based on other content (e.g. generate a summary of each row in a table)
- Action items: Extracts action items from meeting notes automatically
Cost: Notion AI is an add-on at around $10/user/month on top of the standard plan.
Honest assessment: The Ask AI feature — which lets you query across your entire Notion workspace — is the standout capability. For heavy Notion users who store meeting notes, project documentation, and research in one place, being able to ask "what did we decide about the website redesign?" and get an answer is genuinely powerful. The autofill feature for databases is also impressively useful for content management.
Grammarly
Grammarly has expanded well beyond grammar and spelling correction into AI writing assistance.
Current capabilities:
- Spelling, grammar, and punctuation correction (original feature, still excellent)
- Tone detection and adjustment
- Clarity and conciseness suggestions
- Full sentence and paragraph rewrites
- Generative drafting from prompts (GrammarlyGO)
- Plagiarism checking (Business plans)
Where it works: Grammarly integrates across most text inputs on your computer — browsers, Word, Google Docs, email clients, Slack, and more. It works in the background, continuously.
Honest assessment: For everyday writing quality improvement, Grammarly remains one of the best integrated tools available. Its AI rewrites are useful for catching awkward phrasing that you have become blind to in your own writing. The generative features are less impressive than standalone AI tools, but the seamless integration makes it easy to use.
Cost: Free tier for basic corrections; Premium from around £12/month; Business plans from around £15/user/month.
Canva AI
Canva — the popular design tool — has added AI features across its platform.
Key AI features:
- Magic Media (text-to-image): Generate images from text prompts inside Canva designs
- Magic Write: Draft copy — headlines, captions, body text — directly in Canva
- Background Remover: One-click background removal from photos
- Magic Resize: Automatically resizes designs for different formats
- Magic Animate: Applies animation to designs automatically
- Magic Edit: Describe a change to an image and Canva applies it
Honest assessment: For non-designers who produce marketing materials, social content, or presentations, Canva AI significantly expands what is achievable without design skills. The background remover is excellent. Magic Media produces usable images for social content. The biggest limitation is that Canva designs can sometimes look obviously "Canva" — the templates are recognisable. AI features mitigate this somewhat.
Cost: Many AI features are included in Canva Pro (~£11/month). Some are available on the free tier with limited usage.
Summary: Honest Assessment Table
| Tool | Best feature | Most overhyped feature | Worth paying for? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Copilot in Word | Document drafting from briefs | Fully autonomous document creation | For frequent document creators, yes |
| Copilot in Excel | Formula explanation | Complex analysis of messy data | For Excel power users, yes |
| Copilot in Outlook | Thread summarisation | Email writing replacing human tone | Generally yes for Outlook-heavy users |
| Gemini in Docs/Gmail | Cross-document queries | Replacing human judgment in drafts | If already in Google Workspace |
| Notion AI | Ask AI across workspace | Replacing structured project management | For heavy Notion users |
| Grammarly | Inline writing improvement | Full drafting from prompts | Yes, especially for heavy writers |
| Canva AI | Background remover | Magic Write for important copy | Yes for content creators |
Key takeaway: The best AI in your existing apps is the feature you will actually use every day without extra effort. Start with one feature in one tool you already use and build from there.
Practice Task
Pick one tool from this lesson that you use already. Identify the one AI feature most relevant to your daily work and try it on a real task this week. Note how much time it saves and how much editing the output required. This is your baseline for evaluating AI tools going forward.