AI copilot

An AI copilot is an assistant, usually powered by a large language model, embedded directly inside a work application, a spreadsheet, an IDE, a BI tool, that suggests, drafts, or explains, while leaving a human to review and approve the result. Examples in analytics include generating a formula or SQL query from a plain-language description, drafting a summary of a dashboard, or explaining why a metric moved.

This differs from an AI agent, which is built to take multi-step action with less supervision; a copilot is designed around a human staying in the loop for each suggestion, closer to autocomplete than automation. It is a common form of augmented analytics, where AI assists rather than replaces analytical judgment, and often exposes natural language query as its entry point so non-technical users can ask questions in plain English.

Copilots matter because they lower the skill floor for working with data and speed up repetitive tasks like writing boilerplate queries or first-draft summaries. The main pitfalls are trusting a copilot's suggestion without checking it, since it inherits the same accuracy limits as any Generative AI output, and measuring adoption by usage alone rather than whether it actually improved the quality or speed of the underlying work.