Microsoft is No. 3 on the list of the World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies of 2024. Explore the full list of companies that are reshaping industries and culture.

No organization has done more to promote generative AI in the workplace than Microsoft.

After announcing a $10 billion investment in OpenAI in January 2023, Microsoft began incorporating the startup’s tech into its most popular platforms, including the Azure cloud, enterprise offerings, and consumer-facing products. It began by unveiling a conversational chat feature in its Bing search engine early last year, later adding image generation and image analysis functions, enhancements that helped drive Bing to more than 100 million daily active users (though Bing still trails far behind Google, which controls 90% of the search market).

The company’s efforts to turn generative AI into a workplace assistant have been even more profound. Over the past year, Microsoft has extended Copilot, the family of AI assistants that began as a coding helper for GitHub users, across products including Microsoft 365 and Windows. More than 1 million Copilot users now tap the assistant for help creating PowerPoint presentations from a simple prompt, quickly analyzing data in Excel, answering questions about company documents, and summarizing long email threads in Outlook before moving on to more complex requests. “Then it starts to get more sophisticated, where [users] are actually delegating work to Copilot as if it were another colleague, and asking it to do multistep tasks,” says Jared Spataro, corporate vice president for modern work and business applications at Microsoft.

Copilot is also increasingly integrated into Windows, allowing users of new PCs to launch the AI with a single key and ask it to find information from across the web, quickly adjust settings, and even offer advice on personal and business decisions. Enterprises using Copilot for Microsoft 365 include Visa, Honda, Pfizer, and Accenture, and more than 40% of Fortune 100 companies participated in an Early Access Program for the software before it entered general availability in November 2023. AI helped drive Microsoft’s Cloud revenues up 24% year over year.

Explore the full 2024 list of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies, 606 organizations that are reshaping industries and culture. We’ve selected the firms making the biggest impact across 58 categories, including advertising, artificial intelligence, design, sustainability, and more.