Artificial Intelligence
Microsoft 365 Copilot Updates Offer Expanded AI Capabilities, Collaboration Tools
Microsoft has announced updates for Microsoft 365 Copilot, the 10-month-old AI assistant embedded in the company's cloud-based productivity suite, which will include expanded AI capabilities in individual apps, the ability to create autonomous agents, and a new AI-powered collaboration workspace.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Corporate Vice President Jared Spataro outlined the "Wave 2" updates on Monday in a live-streamed LinkedIn webcast. The new capabilities, many of which are now in the general availability stage, continue Microsoft's streak of deepening Copilot's feature set this year; per Spataro, Microsoft has deployed 700 updates and over 150 new features in 2024 so far.
Copilot Agents
Now rolling out to customers as a general availability release is the ability to create AI agents and embed them into Microsoft 365 workflows.
Microsoft previously described the agent capability at this May's Build conference. Microsoft envisions AI agents as smaller copilots that are capable of running autonomously to perform complex tasks with layers of dependencies. At Monday's presentation, Spataro elaborated that agents "can reason, remember, be trained and even know when to ask for help."
The new Copilot Agents capability announced Monday lets users build agents using Copilot Studio, ground them in organizational data like SharePoint or Dynamics 365, teach them skills such as creating support tickets or responding to e-mails, then deploy them across Microsoft 365, including within Microsoft Teams. The agents are fully managed and orchestrated by Copilot.
A separate Copilot Agents in SharePoint feature, rolling out as a public preview in October, will allow users to quickly create agents connected to specific SharePoint sites or folders.
As Microsoft described in a blog post, agents play a central role in the company's AI vision. "We think everyone will need to be able to create agents in the future, much like how everyone can create spreadsheets or presentations in Microsoft 365," wrote Charles Lamanna, Microsoft's Copilot chief. "We believe organizations that embrace Al will create and use many Copilot agents. There will be as many agents as there are documents or SharePoint sites in an organization."
Copilot Pages
Microsoft also began rolling out a new collaboration interface called Copilot Pages on Monday. Pages essentially turns Copilot chats into shareable and editable files, turning human-AI-human interactions into workable interfaces. As Spataro put it, Pages unlocks "an entirely new pattern of work."
Pages can also incorporate information from an organization's larger data estate. This capability is enabled by BizChat, previously called Business Chat, a Microsoft Graph-based feature in Copilot that lets users surface data from their calendars, e-mails, documents, and other sources using natural language prompts.
Microsoft 365 Copilot subscribers can begin accessing Pages now. Those who use Microsoft 365 Copilot for free via their Entra ID accounts will receive access in the coming weeks. More information on Pages, including its rollout, is available in this blog post.
App-Specific Copilot Capabilities
Microsoft also announced Copilot capabilities for specific Microsoft 365 apps.
Now generally available is Copilot in Excel, enabling users to use natural language queries to synthesize and organize Excel information, including non-numerical, unformatted data.
Copilot in Excel with Python is currently in public preview. Through natural language queries, users will be able to perform Python-based data analyses on their Excel data, with little coding experience required.
For PowerPoint, Microsoft has made a new "narrative builder" feature generally available. This Copilot-enabled feature helps users build presentations quickly, pulling context and information from organizational data while keeping everything on-brand.
Copilot in Teams has a new capability, now generally available, that lets it summarize meeting chats, not just meeting transcripts.
Also general available is Copilot in OneDrive. Users can tap this feature to find, summarize and compare OneDrive files.
Coming later this year as a public preview to Copilot in Outlook is a new "prioritize my inbox" feature. As its name suggests, this feature will help users quickly determine which e-mails to address first. It generates summaries of each message and prioritizes them based on their content and sender.
Finally, Copilot in Word will be able to access data from users' meetings and e-mails, on top of already-supported sources like PDFs, PowerPoint presentations and other Word documents. This capability will become available later this month.
For more information on the announcements, visit the Microsoft site.