Microsoft Ignite 2024: The Biggest News In AI, Copilots, Agents

Microsoft Copilot Actions, AI agents inside SharePoint and a new Azure AI Foundry experience are among the big reveals.

Microsoft Copilot Actions prompt templates. Artificial intelligence agents inside SharePoint. And a new Azure AI Foundry experience for designing and managing AI apps and agents.

These are some of the biggest new products and updates the Redmond, Wash.-based tech giant is revealing this week during its Ignite 2024 event.

Ignite runs through Friday, with programming in person in Chicago and online. Microsoft had 200,000-plus people register for the event and expected 14,000-plus in-person attendees.

Microsoft Ignite 2024

In total, Microsoft revealed 80 new products and features across its product portfolio, a number of those focused on the emerging AI era.

About 70 percent of the Fortune 500 use Microsoft’s Copilot AI tool, according to the vendor. For every $1 invested, companies see a return of $3.70, with some of the highest returns reaching $10.

Microsoft also said that about 600,000 organizations have used Copilot in Power Platform and other AI-powered capabilities, up fourfold year over year.

Accenture, No. 1 on CRN’s 2024 Solution Provider 500, is in the process of rolling out Microsoft copilots and agents to 100,000 employees, according to Microsoft. It has a commitment to deploy 200,000 more.

AI looks to feature prominently for the vendor’s 400,000-member partner ecosystem in 2025. In Microsoft’s latest quarterly earnings call, Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella said that the company’s AI businesses should “surpass an annual revenue run rate of $10 billion next quarter, which will make it the fastest business in our history to reach this milestone.”

“When I talk about Copilot, Copilot Studio, agents, it’s really as much about a new way to work,” Nadella said on the call. “I describe it as what happened throughout the ’90s with PC penetration. After all, if you take a business process like forecasting, what was it like pre-email and Excel and post-email and Excel. That’s the type of change that you see with Copilot.”

Here are the biggest news items coming out of Ignite 2024 in AI and with Microsoft Copilot.

Copilot Actions, Copilot In Teams

Microsoft moved its Copilot Actions customizable prompt templates into private preview, the vendor announced during Ignite.

Users can leverage Actions to receive status updates and agenda items from colleagues and employees, compile weekly reports, schedule daily emails summarizing other emails and Microsoft Teams chats and more.

Actions users can automate templates on demand or with an event trigger. Actions can deliver information in an email, Word document and other specified formats, according to the vendor.

Microsoft will push new Copilot in Teams abilities into preview in early 2025, including a way for users to analyze screen-shared content in the collaboration platform and summarize file content in mobile and on desktop.

Screen-shared content will be available for Copilot summarizations, insight and for use when drafting new content, according to the vendor.

The new file summaries ability will apply to one-to-one and group chats in Teams. This feature will also follow file security policies so that users with unauthorized access don’t receive summaries.

New Microsoft 365 Agents

Microsoft introduced a host of AI agents during Ignite, with one such offering, Agents in SharePoint, entering general availability.

These agents are grounded on users’ SharePoint sites, files and folders to improve finding answers from that content, according to Microsoft. Every SharePoint site will include an agent tailored to its content. Users can also make their own agents scoped to select SharePoint folders, sites and files.

Users can give agents a name and behaviors and answer questions in real time, according to Microsoft. The SharePoint agents will follow existing user permissions and sensitivity labels.

Employee self-service agents have entered private preview. These agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot Business Chat (BizChat) can answer common policy-related questions and do some human resources tasks such as understanding a particular employee benefit, retrieving payroll information and starting a leave of absence.

These agents can also handle some IT tasks, including a request for a new laptop and assisting with a Microsoft 365 product. Users can customize these agents in Copilot Studio.

In preview are facilitator agents and project manager agents. Facilitator agents take notes in Teams meetings in real time and summarize information from Teams chats as conversations happen, according to Microsoft.

Project manager agents in Planner can create new plans and use preconfigured templates. The agent will oversee entire projects, assigning tasks, tracking progress and sending reminders and notifications. It can even complete tasks and create content.

Interpreter agents are expected to enter preview early next year. These AI agents can interpret up to nine languages in real time in Teams meetings. Meeting members can have the agent simulate their personal voice.

Azure AI Foundry

Microsoft introduced Ignite watchers to its Azure AI Foundry experience for designing, customizing and managing AI apps and agents.

Now available in preview are the Azure AI Foundry portal—the former Azure AI Studio—and the Foundry SDK.

The portal is the visual user interface for finding AI models, services and tools. Users can see subscription information in a single dashboard. IT administrators, operations personnel and those focused on compliance can manage AI apps at scale in the portal.

The SDK has a unified toolchain, 25 prebuilt templates and a coding experience users can access from GitHub, Visual Studio, Copilot Studio and other tools, according to Microsoft. Users can leverage the SDK for integrating Azure AI into their applications.

Coming soon to preview is the Azure AI Foundry Agent Service. This feature should allow developers to orchestrate, deploy and scale agents for automating business processes, according to Microsoft. Agent Service will allow for bring-your-own-storage and private networking for data privacy and compliance.

Foundry portal and SDK will gain a preview in December for Azure AI risk and safety evaluations for image content. These capabilities should help users assess the frequency and severity of harmful content in AI-generated outputs.

These evaluations will allow Azure AI to go beyond text-based evaluations and assess text inputs yielding image outputs, image inputs yielding text outputs and images with text—such as a meme—as inputs yielding text or images.

Users can leverage these evaluations for modifying multimodal content filters with Azure AI Content Safety and adjusting data sources for grounding. Users can also update system messages before deploying apps to production.

Copilot Control System

A Copilot Control System from Microsoft aims to help IT manage copilots and agents with data access, governance, security controls, measurement reports, business value tracking tools and adoption tracking tools.

One of the features of the Control System is Copilot in Microsoft 365 Administration Centers (MAC), now in private preview and set for general availability early next year, according to the tech giant.

Copilot in MAC leverages AI to do routine tasks by IT administrators and suggest ways to get more value out of M365 subscriptions. It will be available in the admin centers for M365, Teams and SharePoint and provide summaries of trends across an administrator’s assigned areas. The copilot can also summarize message center posts across all apps and services and meeting reports. It can troubleshoot call quality and other user issues with natural language.

Another feature in the Control System is Copilot Analytics. General availability capabilities within Copilot Analytics include a dashboard that covers Copilot readiness, adoption and learning and M365 admin center reporting to surface adoption and usage trends.

In early 2025, Copilot Analytics will include Viva Insights for no additional charge. Insights is a measurement toolset for productivity and business outcomes.

Copilot Studio Updates

Copilot Studio gained a multitude of previews, including ones for autonomous agentic capabilities, an agent library and an agent SDK.

The autonomous agents can take actions on a user’s behalf without prompting each time. These agents act in the background when recording an uploaded file, receiving an email and responding to events, according to Microsoft.

The autonomous agents plan, learn from processes, adapt to new conditions and make decisions.

The library has templates for leave management, sales order, deal acceleration and other common agent scenarios.

The SDK will allow developers to build multi-channel agents that leverage Azure AI, Semantic Kernel and Copilot Studio services and are deployable across Teams, Copilot, web and third-party messaging platforms.

More previews include image uploads for agents to analyze and advanced knowledge tuning to match specific instructions to unanswered questions,

Copilot Studio integrations with Azure AI Foundry will give Studio access to 1,800-plus models in the Azure catalog. A bring-your-own model capability is in private preview, as is the ability to embed voice-enabled agents in Studio and voice experiences in applications and websites.

A new pay-as-you-go consumptive billing option for Copilot Studio messages through existing Azure subscriptions will become available for users on Dec. 1.

Copilot Pages Upgrades

Microsoft has plans to make new features in its Copilot Pages content creation canvas generally available in early 2025, including rich artifacts and multi-page support.

The rich artifacts support means Pages will gain the ability to support code, interactive charts, tables, diagrams and math from enterprise data and web data, according to Microsoft.

Multi-page support will give users ways to add content from multiple chat sessions and from Pages made in previous Copilot conversations.

Other features entering general availability include grounding Copilot chat prompts on Page content as the page is updated for better answer relevancy and Pages viewing, editing and sharing on mobile.

Copilot in PowerPoint, Outlook, Excel

Copilot in PowerPoint should have some new features in 2025, including a narrative builder based on a file and organization image support.

Narrative builder based on referenced file will enter general availability in January, allowing for better first drafts of slides, according to Microsoft. Copilot will add branded designs, speaker notes, transitions and animations to the presentation.

In the first quarter, a capability for bringing images from SharePoint Organization Asset Library, Templafy and other asset libraries into Copilot in PowerPoint will enter general availability.

Microsoft will also increase access to presentation translations, with all Copilot in PowerPoint web users getting the ability to translate presentations into one of 40 languages in December. Desktop and Mac users will gain the capability in January.

By the end of the month, Copilot in Outlook will gain the ability to schedule focus time and one-on-one meetings based on a user prompt. Copilot will find the best times for everyone and draft an agenda based on the prompt’s details of the meeting

Before year’s end, Copilot in Excel will add a new start experience wherein Copilot suggests the type of spreadsheets users should make based on what they want. Copilot can also refine the template with headers, formulas and visuals.

Microsoft Places Enters General Availability

Microsoft revealed that its Places AI-powered workplace application has entered general availability, bringing location data to Teams and Outlook to help with in-office day planning.

Copilot can recommend when users should go into the office based on in-person meetings, guidance and when common collaborators will be in, according to Microsoft. It can manage room bookings for one-time or recurring meetings and help book rooms and desks based on images of the office and floor plans.

Administrators can leverage Places for an analysis of intended and actual occupancy for spaces.

Azure AI Content Understanding

Now in preview is the service Azure AI Content Understanding, which aims to assist developers in building and deploying multimodal applications.

The service uses GenAI to get information from documents, images, videos, audio and other unstructured data and put that information into customizable structured outputs, according to the tech giant.

Content Understanding has prebuilt templates and ways to customize outputs for call center analytics, marketing automation, content search and other use cases. The service also has prebuilt schemas for users to say what they want extracted from data, such as captions, transcripts, summaries, thumbnails and highlights.

Microsoft Fabric News

Microsoft’s Fabric data integration platform gained a host of new previews, including ones for Fabric Databases, SQL database in Fabric and open mirroring.

Fabric Databases aims to unite transactional and analytical workloads to improve app development optimized for AI databases, according to Microsoft. SQL database in Fabric is the first database engine in Fabric, with plans for Azure Cosmos DB and Azure Database for PostgreSQL to join.

SQL database in Fabric will allow for faster app building with data automatically replicated in Fabric’s multi-cloud data lake OneLake and native vector search capabilities allowing for retrieval augmented generation (RAG).

This capability will also allow for auto-optimizing databases, auto-scaling them and translating natural language queries into SQL with inline code compilation next to code fixes and explanations.

The goal of open mirroring, meanwhile, is to allow any app or data provider to bring the data estate into OneLake within Fabric so they can write change data into a mirrored database in Fabric.

A new OneLake catalog is also now generally available for exploring, managing and governing the Fabric data estate across notebooks, lakehouses, warehouses, machine learning models and more.