New Microsoft Copilot Update Wave Focuses On App Integration, Agents

'Think of Copilot as the UI for AI,' Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says.

Microsoft CEO and Chairman Satya Nadella said the vendor is on a second wave of iteration on its Copilot brand of artificial intelligence tools, showcasing a new Copilot Pages canvas offering, more integrations with existing productivity applications and capabilities around AI agents.

Nadella and his team showed new Copilot capabilities Monday during an online event. The CEO of the Redmond, Wash.-based tech giant said that the number of people who use Copilot daily at work has nearly doubled quarter over quarter, with customers coming back to deploy more seats. He also described Copilot adoption rates as faster than any other new Microsoft 365 suite.

“You can think of Copilot as the UI for AI,” Nadella said. “It helps you break down the silos between your work artifacts, your communications and your business processes.”

Microsoft 365 Copilot

About 1,000 customers have given Microsoft Copilot feedback, leading to 700 product updates and 150 new features this year, according to the vendor. Copilot customers grew more than 60 percent quarter over quarter.

Among the wave two features, Copilot Pages has started rolling out to Microsoft 365 Copilot users and will become generally available (GA) later this month, according to the vendor.

Pages will be made available to the 400 million-plus users who can use free Microsoft Copilot when signed in with an account for Microsoft Entra (formerly Azure Active Directory).

Copilot in Excel is GA. Microsoft PowerPoint narrative builder is GA. Copilot in OneDrive, Copilot in Word and an improved reasoning feature in Copilot in Teams become GA this month. Copilot agents and agent building in Business Chat–also called BizChat and meant as a central hub for leveraging web data, work data and line-of-business data for Copilot insights–become GA in “the coming weeks,” according to the vendor.

Copilot in Excel with Python is in public preview. Copilot in Outlook’s “prioritize my inbox” feature enters public preview later this year. Agent builder in SharePoint enters preview in early October.

Copilot Agents, Pages

Microsoft’s Copilot agents, now GA, are AI assistants that can automate and execute business processes.

The agents can range in simplicity from simple prompt-and-response to full autonomy for advanced, repetitive tasks, according to the vendor.

The agents can work in the background, with Copilot as the management and orchestration tool. Agents still follow responsible AI policies and data never leaves the M365 trust boundary, according to the vendor.

Visual creator agent and other pre-built agents are also available. The creator agent will also soon add video generation to its image and design generation abilities.

The agent builder feature coming to BizChat and SharePoint and powered by Copilot Studio will allow users to share information and ask questions by tagging the agent with the “@” symbol. Copilot Studio will be used for more customization.

Microsoft joins a host of other AI vendors investing in so-called agentic AI, including Salesforce and ServiceNow.

Microsoft bills Copilot Pages as a canvas for multi-user AI collaboration and “the first new digital artifact for the AI age.” Pages allows users to edit, add to and share AI-generated content. Users on a page see everyone’s work in real time and can pull content from data, files and the internet.

New Copilot Integrations

Copilot in Excel allows users to work with data not formatted as a table and leverage XLOOKUP, SUMIF and other formulas. Users can also apply conditional formatting and use Copilot to improve charts, PivotTables and other visualizations. Copilot in Excel also now works with text as well as numerical data.

The Copilot in Excel with Python feature in limited access for now allows for forecasting, risk analysis, machine learning, complex data visualization and other advanced analyses with natural language and no coding.

PowerPoint’s new GA narrative builder feature brings in Copilot for creating first-draft presentations in minutes with a prompt. Users ask for an outline with topics and can edit and refine the presentation.

Users will “soon” gain the ability to add files to the outline to ground topics and pull in company-approved images from the SharePoint Organization Asset Library.

The upcoming improved reasoning feature in Copilot in Teams will make it so Copilot can go over meeting transcripts and chats and, when asked by a user, point out unanswered questions during the meeting.

The upcoming Copilot in Outlook “prioritize my inbox” feature aims to get users to the most important messages based on email content, the user’s supervisors and past emails that have gotten responses from the user.

Copilot will generate summaries of each email, say why it prioritized the message and provide insights, according to Microsoft.

Users will “soon” have the ability to teach Copilot specific topics, keywords and people that should lead to emails getting marked “high priority.”

Copilot in Word will allow users to reference web data and work data from Word, PowerPoint, PDFs, encrypted documents, emails and meetings, according to Microsoft. Already added to Copilot in Word are a new on-canvas start experience with suggested prompts and the capability of inline Copilot collaboration on specific sections of a document.

The upcoming Copilot in OneDrive promises users reasoning power over all files to find information, gain insights, summarizes and compare up to five files. Users can see details and file differences in the summary without opening the files, according to Microsoft.