Microsoft on Monday announced a host of new features for its artificial intelligence (AI) assistant, Copilot, both for enterprise and business consumers, as part of its recently hosted ‘Microsoft 365 Copilot: Wave 2’ event.
With the launch of the second wave of Microsoft 365 Copilot, the company is bringing together work, web, and pages. It has introduced Copilot Pages, Copilot in the Microsoft 365 apps, and Copilot agents and Agent Builder, which aim to simplify business operations and enhance collaboration within its suite of applications.
According to the Redmond giant, nearly 1,000 customers provided feedback on Copilot, based on which Microsoft has made over 700 product updates and shipped over 150 new features this year. These new features dramatically enhance performance and give faster response times, including moving to the GPT-4o model.
Let’s have a look at the key announcements made during Microsoft’s Copilot’ Wave 2′ Event:
Copilot Pages
Copilot Pages is a dynamic, persistent canvas designed for multiplayer AI collaboration. It allows users to start a conversation in Microsoft 365 Business Chat (BizChat) and turn all organizational content into a rich database of information and insight. It transforms ephemeral AI-generated content into editable, shareable documents that team members can share via a link for further editing in real time.
“You and your team can work collaboratively in a page with Copilot, seeing everyone’s work in real time and iterating with Copilot like a partner, adding more content from your data, files, and the web to your Page. This is an entirely new work pattern—multiplayer, human to AI to human collaboration,” said Jared Spataro, Corporate Vice President of AI at Microsoft.
Pages have already started rolling for Microsoft 365 Copilot customers and will be generally available later in September 2024. In the coming weeks, it will extend Copilot Pages to over 400 million users with access to the free Microsoft Copilot when they’re signed in with a Microsoft Entra account.
Copilot In Microsoft 365 Apps
The company is also bringing enhanced AI capabilities for Copilot across its Microsoft Office suite as below:
- Excel: Excel now supports Python with Copilot, which enables users to perform advanced data analysis like forecasting, risk analysis, machine learning, and visualization — all using natural language, no coding required. Further, Excel now supports formulas like XLOOKUP and SUMIF; conditional formatting; and the ability to iterate with Copilot on visualizations like charts and PivotTables. Copilot in Excel with Python is currently available for public preview.
- PowerPoint: Copilot comes with a new AI-powered Narrative builder feature in PowerPoint that helps users create initial drafts of presentations from prompts while keeping them in control of the creative process. Upcoming features like Brand Manager will allow the company’s branded template to be used and incorporate company-approved images from the SharePoint Organization Asset Library.
- Teams: Updated features in Microsoft Teams will summarize conversations from the meeting transcript and the meeting chat, helping organizers get a complete picture of what was discussed and see if anything was left unanswered from the chat. This feature will be generally available later this month.
- Outlook: A new “prioritize my inbox” feature lets Copilot in Outlook summarise and prioritize emails based on the content of the user’s email and the context of their role. It will also allow Outlook users to customize Copilot and specify topics, keywords, and essential contacts the AI chatbot needs to know for prioritization.
- Word: Coming later in September 2024, Copilot in Word will allow users to quickly reference not only web data and work data like Word, PowerPoint, PDFs, and encrypted documents but also emails and meetings, enabling them to generate drafts more quickly. The recent Word update also includes a new, on-canvas start experience with suggested prompts.
- OneDrive: The introduction of Copilot in OneDrive makes it easy to gain insights, summarize, and compare up to five files with a clear, easy-to-read summary of the details and differences within files without the need to open them. Copilot in OneDrive is now rolling out and will be generally available by the end of September 2024.
Copilot Agents And Agent Builder
Copilot agents—created in either Microsoft Business Chat or SharePoint—are AI assistants designed to automate and execute business processes ranging from simple to complex tasks. The agent builder feature enables users to create custom AI agents designed to meet specific needs, thus enhancing efficiency.
Copilot agents and the agent builder in Business Chat will become generally available to all customers over the coming weeks. They are also set to enter a preview in SharePoint in early October.
