Today Microsoft laid out what’s changed and what’s new in the next wave of Microsoft 365 Copilot, the banner term for all the AI tech that Microsoft offer for Business productivity. In the release they highlighted three key areas:

• Copilot Pages
• Copilot in Microsoft 365 apps
• Copilot Agents

Copilot Pages

This development revolves around the concept of ‘Business chat’; a central hub that brings all your data into the flow of you work. We are already using Copilot like a colleague and actively collaborating with it to meet business goals and create assets. Copilot pages takes this one step further and allows you to take the assets you make with Copilot and share then collaboratively to allow on the fly editing, while also allowing collaborators to add and generate their own assets within a collaboration session. Have a look at the link below for a video of the tech:

Microsoft 365 Copilot | Copilot Pages (youtube.com)

Copilot in Microsoft 365 apps

Copilot in Excel

The big announcement in this space is that Copilot in Excel now comes with Python! We will talk more about that in a minute, but first the other announcements; Copilot in excel is now generally available, you can work with data that hasn’t been formatted as a table, new support for formulas such as SUMIF, collaboration with Copilot on visualizations and pivot tables and you can now use Copilot to work with textual data as well

Going back to the big announcement, that Microsoft have now integrated Python into Copilot for Excel. This enables a user to perform really cool analytics such as forecasting and machine learning without having to write any code, it can all be done via the use of natural language! Once again for more info see the link for the video below:

Microsoft 365 Copilot in Excel with Python (youtube.com)

Copilot in PowerPoint 

The Narrative Builder that allows you to work with Copilot to quickly make draft presentations is now generally available, This is now with the addition of Brand Manager which takes your companies branded templates and then keeps your presentations ready to be shown and on brand automatically; Copilot will also be able to get images form your organizations Sharepoint to use in presentations as well.

Microsoft 365 Copilot in PowerPoint | Narrative builder (youtube.com)

Copilot in Teams

Copilot can now reason over what is being said in a meetings chat as well as what is being said. This means that a holistic view of the conversation can be provided.

Copilot in Outlook

Coming into public preview in late 2024, Copilot will be able to prioritse your inbox. Using both the content of an email as well as the context of your role, Copilot will help you get to the messages that matter quickly. In addition to this, Copilot will also provide a summary of these emails as well as an explanation of why they were prioritised.

Microsoft 365 Copilot in Outlook | Prioritize my inbox (youtube.com)

Copilot in Word

Generally available now (or by the end of September 2024) Copilot in Word will allow you to reference emails and meetings in addition to the web data and documents currently available. You also not get a new on-canvas start experience with prompts to kick start your drafting process, as well as the ability to use Copilot on the fly to work on specific parts of your document.

Copilot in OneDrive

Microsoft has introduced exactly what is needed for most people with Copilot in Onedrive, with the functionality to get Copilot to look over all your find really quickly to find the document you need. This allows you to compare up to 5 files at a time with clear summaries of the details of and differences between these files without ever opening them. This is going to be a lifesaver for those occasions where you can find where you saved that really important report or spreadsheet!

Copilot Agents

Copilot agents are in house AI assistants you can build to automate and execute business processes, either in collaboration with humans or for them. These agents will be present directly in your workflow and can be created very straightforwardly in the ne ‘Agent Builder’:

Microsoft 365 Copilot | Copilot Studio agent builder (youtube.com)

The example use case they give in the released articles is connecting your agent to a SharePoint to give it business process data, so it can then be used by colleagues as a powerful knowledge base. From here you can also go one step further and create a more advanced agent in the Copilot studio, or if you want a simpler solution you can use some of the pre-built agents that Microsoft is providing. All this functionality is set to come out in general availability for business chat in the next coming weeks and in preview for SharePoint in early October.

Microsoft 365 Copilot | Copilot agents in SharePoint (youtube.com)