In the past year, Copilot has become a daily companion for thousands of businesses, helping to streamline their workflows and improve productivity. Microsoft has received invaluable feedback from nearly 1,000 customers, which has been used to make over 700 product updates and introduce over 150 new features. One of the most significant improvements is the speed of Copilot's responses, which are now twice as fast, leading to a threefold increase in user satisfaction. This is due to the integration of GPT-4o, which provides enhanced reasoning and improved orchestration.
Introducing Copilot Pages
Microsoft Copilot is the new UI for AI. It all starts with Business Chat (BizChat), a central hub that brings together all your data—web data, work data, and line of business data—right in the flow of your work. BizChat turns all your organizational content into a rich database of information and insight, enabling you to collaborate with Copilot like a partner and turning every artifact into a reusable business asset.
How to use Copilot Pages
Access Copilot
Access copilot at Microsoft.com/Copilot. If you have a Microsoft 365 Copilot license, you can also access Microsoft Copilot in Teams and Microsoft Outlook.
Chat with Copilot
Chat with the copilot as you usually would. Once you receive a response you'd like to keep, click 'Edit in Pages'. This will create a page and open side-by-side with the chat with the response already copied and formatted, including link previews and code blocks. A reference to the page will automatically be added to the chat.
Add and refine
You can continue your conversation in chat. Clicking 'Edit in Pages' will add subsequent responses to the bottom of the page. Everything on the page is editable - just click on the page and start typing. Pro tip: type "/" to view a menu of content types that you can use.
Share and collaborate
When you are ready, you can share your page with others who will be able to collaborate on it with you. People you share with will have access to the page and its content, not your Copilot session. If you and your team have a Microsoft 365 Copilot license, you can view the page in full screen to use Copilot directly within the page, adding to each other's prompts and collaborating on a final output. Pro tip: Click the share icon in the upper right and select "Copy component" to surface the page in a fully interactive way when you paste it into Teams or Outlook.
Access Copilot pages
Return to your page at any time by clicking the link in the chat where you first created the page or by opening the Pages tab in Microsoft365.com, where you will see all the Pages that you previously created.
Copilot Pages Features
Pages take ephemeral AI-generated content and make it durable so you can edit it, add to it, and share it with others. You and your team can work collaboratively on 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. For Microsoft 365 Copilot customers, Pages started rolling out on 16th September and will generally be available later in September 2024.
In the upcoming weeks, Microsoft will introduce Copilot Pages to over 400 million individuals who have access to the free Microsoft Copilot while using a Microsoft Entra account. This will combine web grounding, enterprise data protection (EDP), and Pages. You can test Microsoft Copilot at Microsoft.com/copilot and pin Copilot directly within the Microsoft 365 app. Soon, it will also be available in Outlook and Teams.
Microsoft 365 Copilot Wave 2
For millions of people around the world, work happens in the Microsoft 365 apps. It's where Copilot is already becoming a daily habit, delivering personal productivity gains and time savings. And with Wave 2, Microsoft taking everything learning from our customers and using it to make Copilot even better.
Copilot in Excel
When people want to work with that data and get real value from it, they turn to Microsoft Excel—it's the front end for all your business data. Now, you can work with data that hasn't been formatted as a table. Microsoft added new skills to tap into the full power of Excel with support for more formulas like XLOOKUP and SUMIF, conditional formatting, and the ability to iterate with Microsoft Copilot on visualizations like charts and PivotTables to fit your needs. Copilot in Excel can now work with text in addition to numerical data.
Microsoft has introduced Copilot in Excel with Python, a powerful combination of Python and Copilot in Excel. This integration allows users to perform advanced data analyses such as forecasting, risk analysis, machine learning, and complex data visualization using natural language without coding. It's like having a skilled data analyst on your team. Copilot in Excel with Python is currently in public preview.
Copilot in PowerPoint
Creating a polished presentation from an initial idea takes time and effort. With the newly available Microsoft Copilot in PowerPoint, working with Copilot feels like having a supportive partner. You can quickly generate a great first draft while maintaining control over the creative process. Microsoft Copilot uses your input to create an outline that you can easily modify and improve to craft the initial version of your presentation. Soon, you'll also be able to integrate files into the outline to provide more substance to your topics. Additionally, with Microsoft Copilot can incorporate your company's branded template, ensuring that your presentations are cohesive and aligned with your brand. Soon, Copilot can even access company-approved images from your SharePoint Organization Asset Library.
Copilot in Teams
Microsoft Copilot in Teams now has the ability to analyze both meeting transcripts and chat conversations, providing a comprehensive overview of the discussion. For example, you can ask Copilot to identify any unanswered questions from a meeting, and it will efficiently review both spoken and written communication to ensure nothing was overlooked. With Copilot in Teams, every question, idea, and contribution is given the attention it deserves. This feature will be accessible to all users starting in September 2024.
Copilot in Outlook
Struggling with email overload is a common challenge for many of us. With the new "Prioritize my inbox" feature, Copilot in Outlook aims to help you efficiently navigate through your messages by analyzing the content of your emails and considering the context of your role, such as your reporting relationships and your responsiveness in email threads. This means no more sifting through long messages, as Copilot automatically generates a brief summary of each email and explains why it prioritized the message, providing valuable insights. Additionally, in the near future, you'll have the ability to train Copilot to recognize specific topics, keywords, or important individuals, ensuring that those emails receive high priority. These helpful features will be available in public preview starting in late 2024.
Copilot in Word
In the upcoming release of Microsoft Word in September 2024, Copilot will make it easier and faster to incorporate content from various sources such as web data, Word, PowerPoint, PDFs, encrypted documents, emails, and meetings. This feature aims to seamlessly integrate the referenced information into your writing process, allowing you to create a solid first draft more efficiently. Recent updates to Copilot in Word have enhanced its capabilities, including a new on-canvas start experience with suggested prompts to stimulate creativity and the ability to collaborate with Copilot inline while working on specific sections of your document.
Copilot in OneDrive
Microsoft OneDrive is a rich repository where professionals store their personal work content—but we all spend too much time trying to find the right documents or remember which document has the content we need. Copilot in OneDrive can reason over all your files quickly to find the information you need, making 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 your files—without opening a file. Copilot in OneDrive is now rolling out and will be generally available end of September 2024.
Microsoft Copilot agents
Accelerating every business process with Microsoft Copilot—to grow revenue and reduce costs—is the best way to gain competitive advantage in the age of AI. Introducing Copilot agents, now generally available. Agents are AI assistants designed to automate and execute business processes, working with or for humans. They range in capability from simple, prompt-and-response agents to agents that replace repetitive tasks to more advanced, fully autonomous agents. And with Copilot agents, you can do all this and more by bringing the power of agents right into the flow of your work. Microsoft Copilot agents work for you in the background, fully managed and orchestrated by Copilot. Simple and secure to manage, all Copilot agents have the same Responsible AI and EDP promises—your data never leaves the Microsoft 365 trust boundary and everything happens within your tenant. You can also leverage pre-built agents like the new Visual creator agent, which helps you create AI-generated images, designs, and soon videos.
To make it even easier to build Copilot agents, today we are announcing agent builder, a new, simplified experience powered by Copilot Studio.
Now anyone can quickly create a Copilot agent right in BizChat or SharePoint, unlocking the value of the vast knowledge repository stored in your SharePoint files. Imagine, for instance, firing up agent builder to build an agent right in the flow of your work in BizChat, quickly connecting it to SharePoint to power it with relevant business process data, and in moments you have a powerful knowledge resource you can share with your colleagues in Teams or Outlook. You can @ mention the agent as you would any other teammate, sharing new information and asking questions your agent answers in real time. If you want to build a more advanced agent from there, you can further customize it in Copilot Studio, deploying it to do things like connect to a data source or take actions on your behalf.
Copilot agents and agent builder in BizChat will be rolling out in general availability to all customers over the coming weeks. Copilot agents and agent builder in SharePoint will enter preview in early October.
Conclusion
Microsoft’s updates to Copilot are making it easier for businesses to get work done faster and more efficiently. With new features like Copilot Pages, businesses can turn AI-generated content into something they can edit, share, and use again. The updates to Excel, PowerPoint, and other Microsoft 365 apps are designed to help users analyze data, create presentations, and manage emails more easily.
The arrival of Copilot agents and the new agent builder tool enables businesses to automate tasks and processes, saving time and effort. These tools simplify day-to-day work and enhance team collaboration. As Copilot continues to be released, businesses can leverage these features to increase productivity and work more efficiently. Microsoft is integrating powerful tools into everyday tasks, making them accessible. Now is an ideal time for businesses to discover how Copilot can enhance their work.
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