Microsoft announces Wave 2 of Copilot with integrations across all 365 products

Microsoft introduced Copilot Agents, AI assistants that can do specific tasks autonomously with very little help from the user

Microsoft has announced a host of new upgrades coming to its AI assistant Copilot for both enterprise and personal customers as a part of its ‘Microsoft 365 Copilot: Wave 2’ event held yesterday. These features included further integration with Microsoft 365 applications and improving performance by moving to the GPT-4o model.

“It has just been 18 months since we launched Microsoft 365 Copilot. It is rapidly becoming an organising layer for work; how work gets done, transforming the workflow and work artifacts for more than 400 million people who use Microsoft 365,” CEO Satya Nadella said during the live stream.

He added that the adoption rates for Copilot were faster than any other new Microsoft 365 suite and daily users at work had almost doubled quarter over quarter.

During the livestream, the company announced 700 product updates of which over 150 new features have been shipped already, they said.

With these updates, Microsoft explained that Copilot would grow in three major ways. 

First, it will bring the web, work and pages together through Microsoft Pages. When users sign in to their work account, there will be a tab available to switch from Work to Web. Microsoft calls the Work tab as BizChat, a workflow in Copilot that can get answers from your work data from Microsoft 365 applications. 

Now, with Pages, users can take the insights they get from Copilot and edit them, add to a Page and share them with your team for everyone to work together. Anyone can edit and share the document via Pages. 

Secondly, Copilot is being deeply integrated with other Microsoft apps like PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook, etc. Like Copilot in Excel will support users with data visualisation, conditional formatting and formulas and more. In PowerPoint there’s a new Narrative Builder that helps users form the first draft of their presentation in minutes. 

While Copilot in Teams can draw the contents of a meeting and give a summary of what happened if a user missed it.

Thirdly, Microsoft introduced Copilot Agents, AI assistants that can do specific tasks autonomously with very little help from the user.

There’s also a new agent builder with Copilot Studio using which users can build Copilot agents which can be later called for any 365 app whenever required with a simple “@” command.

Published - September 18, 2024 10:02 am IST