This afternoon (16th September 2024), Microsoft passionately announced (almost 9 months after Copilot was officially available to any organisation) the latest updates coming to Microsoft 365 Copilot as part of what they are calling “Wave 2”. The 30-minute-long session, hosted by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Jared- Spataro, unveiled a heap of new features, capabilities and performance enhancements were announced across the entire experience.
Microsoft 365 Copilot (THIS IS NOW IT’S NEW OFFICIAL NAME) provides enterprise data protection, ensuring the same level of security and compliance protection as other services like files, SharePoint, and emails. Microsoft said that significant improvements have also been made to PowerPoint and Excel based on feedback, including the introduction of Python integration in Excel.
Some of these things are “generally available” from today and others are coming in the next few weeks and months. – See the end.
Evolving the purpose and role of Microsoft 365 Copilot
Microsoft told today, how Copilot is evolving from an individual productivity assistant to a collaborative partner at work. Copilot can utilise various content sources such as files, chats, calendar invites, and emails to generate rich outputs based on the needs of the user and teams of people. You will have seen in the various demos how the product demos now showcase how Copilot facilitates collaboration and achieves outcomes, making both personal and teamwork more efficient and effective.
They have also focussed lots on performance and stability enhancements with huge investments in their Azure Data Centres.
Microsoft also wanted to ensure organisations know just how much they focus on providing the same level of enterprise data protection to Copilot as they have with files, email, SharePoint etc.
So, here’s my pick of what’s new and most cool!
1. Copilot Agents
Microsoft is also broadening the definition of “agents“, ranging from personal AI assistants to fully autonomous agents. These agents span across a spectrum, from human-in-the-loop to fully autonomous.
This is the top announcement for me, I think. Agents (aka Custom GPTs,) have been a very popular discussion with my customers. When Microsoft talks about agents, they use it in its broadest term with an agent being anything from an AI assistant helping you retrieve information right (a foundational agent capability), all the way to autonomous support agent, meaning the agent does not need a human to intervene for it or for it to be able to do its work. Wow Right!
You will see Microsoft focusing on agents across the entire spectrum – giving organisations the ability to create agents using natural language to “support whatever custom business process you are trying to automate“. This will be going into public preview later this month Copilot Agent Builder will be part of Copilot Studio as I understand it.
As an example, say an issue out in the field required further research and follow-up and the team keeps all their customer records from deployment info to maintenance reports on a SharePoint site. Like many organisations, there’s loads of valuable information stored here, but it takes ages to sift through it and find what is needed. Now with Copilot Agents, an agent can be built from any SharePoint site library or folder. It’s possible to create an agent with a single clip and in just a few seconds, your agent is ready to be used and shared with your team and it can be simply added to the department’s team’s chat.
Once created, created agents can be customised and things like topics and knowledge can be enhanced as well as the actions it can take. These can be connected to third party apps such as Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management.
2. Copilot Pages – Powered by Loop
This is the second biggest announcement and combines two of my favourite parts of Microsoft 365 – Copilot and Loop.
Accessed through BizChat, Copilot Pages, allows users to create side-by-side pages for real-time collaboration. Built on Loop components, these pages enable multiple users to work together and update data simultaneously, enhancing teamwork and productivity.
This can be used when you are working in BizChat – pulling Copilot’s response into a sharable canvas (Loop spaces) built for real-time multiplayer collaboration with Al. Copilot can then be used to improve and expand upon subject matter, build visualizations, and bring in additional content.
Biz Chat will be the place where you can start and finish most of your work before you transition it to your format of choice. Within Biz Chat, you’ll also soon see a button to move the output to the final experience – says move to Outlook, move to Word, move to PowerPoint etc., but you can do all of the pre-work in Bizchat which Microsoft’s customers say is where they spend “most” of their time.
3. Biz Chat Enhancements
Copilot Biz Chat, will, as I discussed above have the ability to send output to the final app for you to finish your work. You’ll see a send to button making workflow faster and just feel smoother and more integrated.
4. Utilising Email and Bizchat for Business Insights
Copilot can now use email and Bizchat to identify patterns and information, recall similar situations, and access relevant content from various sources. This feature is designed to help discover strategies such as price reduction, promotional offers, and ad campaigns as example by reasoning over email and chat threads to help solve business challenges.
5. Copilot in PowerPoint Improvements
Copilot democratizes advanced features in Excel by allowing users to use natural language to access them. PowerPoint improvements include the ability to easily build custom narratives, sections, and flow within presentations. Branding options ensure consistency with company logos, fonts, colours, and styles. PowerPoint’s new narrative builder, with creative control over the flow, reordering topics, deleting unwanted ones, and adding new ones.
Copilot helps create presentation outlines quickly, offering image suggestions from approved sources or AI-generated options. It designs slides in company branding with various layout choices.
PowerPoint’s new features include adding picture notes to slides, built-in slide transitions, and animated text. These features help users create professional-looking presentations quickly and easily, using their own corporate-branded content.
Leveraging corporate templates requires that marketing teams integrate their organisations branded assets into a SharePoint OAL (Organization Asset Library) in order to be able to create presentations with organisational images. This is scheduled for release in Q4 2024.
6. Copilot in Word
Copilot in Word has new features including (finally) allowing it to reason over more document sources including emails, chat, meeting content and files etc making this much easier to get documents created while referencing multiple sources of information.
7. Copilot Enhancements in Teams
Improvements are coming to Teams based on user feedback. Copilot can now reason over chat in addition to meeting transcriptions. This entered public preview today.
8. Copilot in Outlook Improvements
Outlook’s new Copilot feature, ‘Prioritise my inbox’, organises emails based on topics, keywords, and important people. It identifies important contacts like your boss and their boss, enhancing email organisation and efficiency.
Since Copilot can reference emails, meetings and attachments as well as knowing who your colleagues are when you are drafting it can save a huge amount of time as it understands the context in which you are working. This new feature is rolling out now, with early access for some insider rings.
Summary
As I am sure you are, I am excited about these new features (and there’s still more to come) and improvements and look forward to your feedback on the announcements.
In summary, here’s what was announced again and when it will be available (according to Microsoft).
Are there things you were expecting to hear about but didn’t?
Oh and if I missed anything, let me know!!!