Microsoft Corp. today announced updates and improvements to its generative artificial intelligence-powered Copilot family for its Microsoft 365 apps and the addition of new features such as new autonomous agents that can automate and execute business processes on behalf of users.

Front and center, Microsoft announced Copilot Pages, a new AI feature designed for team collaboration that can bring data in from the web or corporate knowledge bases and then allow it to be shared between users.

It starts with a standard Copilot prompt, where a user asks a question about any subject and the large language model brings in information from Business Chat, also known as BizChat, a centralized data repository that can house web data, work data and business data. It then builds a response that can be put into a Page, which acts like a sharable canvas.

“Pages takes ephemeral AI-generated content and makes it durable, so you can edit it, add to it, and share it with others,” said Jared Spataro, corporate vice president of AI at work at Microsoft. “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.”

Pages rolls out today for Microsoft 365 Copilot customers and will be generally available in Sep. 2024.

Microsoft 365 Copilot app enhancements

Microsoft has announced a number of apps that will be getting AI updates and enhancements including Excel, Powerpoint, Teams, Outlook and Word.

Copilot in Excel is now generally available, allowing users to work with business data in ways they never have before by using queries to ask for visualizations and analysis. The AI is capable of working with text in addition to numerical data by applying deep machine learning reasoning. Microsoft said it included new skills with support for more formulas including XLOOKUP and SUMIF, conditional formatting, and the ability to iterate on visualizations and charts.

Basic and advanced users will also be able to ask Copilot for Excel to generate Python code to conduct powerful analysis of their data. Python is one of the most popular and understandable programming languages for understanding advanced analysis of data including forecasting, analysis, machine learning and visualizing complex data. The AI can assist with this with no coding knowledge needed. The AI behaves just like a skilled coding partner and data analyst capable of doing all the work.

Currently in public preview, the new Python capability can produce all the code to produce vivid charts and visualizations for beautiful data analysis. Afterward, advanced users can also go through the Python code and modify it themselves.

PowerPoint is getting a specialized narrative builder that allows users to prompt Copilot to generate a first draft of an outline that allows the creative director to remain in control of the process. From there the builder can generate a slideshow, including paragraphs of text, bullet points and images. A brand manager will make certain that Copilot produces images that fit the company’s branding policy and theme using DALL-E 3. Soon, the company said, the AI will pull in company-approved images from SharePoint.

Copilot in Teams will now be able to fully understand the context of a meeting transcript to allow users to ask questions about what was said and typed in chat. For example, Copilot could be asked if anything was left unanswered during the meeting and quickly reveal what needs to be followed up on.

Outlook is also getting an AI upgrade with Copilot providing the ability to catch and prioritize important emails, including a summary at the top and the AI’s reasoning why the email is important. Copilot in Teams will be generally available later this month and Copilot in Outlook will be in public preview starting later this year.

Coming in late September, Copilot in Word will allow users to reference web and work data directly in documents, by pulling in information from other Word docs, PowerPoint, PDFs, email and meetings. This will allow users to quickly incorporate their entire knowledge base into their writing process right where they work.

That means users can activate the Copilot right in their document at any point, or select text to have it modify blocks of text inline. Both capabilities are generally available.

Copilot autonomous agents

Agents are a type of AI assistant that automates tasks on their own and does work for humans by working alongside them, they can range from simple chatbots to agents that replace repetitive work, to more advanced autonomous bots.

Microsoft has made it easy to build agents with an agent builder powered by Copilot Studio, which makes it easy to make an agent right from BizChat. All a user has to do is describe the type of agent they want to build in natural language, the tasks and skills that it needs and the agent builder will complete the necessary knowledge base and skill connections that it needs.

After that is done, the user can go into a more advanced mode to add more connections, such as SharePoint or other connectors.

Once the agent is finished, users can even @ mention it as they would any other teammate and it will respond just like any other Copilot and it will respond within its area of knowledge. For example, a user could create an agent that is designed specifically to assist field technicians with company knowledge about its products, how to fix them, their manuals, the ability to order new parts and escalate if a problem requires a higher level of service.

Copilot agents and agent builder in BizChat will be generally available to all customers over the coming weeks. Microsoft also said that an agent builder is coming to SharePoint and will enter public preview in early October.

Image and videos: Microsoft