Microsoft 365 Copilot is Getting New Agent Builder, Pages Experience, More

It’s been nearly a year since Microsoft launched Microsoft 365 Copilot, also known as “Copilot for Microsoft 365,” for organizations willing to upgrade their Microsoft 365 subscription with an AI assistant. Today, the Redmond giant is kicking off the next phase of innovation for Microsoft 365 Copilot with new Copilot pages, a simplified Agents Builder experience in Copilot Studio, and more.

Microsoft 365 Copilot is available as a paid add-on on top of a Microsoft 365 commercial subscription, and at $30 per user per month, it’s not exactly cheap. Still, Microsoft said that its AI assistant has been enjoying some real momentum since its official launch in December 2023.

According to the company, nearly 60% of the Fortune 500 now use Copilot, and the number of employees who use the AI assistant every day nearly doubled quarter-over-quarter. The company also said that Copilot customers increased more than 60% quarter-over-quarter, and that the number of customers with more than 10,000 seats more than doubled quarter-over-quarter.

“Now with GPT4o and enhanced orchestration, we’ve dramatically improved performance,” said Jared Spataro, Corporate Vice President, AI at Work. “Copilot responses are more than two times faster on average, and response satisfaction has improved by nearly 3X. When you add it all up, we’ve built the world’s best AI feedback loop with Copilot. And we’ll continue to rapidly bring all the latest models to Copilot and rapidly improve the product based on your input, adding new capabilities and new models, including OpenAI o1 with advanced reasoning.”

New Copilot Pages

With Copilot pages, Microsoft will make it possible to start a conversation in Microsoft 365 Business Chat and save it as a page that can be edited further by multiple collaborators, in real time. This is a way to turn what could have been an ephemeral conversation with Microsoft’s AI Assistant into a dynamic and shareable document.

“You and your team can work collaboratively in 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,” explained Spataro. “This is an entirely new work pattern—multiplayer, human to AI to human collaboration.”

Copilot Pages will start rolling out today for Microsoft 365 Copilot customers, but Microsoft is already planning to make them available to people using Copilot with a free Microsoft account. That’s actually more than 400 million people, according to Spataro.

New Agent Builder experience in Copilot Studio

In November 2023, Microsoft launched Copilot Studio, a conversational AI platform allowing its customers to customize Microsoft 365 Copilot and create their own Copilots. Now, Microsoft is referring to these custom Copilots as “Copilot agents,” and they’re now generally available in Copilot Studio.

To simplify the process of creating a Copilot agent in Copilot Studio, Microsoft is introducing a new Agent Builder experience. It will start rolling out in Microsoft 365 Copilot Business Chat in the coming weeks, and it’s also coming to SharePoint in public preview in early October.

Agent Builder will work as a lightweight Copilot Studio experience where users can specify what they want their agent to do and which knowledge sources it can use, all using natural language prompts. Once created, these Copilot agents can be exclusively used by their creators or shared with a group of colleagues or the entire organization. You can learn more about Copilot agents in this separate blog post.

New Microsoft 365 Copilot capabilities

Since Microsoft 365 Copilot became generally available last December, Microsoft said that it added over 150 new features and capabilities to its AI assistant. With the next wave of Microsoft 365 Copilot, more new AI capabilities are coming to Microsoft 365 apps.

Word: Later this month, Copilot in Word will be able to reference emails and meetings in addition to web data and work documents.

Excel: Copilot is now generally available in the spreadsheet app. In addition to numerical data, it can now work with text and the Python programming language.

PowerPoint: Narrative Builder is now generally available in PowerPoint to help users create presentations using a natural language prompt, and it will soon be able to use information from files. With Brand Manager, Copilot will soon be able to create a presentation that uses a company’s branded template.

Teams: Later this month, Copilot in Teams will be able to answer questions about a meeting using information from the AI-generated meeting transcript as well as conversations that happened in the chat.

Outlook: The email client will soon be able to summarize emails and prioritize them with top insights. Outlook users will also be able to specify topics, keywords, or people Copilot needs to prioritize.

OneDrive: Copilot in OneDrive will be generally available for all Microsoft 365 Copilot customers this month, and it will be able to find files and summarize their content from a natural language prompt.

Microsoft said today that it was “just the beginning of Wave 2 of Copilot innovation,” and the company is planning to continue discussing new Microsoft 365 Copilot features over the next two months. Before Microsoft announced its new Copilot agents today, Slack also announced its own AI-based chatbots called Agents for Slack, which will be available for paying customers by late 2024 or early 2025.