Introducing Microsoft Copilot actions, new agents and tools to empower IT| Microsoft 365 blog

Microsoft 365 Copilot is becoming a daily habit for people around the world – already nearly 70% of Fortune 500 companies use it. Dow expects Copilot to save it millions of dollars on shipping operations in the first year; on Bank of Queensland Group70% of users save two and a half to five hours per week; Eaton accelerates internal documentation processes by 83%; and Accenture goes big and rolls out Copilot to 100,000 employees.

Today at Microsoft Ignite 2024we are accelerating our ambition to empower every employee with Copilot as a personal assistant and to transform every business process with agents built into Microsoft Copilot Studio.

Notifications include:

• Copilot actions in Microsoft 365 Copilot to help you automate repetitive everyday tasks.
• New agents in Microsoft 365 to unlock SharePoint knowledge, provide real-time language interpretation in Microsoft Teams meetings and automate employee self-service.
• The Copilot control system to help IT professionals manage Copilot and agents securely.

These announcements build on our wave 2 momentum, including the new autonomous agent capabilities that we announced in October 2024.

Empowering every employee with a personal AI assistant

Thanks to our customers, we have the world’s best feedback loop about artificial intelligence in the workplace. We’ve dramatically improved Copilot’s performance – the answers are twice faster on average and the response satisfaction is almost three times higher¹– and shipped hundreds of new features. And we add new value to Copilot to tackle work’s biggest pain points and help every employee scale their impact—from automating repetitive tasks to managing your calendar.

• New Copilot actions automate everyday tasks with simple, fill-in prompts that you can set and forget. For example, you can automatically receive a summary of your most important action items at the end of each working day, create an action to collect input from your team for a weekly newsletter you send every Thursday, or automate the preparation of client meetings with a recurring action, that summarizes your last few interactions prior to your next sync. In private preview.

• We’re adding new value to Copilot Pages—a dynamic, persistent canvas designed for multiplayer AI collaboration—with rich artifacts. Now you can ask Copilot to create everything from interactive flowcharts to blocks of code—drawing from data across the Microsoft Graph—and then share them on durable pages your team can build on. Generally available in early 2025.

• With Teams, there is rich dialogue across the conversation, as well as chat and presentations on the screen. Now Copilot in Teams can understand, summarize and answer questions based on visual content shared on screen – from PowerPoint to the web – in addition to the transcript and chat. You can also ask Copilot for one quick overview of a file shared in a chat to get all its highlights without having to open the file. Public preview comes in early 2025.
• Now, with a single prompt, Copilot in PowerPoint can translate entire presentations to one of 40 languages ​​while maintaining the overall design of each slide. It’s like having a skilled translator working right next to you. Generally available in 2025.
• Copilot in Outlook can now help you plan focus time or one-on-one with a colleague – look across both of your calendars to find the best time – and draft a meeting agenda. Generally available in late November.
• And to make work more fun, earlier in November 2024 we announced Themes by Copilot in Outlook, so you can create a unique theme that speaks to you—it can even change with the weather. Generally available.

Transform any business process with agents

Copilot is where you interact with agentsand Copilot Studio is where you can easily create, manage and connect agents to Copilot. We introduce agents in Microsoft 365 designed to help scale individual impact and transform business processes. These new agents complement the autonomous agents we announced in October 2024 for sales, service, finance and supply chain professionals—and we’re just getting started. We will create many more agents in the coming year who will give customers the competitive edge they need to future-proof their organization.

• Organizations depend on SharePoint and create more than two million websites and upload more than two billion files daily. We’re announcing that every SharePoint site now has an agent, so every employee can quickly tap into this vast knowledge base. You can use agents in SharePoint to quickly pull project details from a work schedule, summarize a recent product memo, or find a document in seconds. For example, salespeople can instantly find the latest product specifications, pricing documents or customer proposals, enabling them to respond to customer inquiries faster and more accurately without having to search through multiple files. You can ask agents questions about data across your files and even create and share custom agents with a single click. Generally available.

• Imagine being able to sound like you in another language. The Interpreter agent in Teams provides real-time speech-to-speech interpretation during meetings, and you can choose to have it simulate your speaking voice for a more personalized and engaging experience. Public preview comes in early 2025.
• The Employee self-service agent i Business Chat quickly answers common policy questions and makes it easy to carry out key tasks, starting with HR and IT. It can help employees understand their benefits, for example, or request a new laptop. And it can be customized in Copilot Studio to meet your organization’s unique needs. In private preview.
• Other agents include Facilitatorwhich takes real-time notes in Teams meetings and chats, and Project managerwhich automates plan creation and even completes tasks in Microsoft Planner. In public preview.
• In the coming months, partners like ServiceNow, Working dayand Context– along with dozens more – will add their agents to Copilot and bring their unique, mission-critical knowledge to organizations across HR, finance and sales right into the workflow. S&P Global, CB Insights and more are introducing new connectors that enable Copilot to reference more types of business data.

Equipping IT to lead AI transformation

CIOs and IT professionals are at the epicenter of AI transformation. To empower any IT team to lead at scale, we introduce Copilot control system—designed for IT to confidently adopt and accelerate the business value of Copilot and agents.

• Data protection enables intelligent grounding of enterprise data while respecting your organization’s controls. To give IT even more control, we’re announcing it SharePoint Advanced Management will be included at no additional cost to Copilot customers to accelerate adoption and address oversharing with built-in content management reports and controls. Generally available in early 2025.
• Management control allow IT to manage access to and use of Copilot and agents – including control over which users can use Copilot and agents – along with visibility into agent status and lifecycle. And we announce that Copilot in Microsoft 365 admin centers will be available to all Copilot customers to automate time-consuming IT tasks, provide personalized insights to improve tenant management, and answer admin questions. In private preview; generally available in early 2025.
• Measurement and reporting empower IT and business leaders to track adoption patterns and ROI from the use of Copilot and agents. We are announcing that Microsoft Viva Insights will be included in Copilot at no additional cost as part of the new Copilot Analytics. Copilot Analytics delivers out-of-the-box experiences to measure Copilot adoption and business impact, customizable reporting for deeper analytics, and the new Copilot Business Impact Report to analyze Copilot usage against the company’s key performance indicators across sales, finance, marketing and more. The Copilot Business Impact Report is in public preview; Copilot Analytics is generally available in early 2025.

Enable every employee to be secure and productive with Windows

In today’s digital landscape, protecting your organization’s data from new threats and ensuring system integrity is paramount. We push the boundaries to continue to make Windows the most secure and efficient platform for you and your organization.

• We are introduces the Windows Resiliency Initiativewhich includes Fast machine recovery—a new solution to help customers recover from unexpected disruptions that allows administrators to perform targeted fixes from Windows Update on PCs even if they are unable to start. Coming to the Windows Insider Program in early 2025.
• We are also happy to announce Link to Windows 365the first Cloud PC device purpose-built by Microsoft to connect directly to Windows 365 in seconds. Windows 365 Link enables desktop users to work securely on a familiar Windows desktop in the Microsoft Cloud with responsive, high-fidelity experiences. In public preview now; generally available for $349 in select markets from April 2025.

Other news

• IN Microsoft Placeswe have added AI-powered location insight in Teams and Outlook with Copilot, so you can optimize your days in the office for better personal connections. Key features include Copilot recommendations on when to go to the office based on co-workers’ shared work schedules with intended building locations. Generally available.

To empower every employee with Copilot as a personal assistant and transform any business process with agents built into Copilot Studio, start using Copilot today. Visit Microsoft365.com/copilot or download the Microsoft 365 app on your mobile device.

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Sources:

¹ Blind, side-by-side human intelligence tasks conducted on behalf of Microsoft in July and August 2024, each with 9 participants (judges) to compare user satisfaction with query responses from Microsoft Copilot and a competitor. Copilot won 16% of comparisons in July and 46% in August.

² The price is accurate from November 2024.