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Microsoft Announces New Copilot Agents and Enhancements
Microsoft on Wednesday announced new and updated AI-powered agents for Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat, aimed at enterprise collaboration, project management and data analysis.
"Agents are fundamentally shifting how businesses operate," said Daniela Chocron, Microsoft product manager, in a blog post. "They help companies scale faster and generate value more efficiently, powering a new kind of hybrid work."
Part of what the company is calling its "Microsoft 365 Copilot Wave 2 spring release," two new agents making their way into Microsoft 365 in preview form this April are Researcher and Analyst. Researcher is designed to tackle complex, multistep projects using a blend of OpenAI research models and Microsoft’s deep data orchestration, while Analyst acts as a digital data scientist, using Python and chain-of-thought reasoning to present insights from raw datasets.
Also debuting in June is Skills, an agent aimed at talent discovery and workforce planning. Skills enables employees to find experts, understand colleagues' capabilities and map skill gaps across an organization using Microsoft’s new People Skills data layer.
To facilitate deployment, Microsoft announced that an Agent Store will be arriving next month within Copilot Chat, allowing users to discover and use out-of-the-box and custom agents from Microsoft, partners and custom creations.
Microsoft also announced three new agents will be embedded across Microsoft 365 products and services. They include:
- Interpreter, now in public preview, offers real-time speech-to-speech translation in nine languages within Teams meetings.
- Facilitator, arriving in early May, helps moderate and summarize meetings, track decisions and surface relevant insights.
- Project Manager, already in public preview within Microsoft Planner, automates project creation and task management, and now adds the ability to generate detailed project status reports.
The company also said SharePoint agents will begin rolling out in May, allowing users to interact with SharePoint-based data directly in Copilot Chat. These agents can be shared across Microsoft Teams or via email and are designed to deliver scoped, context-aware responses from internal content libraries.
Finally, as part of the company's spring release, Microsoft said it is introducing a refreshed Copilot app designed to drive human-agent collaboration. Among the key improvements are a faster, AI-powered search experience to streamline information discovery and a new Create interface that the company said allows users of all skill levels to design with ease. Copilot Notebooks has also been added, offering an environment for turning raw content and data into immediate insights and outcomes.