Microsoft 365 Copilot Blog articles

Microsoft 365 Copilot readiness and resiliency with SharePoint and M365 Backup/Archive

Sesha_Mani — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 16:12:51 GMT

As AI becomes embedded in everyday work, governance shifts from being a back‑office function to a strategic enabler. Organizations that succeed with Copilot and agents aren’t just moving fast (70% of early Copilot users said they were more productive) – they are prepared, resilient, and deliberate in balancing AI-driven innovation with security and relevance. AI-first modern governance delivers real value across three dimensions: building readiness before AI is turned on, ensuring resilience when the unexpected happens, and driving relevance so people and AI can focus on what matters. Today, we are excited to announce many content governance innovations that moves organizations forward on their frontier transformation.

Innovations across 3Rs Framework: Readiness, Relevance, Resiliency

As your tenant’s digital estate grows exponentially in this AI era, content governance becomes even more important to get it right.

Readiness covers the elements of content permissions and oversharing, lifecycle, and sprawl of content. These elements take center stage in the boardrooms as they could become an inhibitor for organization’s AI transformations.

Relevance touches upon a key aspect of successful Copilot and agent deployments – how good their responses are? The quality of data AI can access directly determines the quality of its outputs. Dormant and inactive content must be put in cold storage and excluded from AI’s visibility. This increases the quality of responses.

Resiliency is all about business continuity, especially in the era where agents are part of the workforce and organizations must be prepared for unforeseen situations, such as an agent going rogue and accidentally deleting content. We are excited to share new capabilities that help your organization stay resilient.

With this backdrop, let us dive into innovations across these three pillars and additional areas:

Readiness

Enhancements in content oversharing controls

SharePoint Admin Agent

Agent governance

Relevance and Resiliency

Microsoft 365 Archive

Microsoft 365 Backup

Inactive site policy

Security and Compliance capabilities

Enterprise Lifecycle

Readiness

Readiness is about ensuring your content is permissioned rightfully, organized in manageable clusters, and has lifecycle guardrails before AI uses it. We are bringing many innovations to Copilot native governance capabilities powered by SAM (SharePoint Advanced Management). Let’s dive in.

1. Enhancements in content oversharing controls

New Admin role: SharePoint Advanced Management Admin role

We heard your feedback for Microsoft 365 and SharePoint admins to be able to see granular insights, for example file level view of permissions scopes, right within SharePoint admin center. Today, we are thrilled to announce a new admin role called SharePoint Advanced Management Admin to empower you to achieve just that.

Catalog management – Generally Available

As your tenant grows, managing the increasing number of sites and OneDrives can quickly become overwhelming. Catalog Management brings order to this complexity by organizing content into meaningful groups aligned to how your business operates, creating a centralized catalog of sites tailored to your needs. With that foundation in place, you can connect governance tools and actions to specific content groups, enabling more targeted oversight and improvements across your environment.

Data Access Governance – Site permissions report for Users and Groups - Generally Available by June 2026

Site Permissions reports now extend to users and Microsoft 365 and Security Groups, enabling admins to instantly identify every site a user/group can access and the scope of that access — closing a critical blind spot in oversharing governance. And clear remediation pathways are available through Restricted Access Control (RAC) and Restricted Content Discovery (RCD) policies. Learn more:

Data Access Governance - Detailed reports for Everyone and EEEU – Generally available

The new Data Access Governance detailed report deliver complete, item-level visibility for "Everyone" and "Everyone except external users" permissions across your entire tenant — empowering admins to identify and remediate oversharing risks at scale, especially as organizations prepare for secure Copilot adoption.
In addition, admins can now customize emails for site access reviews (SAR) with their own messaging, assign review requests directly to site owners OR site admins, ensuring clear accountability. They can choose between sending one combined review email to all recipients or individual emails, improving control over urgency and responses. Email delivery status and recipient lists are visible, removing uncertainty about notifications.

Governance hub for Site Owners – Private Preview

Site owners have a critical role to play in ensuring accuracy of site information, including the site's necessity, its owners, members, permissions, and sharing settings. We’re introducing the Governance Reviews Dashboard in Private Preview, a centralized, actionable view where site owners can see all pending site governance reviews (inactivity, ownership, attestation, access reviews) across the sites they own.

The dashboard shows required actions, due timelines, and site enforcement status and allows site owners to act directly from one place. Combined with consolidated policy notifications, it replaces multiple emails with a single, actionable governance surface.

As you see below, the dashboard highlights the Group-based Permissions Review initiated for the owners of the Contoso Finance site.

Restricted access control (RAC) policy for Site Owners – Generally Available

We are bringing content oversharing controls to site admins!

Site owners/admins can now independently manage RAC (Restricted Access Control) policy on a site, by providing appropriate justification on why the policy is being applied or updated.

RAC policy ensures that only users specified in the control groups will be allowed to access content. It also prevents oversharing of content with users outside of the control groups. Copilot honors RAC policy and thus prevents oversharing.

Restricted content discovery (RCD) policy for Site Owners – Generally Available

Restricted Content Discovery (RCD) policy is very powerful control to prevent content from being discovered in Microsoft 365 Copilot as well as in Declarative agents. Site owners/admins can now independently manage RCD (Restricted Content Discovery) policy on a site, by providing appropriate justification on why the policy is being applied or updated.

2. SharePoint Admin Agent

Introducing the SharePoint Admin Agent, Microsoft’s first-party AI assistant for managing your rapidly growing digital estate across Microsoft 365.

As the content backbone of Microsoft 365 – powering Teams, OneDrive, Loop, Copilot, and more - SharePoint sits at the center of content governance, spanning permissions, lifecycle, resilience, and relevance across users, apps, and now AI agents.

The SharePoint Admin Agent brings these capabilities together in one simple conversational experience, with powerful skills across Storage, Lifecycle, Catalog, Oversharing Management, and Multi-Geo. Admins can ask questions in natural language, gain actionable insights, and take meaningful action without switching portals or writing scripts.

Together, these capabilities help organizations drive the 3Rs of content governance for AI era: Relevance, Readiness, and Resilience.

SharePoint Admin Agent’s Starter Prompts:

You can try various starter prompts categorized under various skills – Permissions, Lifecycle, Storage, and Multi-Geo.

Permissions and Oversharing Management skill – Generally Available

Empowers admins to use natural language to uncover who has access to what, detect oversharing risks, and take targeted action to better protect sensitive content.

Lifecycle skill – Generally Available

Helps admins stay in control of content from creation to end of life by identifying inactive, outdated, and ownerless sites and enabling actions like reviews and archival.

Storage skill – Generally Available

Gives admins a clear view of storage consumption across the tenant so they can spot content sprawl, optimize capacity, and reduce unnecessary costs with confidence.

Multi-Geo skill – Private Preview

Microsoft 365 Multi-Geo enables customers to comply with data residency compliance requirements by ensuring that the data (OneDrive, mailbox, Teams channels & chats, et al) of a user is hosted within a specific geo where the user is located. The new Multi Geo skill in SharePoint Admin agent assists the admin in getting insights on the location status of OneDrive for Business of users and groups.

Recovery Skill – Private Preview

The Recovery skill helps admins leverage the Microsoft 365 Backup tool to find and understand available restore points, so that you can more easily and quickly recover from events that require point in time recovery of your OneDrive or SharePoint data. The initial release focuses on restore point availability if you have enabled Microsoft 365 Backup and have onboarded OneDrive accounts or SharePoint sites. In the future it will provide recommendations based on activity.

3. Agent governance in SharePoint, Teams, and OneDrive

Microsoft Agent 365 is a unified control-plane for agents that enables you to observe, govern and secure agents across your organization – including agents built with Microsoft AI platform and from other partners. Read more.

Specifically, Agent Registry and Agent Map capabilities provides you a breadth view of agents in your organization. To complement that breadth view, we are introducing depth view of agents in the lens of Microsoft 365 resources, specifically SharePoint sites, Teams, and OneDrives. Thrilled to introduce Agent Access Insights and Heatmap.

Agent Access Insights for SharePoint and OneDrive – Generally Available

Agent access insights provide rich information on agents that are accessing SharePoint sites and OneDrive within your tenant. It provides you with details on how much traffic these agents are bringing to your sites and in cases of accidental oversharing it helps you to take necessary actions such as setting up RAC (Restricted Access Control) or RCD (Restricted Content Discovery) policy.

Agent Access Heatmap for SharePoint and OneDrive – Private Preview in May’26

Agents are most effective when working on your organization’s relevant data. Agent Access Heatmap offers rich visual insights on agent access with additional dimensions like sensitivity and agent platform. This gives admins visibility into both the sensitivity of the content being accessed and the frequency of access. Admins now have effective tools for pausing agentic access to a site or scoping more granular access.

Enterprise App Insights – Generally Available

Enterprise Application Insights helps you to gain visibility into how non-Microsoft (3^rd party) enterprise applications are accessing SharePoint and OneDrive content. It provides details on which apps are accessing sites, how frequently these apps are accessing content, permission scope (example: Files.Read) as well as what call pattern (Application Only, User and Application, etc.,) they exhibit, enabling you to take measures to enhance the security of your tenancy.

Restrict access for high privileged applications – Private Preview

Third-party applications with broad reaching permission across all files or all sites in your organization can increase the risk of data disclosure. This new setting allows OneDrive and SharePoint Administrators to enforce finer-grained permissions for 3^rd party applications or define which specific applications are allowed to have these broadly scoped permissions. Via Baseline Security Mode, admins can also gain rich insights into which applications in their organization are having these broad permissions, and which resources are being accessed.

Relevance and Resiliency

Relevance is about making sure people and AI, are working from the right information at the right time. By reducing noise, retiring stale content, and focusing Copilot and agents on high‑value data, governance helps every insight stay accurate, actionable, and meaningful.

Resiliency, on the other hand, is all about business continuity so that in unexpected situations like ransomware incidents or agents accidentally deleting content you can recover quickly.

Microsoft 365 Archive

File level archive for SharePoint – Public Preview

File level archive for SharePoint is in public preview, with controls spanning admin, site, and file-level UI, and through Graph APIs or PowerShell. File level Archive gives you a way to more surgically file away inactive content, saving you 75% off list in storage costs. That content remains searchable by end users or admins, is easily reactivated in place by any user with file read permissions and continues to work seamlessly with Purview functionality. Best of all, you are only charged for usage if your total storage consumption is greater than your pre-allocated quota, and there are no reactivation fees (just like site archiving)!

Purview data lifecycle management retention policy integration is now in Private Preview. With that, you can leverage these retention policies to move files into archive before they are deleted as part of a more wholistic retain-archive-delete data lifecycle management workflow.

Here are a couple of recent customer examples highlighting the adoption of Microsoft 365 Archive:

*Stats based on customers’ testimonials. Read more at aka.ms/M365Archive/Story/Kantar and aka.ms/M365Archive/Story/Dentsu

SharePoint Extra Storage PAYG meter – Public Preview in June 2026

We’re also making it easier than ever to manage and pay for your active data.

SharePoint Extra Storage PAYG meter will roll in public preview June 2026. This PAYG meter allows you to grow your active storage usage with very little operational overhead. It works seamlessly with Archive PAYG so that you are charged the lowest possible blended rate only for storage that you're using on a daily basis (charged monthly). And you are only charged if total active + archive storage usage exceeds your pre-allocated quota. Now there's no need to prepay up to a year in advance for storage packs that you'll grow into later, no need to try to precisely manage that prepaid level through predictive efforts, and no risk of breaching storage payment compliance. Pricing will be shared when the product is in public preview.

Tenant-wide Version Trimming and What-if Analysis – Private Preview in June 2026

The “what if analysis” capability gives you a way to test which versions the trimming feature will delete and what the impact of that action will be. You can then run the actual tenant-level trimming job to free up storage space. This is very similar to the existing site and doclib level trimming capabilities, but expanded for a tenant-wide job. The initial release will be via PowerShell only. Please request to join the private preview by filling out this form.

SharePoint Admin Agent Storage Agentic Skill general availability. As noted above, the Storage Agentic skill rolling into general availability now helps with SharePoint usage understanding and optimization. Stay tuned for more intelligence and automation coming to this skill this year and beyond, including integration of version trimming reports and execution.

2.SAM (SharePoint Advanced Management) Inactive site policy - Generally available

As part of Copilot native governance capabilities, admins can trigger an inactive site policy per tailored criteria, say any sites that are untouched for two years, and then take automatic actions like set read only or archive. Learn more here.

3. Microsoft 365 Backup

In the AI era, the speed at which individuals get work done is greatly accelerated. So too is the speed at which bad actors can take advantage of weaknesses in cyber-attack scenarios, and the speed at which an inadvertent agentic action can take place. Given this, it's more important than ever to put proper resilience capabilities in place. Microsoft 365 Backup was built to do just that, in a uniquely secure, scalable, and performant manner.

For those not familiar, Microsoft 365 Backup provides ultra-fast large scale and backup (near day-zero protection) and recovery capabilities. The solution is a critical component of any M365 customer’s cyber resiliency story. You can onboard the native M365 Backup application via the M365 admin center, or you can leverage a Microsoft 365 Backup Storage app built by the one of the recognized backup partner solutions (just be sure to ask for the version of the partner app built on M365 Backup Storage to get the performance and security benefits of the platform). For example, Veeam Data Cloud Premium, AvePoint Confide Express, or Cohesity with M365 Backup Storage. These vendors provide extended capabilities that deliver a fuller set of capabilities to you to ensure you never have to trade off speed for feature or service coverage. You can get everything you need and more with one of their better-together M365 Backup Storage hybrid solutions.

We heard from our customers and partners about the need to expand and extend native platform capabilities.

Full Workload Backup - Rolling out to public preview

This allows you the ability to fully protect all your SharePoint sites, OneDrive accounts, and/or Exchange Online mailboxes dynamically with a few simple clicks. With full workload backup you can ensure your tenant is fully protected without any operational overhead to detect and add new sites or users. The tool does that for you automatically.

Feature Discovery experience is now generally available

With this experience, you will be notified within the Backup tool whenever we launch a new capability for you adopt. This way, you can benefit from the manageability and enhanced features we release in regular intervals, all within the Backup tool.

Easier discovery of the daily fast restore points is rolling out to general availability

With this update, we're making it easier to find and leverage the ~daily preloaded restore points that provide the fastest restore performance in the Backup tool. These faster restore points for OneDrive and SharePoint are your optimized path to recover large quantities of sites at speeds of up to and beyond 3TB/hr. (with most tenants completing full tenant restores in a matter of hours).

2-year Backup Restore Point Retention in Private Preview

With this capability, you can select to keep the backup recovery points for up to 2 years after they are created. That means you can use Microsoft 365 Backup to go back in time up to 2 years after a restore point is created.

M365 Backup in the government community cloud (aka GCC) is generally available

Now customers that operate in GCC can benefit from the operationally fast and secure capabilities delivered by Backup. Some of the newest features mentioned in this blog are still in the process of reaching GCC but will be there soon.

Granular file/folder browse/restore is generally available

With this, the Backup tool provides a specialized recovery method to find and restore folders/files within a site in a matter of minutes.

Departmental billing is generally available

Departmental billing gives admins the ability to attach distinct Azure billing policies to distinct Backup policies, is also generally available. Now each department in your organization can control and pay for their own backups.

Security & Compliance capabilities in SharePoint & OneDrive

Extended SharePoint Permissions (ESP) – General Availability

Extended SharePoint Permissions (ESP) extends SharePoint’s existing site permission model so that document libraries can use sensitivity labels to ensure access controls follow files when they’re downloaded from SharePoint. Files downloaded from ESP‑enabled libraries can only be opened by users who have access in SharePoint, and access is evaluated dynamically—changing or revoking SharePoint permissions, deleting the file, or deactivating the site automatically removes access to the downloaded copy.

At the same time, files stored within SharePoint libraries that use ESP continue to behave like first‑class SharePoint content. They remain governed by standard Microsoft 365 experiences—including enterprise search, discovery, auditing, and Copilot interactions. Protection is applied without breaking how documents are stored, discovered, or reasoned over inside SharePoint.

To learn more, check out the Configure SharePoint with a sensitivity label to extend permissions to downloaded documents page.

OneNote support for Sensitivity Labels - General Availability

Organizations can now classify and protect OneNote sections using the same sensitivity labels they already rely on across Word, Excel, Outlook, and SharePoint, ensuring sensitive notes are encrypted and access‑controlled according to organizational policy. Labels are applied at the section level, making it easy to protect sensitive content while still allowing teams to collaborate securely across Windows, Mac, Web, iOS, and Android.

Copilot continues to respect user permissions, and with sensitivity labels applied to OneNote sections, organizations gain an additional layer of classification and control—helping ensure AI‑assisted interactions with notes remain compliant with security and privacy expectations.

To learn more, check out Sensitivity Labels in OneNote Now Generally Available | Microsoft Community Hub

Sensitivity label support for videos – Public Preview in May’26

Video has become a core medium for collaboration—capturing meetings, training, product demos, and internal communications. With sensitivity label support for video files, organizations can now begin extending their information protection strategy to video content stored in SharePoint and Microsoft Stream, bringing videos into the same classification framework used for documents.

Users can continue to watch and share videos as they do today, with labeling applied as governance metadata rather than as a disruptive enforcement layer. By introducing labeling for video files, Microsoft lays the groundwork for more comprehensive protection and compliance scenarios over time—helping organizations understand, manage, and govern video content alongside documents, without changing user workflows on day one.

Label inheritance for Teams Meeting Recordings– Public Preview in May’26

Protecting meeting content shouldn’t require extra steps from users. With this update, Teams meeting recordings will automatically inherit the sensitivity label of the meeting itself, ensuring protection is applied by default and stays consistent from the moment a meeting is recorded.

When a meeting is labeled, that label now flows seamlessly to the recording—without any user action. For meetings protected with encryption, recordings are securely playable online but cannot be downloaded, significantly reducing the risk of data exfiltration while still enabling access for authorized participants. This approach balances strong protection with usability, especially for highly sensitive meetings.

Beyond recordings, the inherited label is consistently enforced across all related meeting artifacts, including transcripts, shared documents, and notes. This delivers a more cohesive, end‑to‑end compliance experience for meetings, closing long‑standing gaps where different artifacts could be protected inconsistently.

Microsoft Baseline Security Mode (BSM) 2026 – Private Preview

Security is no longer a point‑in‑time deployment — it’s a continuous journey. At Ignite’25 we introduced Microsoft Baseline security mode 2025.

Today, we’re announcing the Microsoft Baseline Security Mode (BSM) 2026— a major step forward in helping organizations operationalize secure‑by‑default protections across their Microsoft environments. BSM 2026 builds on the foundation introduced in BSM 2025 by expanding workload coverage, deepening integration across services, and applying the security learnings Microsoft has gained through our own internal transformation under the Secure Future Initiative (SFI).

BSM 2026 expands beyond identity and collaboration workloads to include:

Microsoft Intune
Microsoft Purview
Dynamics 365

This expansion also adds a new pillar “Applications” enabling organizations to enforce consistent, baseline protections across even more of their Microsoft cloud estate — reducing configuration drift and ensuring security standards extend beyond productivity into device management, data governance, and business applications.

To join the preview, go here.

Microsoft 365 Information Barriers (IB) enhancements

Microsoft 365 Information Barriers (IB) is a compliance control that prevents specific people or groups in an organization from communicating or collaborating with each other across Microsoft 365 services. It’s mainly used to avoid conflicts of interest and meet FINRA regulatory requirements.

We are happy to announce the general availability of the following enhancements to Microsoft 365 Information barriers:

IB Insights: Insights on usage of IB modes across SharePoint sites and OneDrive are now generally available. These rich insights help you identify and discover IB usage patterns across SharePoint sites and OneDrive.
IB support in Gallatin: Information barriers in Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Online and OneDrive, Microsoft 365 Groups will be generally available in Gallatin environment in June 2026.

Learn about Information Barriers | Microsoft Learn

Microsoft 365 Enterprise lifecycle

Cross-tenant sites migration – Generally Available

Microsoft 365 provides enterprise customers with capabilities to support the full lifecycle of their business, whether it be mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, or consolidation – The M365 Cross-Tenant Data Migration features allow admins to manage migrations at scale, securely, with deep product integration to ensure minimal impact to your daily business.

We’re happy to announce general availability of Cross-tenant SharePoint site migration, allowing admins to quickly migrate Communications Sites, Team Sites, and Group-Connected Sites from one Tenant to another with full fidelity and features such as automatic redirection of sharing links.

M365 Cross-tenant user migration with Teams Chat and Meetings – Private Preview

Adding to the Microsoft 356 Cross-Tenant migration capabilities, we’re excited to announce the preview of Cross-Tenant User Data Migration with Orchestrator, featuring Teams Chat and Meetings migration. This preview brings meetings, 1:1 chat, and group chat migration securely and at-scale, with built-in product integrations to ensure minimal business disruption.

It also helps to simplify your role in managing migrations by ensuring orchestration across OneDrive, Mailboxes, and Teams, and enhances the user's experience when they migrate by making sure that everything, they need to be productive is ready and waiting for them when the migration is complete. Read more.

Multi-Geo: Default geo move – Private Preview

Microsoft 365 Multi Geo provides enterprise customers with the ability to expand their Microsoft 365 presence to multiple geographic regions within a single existing Microsoft 365 Tenant. A Multi Geo tenant has a primary geo and one or more satellite geos where the tenant data (files, mailboxes, Teams chats) are hosted.

As Microsoft opens new data centers in new countries, some customers wish to relocate their primary geo to the new go-local location e.g. a customer may choose to relocate their primary geo for M365 from the broader EUR geo to Germany geo to ensure that the data resides within Germany. Sometimes enterprises change their primary business location to another country and are then required to change primary geo of their M365 tenant.

We are now enabling customers to change their primary geo for SharePoint and OneDrive from a broader region like EUR or APAC to a more specific geo like Germany or Korea respectively. For such moves of primary geo of a tenant, the customer should not have a satellite in the target geo. This capability is currently in private preview.

Restricted site provisioning for Apps – GA

Manage the sprawl and structure of data in your organization by applying this new control that allows you to govern which 3^rd party applications or agents can create OneDrives or SharePoint Sites in your organization. Using restricted OneDrive and SharePoint Site creation for Apps, you can apply allow or deny-based policy, and manage which types of SharePoint site can be created on a per-application basis. Available via SharePoint Online Management Shell, using the command Set-SPORestrictedSiteCreationForApps.

Get started now!

If you are new to Microsoft 365, learn how to try or buy a Microsoft 365 subscription.

For all the private previews mentioned in this blog, you can sign up Private Preview.

M365 Conference – Related Sessions

Watch the featured sessions at the M365 Community Conference in Orlando:

Agent 365: The Control Plane for All Agents, Tue, April 21, 4.15 pm EST
Microsoft Baseline Security Mode: Simplify, Secure, Succeed, Tue, April 21, 4.15 pm EST
New Security and Compliance Features and Reporting for SharePoint Admin, Site Owners and More, Thurs, April 23, 9 am EST
What's New in Security & Compliance for SharePoint, OneDrive, and Teams, Wed, April 22, 2.30 pm EST
Microsoft 365 Multi Geo and Mergers & Acquisitions, Tue, April 21, 1.45 pm EST
From Chaos to AI-Ready in 30 Days: Meet the SharePoint Governance Agent, Grounded by SAM, Tue, April 21, 11 .30 am EST
Secure and Govern Microsoft 365 Copilot - What Every IT Pro Needs to Know, Wed, April 22, 1.30 pm EST

Resources

To learn more about the features in detail, check out the product capabilities documentations below.

To learn more about Microsoft 365 Backup and the ISV solutions built on the M365 Backup Storage platform, check out this recent webinar: Resiliency in the age of AI with Microsoft 365 Backup

Available today: Anthropic Claude Opus 4.7 in Microsoft 365 Copilot

Bas Brekelmans — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 17:45:47 GMT

Today we're expanding model choice in Microsoft 365 Copilot with the addition of Anthropic's latest model—Claude Opus 4.7—now available in Copilot Cowork (Frontier) and Copilot Studio early release cycle environments, and rolling out to Copilot in Excel.

Opus 4.7 is designed to be faster and more precise, with improved ability to select the right tool for the task. It handles complex, multi-step work with rigor—following your instructions more closely, checking its own outputs before responding, and reading images at higher resolution—so Copilot can interpret visual content with more detail and pull in relevant context with Work IQ to take action more precisely.

We are committed to bringing you the latest cutting-edge AI innovation and model choice built for work and tailored to your business needs—with the security, compliance, and privacy that you expect from Microsoft.

Get started today

Claude Opus 4.7 is now available in the model selector in Copilot Cowork, Copilot Studio, and rolling out to Copilot in Excel.

Our team will continue to refine the experience based on your feedback.

For more details, learn more about Claude Opus 4.7 here

Copilot in Word: New Capabilities for Document Workflows

SusanHendrich — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 20:03:51 GMT

Today, we are introducing new Copilot in Word capabilities for legal, finance, and compliance professionals doing high stakes, and detail intensive work. Whether reviewing contracts or finalizing policy documents, Copilot can track changes when an audit trail is needed. This release supports the way professionals work, where document integrity is non-negotiable.

These features are grounded in Work IQ, the intelligence layer that personalizes Microsoft 365 Copilot to you and your organization, so responses reflect your content, context, and priorities. Built on your data, Copilot in Word delivers fast, reliable answers you can trust. It operates within the Microsoft 365 trust boundary, preserving sensitivity labels, enforcing data loss prevention policies, and keeping your data secure.

What's New and Why it Matters

Copilot works directly on the document — right where you and your team already collaborate. Every feature below is native to Word, respects your formatting, and preserves your collaboration history. New features available today include:

Track Changes with word-level precision. With Copilot in Word, changes are visible by default, and now it is easy to turn track changes on from Copilot, so edits are always transparent, auditable, and granular.

Contextual comments. Add, read, reply to, and manage comment threads anchored to the correct text with Copilot, keeping collaboration context intact.

Table of Contents. Insert and update tables of content using Word's built-in heading types. Structure stays accurate as the document evolves.

Dynamic page features. Insert and manage headers, footers, columns, margins and dynamic fields like page numbers and dates that automatically refresh with edits.

Progress messages. For multi-step edits, Copilot shows what it's working on in real time, building trust and transparency.

How it Works

Here are example prompts to experience Copilot in Word’s new capabilities:

1. Revise with precision. Turn on Track Changes and tighten the Executive Summary. Clarify any vague words and spell out acronyms but don’t rewrite whole sentences unless necessary.

2. Flag items for review. In the Risk Factors section, flag anything that’s unclear and add comments where we need Finance validation or legal signoff based on what came up in last week’s review meeting.

3. Format for readability. Create a table of content, then add a header with the document title and today’s date, and add page numbers to the footer.

4. Review pending changes. Go through all unresolved tracked changes and comments and create a short ‘Review Summary’ section at the top that captures (1) proposed changes in the document and (2) open questions from comments.

Get Started

These new capabilities are available today on Copilot in Word on Windows desktop through the Frontier program, on the Office Insiders Beta Channel. Support for Word for the web and Mac is coming soon.

Join Frontier to get early access to Microsoft’s latest AI innovations.

Latest enhancements for Copilot security, management, and analytics

Sophie_Ke — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 21:31:46 GMT

As Copilot becomes a daily workflow for more teams, IT and security leaders need clear, practical controls to deploy and manage confidently—without slowing down adoption or compromising governance.

Let's take a closer look at the new enhancements providing built-in security, management, and governance controls to help give you greater visibility and control over your Copilot deployment.

Secure and Govern Microsoft 365 Copilot – a Foundational Deployment Guide

We are excited to share that we have updated and expanded the deployment blueprint to address Oversharing into the Secure and Govern Microsoft 365 Copilot foundational deployment guidance! This guide provides these three essential steps for establishing a secure and governed foundation for Copilot:

Remediate oversharing
Implement reliable guardrails
Meet AI-related regulatory obligations

Delivering a foundational path to help every organization get started with Copilot with confidence. Read more and download the blueprint at aka.ms/Copilot/SecureGovern!

As part of this deployment guidance, here are the features from Microsoft Purview to help you secure and govern Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention to safeguard Copilot prompts

Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention (DLP) for Microsoft 365 Copilot to safeguard prompts helps organizations prevent sensitive information from being used in Copilot prompts. Admins can define policies that detect and restrict prompts containing sensitive information types (SITs), ensuring that Copilot does not respond to such inputs or use them in any web grounding. Generally available.

Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention for web queries to safeguard sensitive web search

We are also expanding Microsoft Purview DLP for Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Chat to safeguard web searches containing sensitive data. Admins now have the option to define policies that detect and restrict prompts containing sensitive information types (SITs) from being used for web search, while allowing the response to be grounded in Work IQ. This capability currently extends to Microsoft 365 Copilot and agents built in Copilot Studio that are published to Microsoft 365 Copilot. Now available in Public preview.

Microsoft Purview: Data Security Posture Management: Remediate overshared files

Now, in addition to identifying sharing links across SharePoint sites, this enhanced capability enables bulk remediation by allowing admins to remediate or disable overshared links at scale. This helps organizations proactively reduce data exposure, strengthen compliance posture, and ensure sensitive files are only accessible to the right people. Generally available.

Purview in Microsoft 365 Admin Center

Finally, AI and IT admins in Microsoft 365 Admin Center can gain visibility around oversharing risks and drive remediations, understand how many sensitive copilot interactions are protected, and turn on Microsoft Purview DLP for Copilot right there. This enables secure adoption of Copilot and collaboration with the Security team. Generally available.

Organizational messages enhancements

Organizational Messages now includes email as a delivery channel, expanding beyond existing surfaces such as the Windows Taskbar, Windows Notifications, Windows Spotlight, and Teams Popovers. Email enables high‑confidence reach by delivering critical messages directly to users’ inbox. It also supports targeted, timely communication for important updates such as adoption nudges while providing a familiar, auditable channel IT can trust. Rolling out to general availability this month.

Usage‑based targeting enables IT admins to drive Copilot adoption by delivering Organizational Messages to users based on real usage behavior, not static group membership. By leveraging dynamic, pre‑defined usage segments, admins can reach the right users with timely, relevant guidance that accelerates awareness, engagement, and value from Copilot investments. Rolling out to general availability this month.

Copilot Dashboard: Expanded access and deeper insights

The Copilot Dashboard is now available to customers with at least 1 Microsoft 365 Copilot license, and includes new capabilities that help you understand how Copilot is being used, how it is changing work patterns, and where it’s delivering value. Analyze how your organization uses both Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Chat so you can make informed decisions about rollout and enablement. Metrics include total users, usage trends, adoption by group, intensity, retention, and app-level breakdowns. Generally available.

User satisfaction tracking at scale

Understand how users perceive the value of Microsoft 365 Copilot by analyzing real‑time feedback captured in their natural workflow. This feature aggregates thumbs‑up and thumbs‑down reactions to Copilot responses across Microsoft 365 apps, helping you track satisfaction trends over time and compare satisfaction across groups. These insights help you identify where Copilot is resonating—and where additional guidance or enablement may be needed. Generally available.

New Intent Patterns Across Microsoft 365 Apps

Get a deeper understanding of how employees use Copilot to get work done. New intent‑based metrics categorize individual user prompts into common intent categories to better understand Copilot usage. Analyze common Copilot tasks and usage patterns, including activity in the Microsoft 365 Copilot app, Edge, and OneNote, as well as key scenarios in Outlook, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint such as suggested reply, translate, coach, and clean data. These metrics are available in the Copilot Dashboard and advanced reporting in Viva Insights to support deeper behavioral analysis. Rolling out to public preview this month.

Export Copilot Dashboard Data

Extend your analysis beyond the dashboard by exporting Copilot metrics for custom reporting in your own reporting tools. You can download de‑identified Copilot Dashboard data as a CSV file, including weekly metrics covering the past six months, to support offline analysis or integration with other analytics tools. This makes it easier to tailor insights to your organization’s specific reporting needs. Rolling out to general availability this month.

Conclusion & next steps

These latest updates are designed to help IT administrators and security professionals address practical needs when deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot: establish a secure and governed foundation, drive adoption, and understand where it’s delivering value. Learn more in the Get started deploying Copilot and agents playbook and at aka.ms/Copilot/SecureGovern.

What’s New in Microsoft 365 Copilot | March 2026

Seth_Patton — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 15:30:00 GMT

Welcome to the March 2026 edition of What's new in Microsoft 365 Copilot! Every month, we highlight new features and enhancements to keep Microsoft 365 admins up to date with Copilot features that help your users be more productive and efficient in the apps they use every day.

Let’s take a closer look at what’s new this month:

User capabilities:

Video recap of meetings in Copilot Chat
Researcher, app branding, and Notebooks improvements for Microsoft 365 Copilot app
AI in SharePoint
Audio recap in more languages for Copilot in Teams
Work IQ context and editing local workbooks with Copilot in Excel
Citations display for Copilot in Word
Standardize format with Copilot in PowerPoint

Copilot controls:

Safeguard web searches and prompts with Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention
Manage authoritative sources, high-usage users, and domain exclusion in Microsoft 365 admin center
Tracking satisfaction, intent, and usage with Copilot Dashboard
Copilot Tuning templates in Agent Builder

User capabilities

Video recap of meetings in Copilot Chat

When users ask Copilot Chat to summarize a meeting, they’ll now get a video recap alongside the written recap. Video recap transforms the meeting summary into a narrated highlight reel, combining key takeaways with short, relevant clips that bring important moments to life. Users can quickly catch up and see curated segments from the discussion without sifting through a full recording. Video recap is available in Copilot Chat and Microsoft Clipchamp web player for meetings that are at least 10 minutes long with recording enabled. Video recap will launch initially in English only. This feature is rolling out in March.

Researcher, app branding, and Notebooks improvements for Microsoft 365 Copilot app

Researcher in Microsoft 365 Copilot introduces new output formats that let users generate polished reports in their preferred formats. Users can convert Researcher reports to PowerPoint, a PDF, an infographic, or an audio overview, adapting insights to every audience in one click, without redoing the work. This feature rolled out in March.

Admins can now add a branded footer to the Microsoft 365 Copilot app for their organization. This footer appears at the bottom of the Copilot Chat screen in the app and helps build trust that they are using an approved, organization-managed AI tool. The footer can be configured for users in the Microsoft 365 admin center. This feature rolled out in March.

Copilot Notebooks features a new, revamped user experience that makes navigating and working in Notebooks more intuitive. The updates bring references, content in Copilot Pages, and Copilot chats into one seamless, side-by-side view. Other updates include richer reference sets, a new Overview page, faster artifact creation with Copilot, and easier sharing with teammates. This feature rolled out in February.

Audio recap in more languages for Copilot in Teams

Audio recap is now available in seven additional languages, so global teams can easily catch up on meetings in the language that works best for them. In addition to English, users can now generate and listen to AI-powered audio summaries in Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish. Whether users are commuting, multitasking, or just have a preference for listening over reading, audio recap delivers the key discussion points, decisions, and action items from one or multiple meetings—now in more languages. This feature rolled out in March.

AI in SharePoint

What was introduced as Knowledge Agent in September 2025 is now refreshed and rebranded with new capabilities as AI in SharePoint. AI in SharePoint brings agentic building and content intelligence directly into SharePoint. Teams can plan and build sites, libraries, pages, and lists using natural language. Rather than requiring technical expertise, this capability makes work in SharePoint more accessible by enabling users to describe what they want to build in plain language. AI in SharePoint rolled out to Public Preview in March and is rolling out worldwide in May.

In addition to the new planning and building experiences, AI in SharePoint automatically extracts and applies metadata, adapts libraries as content changes, and helps ensure information is structured to support accurate Copilot and agent experiences across Microsoft 365. The preview is powered by Anthropic’s Claude model. These features rolled out to Public Preview in March and are rolling out worldwide in May.

Work IQ context and editing local workbooks with Copilot in Excel

When users are editing with Copilot in Excel, Work IQ automatically brings in the most relevant context—from emails, meetings, chats, files—without requiring users to manually reference them. This helps Copilot make more accurate, multi‑step edits that reflect the latest context about users, their work, and their relationships. This feature rolled out in March.

Copilot can now make multi-step edits to modern Excel workbooks stored locally on devices across Windows and Mac platforms. This gives users the flexibility to work with Copilot no matter where their files are located, eliminating the requirement to store files in the cloud. This feature rolled out in March.

Citations display for Copilot in Word

Now when users are editing with Copilot in Word, citations are automatically displayed whenever responses incorporate information from web content or Work IQ sources. This helps users easily verify and track the origins of content, improving transparency and confidence in the document’s accuracy, and ensuring reliable referencing for all edits with Copilot. This feature rolled out in March.

Standardize format with Copilot in PowerPoint

By enabling ‘Edit with Copilot’ in PowerPoint, users can quickly standardize a presentation’s appearance by automatically updating fonts, font sizes, and bullet styles across all slides at once, eliminating the need for tedious, manual adjustments. This streamlines the formatting process, ensuring a polished and consistent look throughout the presentation, so users can focus more on their content and message, confident that their slides maintain a professional and cohesive design. This feature rolled out on Web in March, and is rolling out on Windows and Mac soon.

Copilot controls

Safeguard web searches and prompts with Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention

Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention (DLP) for Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Chat is expanding to safeguard web searches containing sensitive data. This real-time control helps organizations mitigate data leakage and oversharing risks by preventing users from using sensitive information in Copilot prompts for web search, while allowing the response to be grounded in internal data sources. This feature rolled out to Public Preview in March and is rolling out worldwide in June.

Microsoft Purview DLP is further expanding to safeguard prompts, helping organizations prevent sensitive information from being used in Copilot prompts. Admins can define policies that detect and restrict Copilot from responding to prompts, connecting to internal data sources, and performing web searches, if the prompt contains sensitive data such as financial data, national IDs, bank numbers, or custom SITs. This feature is rolling out in March.

Manage authoritative sources, high-usage users, and domain exclusion in Microsoft 365 admin center

Admins can now manage authoritative sources within the Copilot Search experience in the Microsoft 365 admin center. This capability enables admins to designate SharePoint Online sites as authoritative content for their organization, helping enhance relevance and ranking of these sites in Copilot search results. This feature is rolling out in April.

High‑usage users is a new category that helps IT and finance teams quickly identify individuals driving high consumption across Copilot usage‑based services (i.e. pay-as-you-go services). By surfacing high‑usage patterns in one place, admins gain early visibility into potential cost drivers, enabling faster investigation and informed license optimization decisions. This insight helps organizations better manage spend, improve license allocation, and ensure usage aligns with business value, without slowing down AI adoption and business process innovation. This feature rolled out in March.

Domain exclusion for web grounding lets admins specify a limited set of sites to exclude from web grounding in Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Chat, giving IT teams control over which external web sources Copilot can reference when generating responses, supporting compliance and content governance requirements.

This feature is rolling out in April.

Tracking satisfaction, intent, and usage with Copilot Dashboard

Analysts can now track user satisfaction of Microsoft 365 Copilot at scale. In the Copilot Dashboard, analysts can understand how users perceive Copilot value by analyzing the breakdown of thumbs up and thumbs down for Copilot responses, as well as see trends over time and breakdowns by group. This feature rolled out in March.

Admins can now use new metrics to better understand common user intents and usage patterns for Copilot across Microsoft 365 apps in the Copilot Dashboard and Advanced Analysis in Viva Insights. Using these metrics, admins can track Copilot tasks in the Microsoft 365 Copilot app, Edge, and OneNote, and analyze key intent-based scenarios in Outlook, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint—including suggested reply, translate, coach, and clean data. This feature is rolling out in April.

Copilot Tuning templates in Agent Builder

Copilot Tuning introduces new templates in Agent Builder designed for tasks such as drafting complex documents, validating documents against guidelines, and editing to match a distinct writing style. Users with Copilot Tuning enabled can further customize the template-based agents by tuning the context, tools, and underlying models with their organization's proprietary data, processes, and standards, empowering teams with customized agents aligned to how the organization works. This feature will be available to enterprises with at least 5,000 Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses, will roll out to Frontier in April, and will roll out worldwide in June.

Did you know? The Microsoft 365 Roadmap is where you can get the latest updates on productivity apps and intelligent cloud services. Microsoft 365 Copilot release notes is where you can see the Microsoft 365 Copilot features that are generally available (Current Channel for Microsoft 365 apps) and specific to each platform. Check back regularly to see what features are in development, coming soon and generally available. Please note that the dates mentioned in this article are tentative and subject to change.

Introducing multi-model intelligence in Researcher

gauravanand — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 13:00:00 GMT

Today, Researcher—Microsoft 365 Copilot's deep research agent for work—takes a significant step forward. Designed to tackle complex research in the flow of work, Researcher now goes further with two new multi-model capabilities that raise the bar for accuracy, depth, and confidence: Critique and Council.

Critique is a new multi model deep research system designed for complex research tasks. It separates generation from evaluation and utilizes a combination of models from Frontier labs including Anthropic and OpenAI. One model leads the generation phase, planning the task, iterating through retrieval, and producing an initial draft, while a second model focuses on review and refinement, acting as an expert reviewer before the final report is produced. Our evaluations show that this architecture exceeds traditional single model approaches and delivers best in class deep research quality. This design provides clear optionality across generator and reviewer roles, with the ability to support and expand these roles over time as the system evolves.

DRACO (Deep Research Accuracy, Completeness, and Objectivity) benchmark scores across 100 complex research tasks spanning 10 domains. All results are sourced from the original paper [Zhong et al., arXiv:2602.11685 (Feb. 2026)], except for Researcher with Critique. Researcher with Critique achieves a substantial improvement of +7.0 points (SEM ±1.90) in the aggregated score, +13.88% over Perplexity Deep Research (Claude Opus 4.6 model), the best system reported in the paper.

Council brings multiple model responses side-by-side in the Researcher experience. Additionally, a cover letter provides valuable insights on where the models agree, where they diverge, and the unique insights each brings on the topic.

Critique & how it works

Many AI research workflows rely on a single model to handle planning, sourcing, synthesis, and writing, but Critique takes a different approach by dividing responsibilities between two AI partners—one optimized for deep exploration and structured synthesis, and a second focused on validating claims, improving presentation and strengthening the structure. By giving evaluation as much emphasis as generation, this architecture creates a powerful feedback loop that delivers higher-quality results across factual accuracy, analytical breadth, and presentation. Critique will be the default experience in Researcher, available when Auto is selected in the model picker.

Critique follows a review process similar to those conducted in academic and professional research settings. It’s built around rubric‑based evaluation—a structured review that focuses on strengthening the report without turning the reviewer into a second author. The reviewer examines the report from several angles and then generates an enhanced report, concentrating on the following dimensions:

- Source Reliability Assessment. The reviewer emphasizes the use of reputable, authoritative, and domain‑appropriate sources, prioritizing evidence that is verifiable and suitable for your research context.

- Report Completeness. The reviewer evaluates if the final report satisfies the intent of your request comprehensively with relevant and unique insights.

- Strict Evidence Grounding Enforcement. The reviewer enforces a conservative grounding standard, requiring every key claim to be anchored to reliable sources with precise citations—strengthening factual accuracy, reliability, and trust in the final report.

Performance Validation on the DRACO Benchmark

We evaluated Critique on the DRACO benchmark (Deep Research Accuracy, Completeness, and Objectivity)—100 complex deep research tasks across 10 domains, introduced by researchers from Perplexity and academia in February 2026 [Zhong et al.arXiv:2602.11685]. These research tasks originate from anonymized real-world usage patterns executed in a large-scale research system. The system responses are graded against task-specific rubrics along four dimensions: factual accuracy, breadth and depth of analysis, presentation quality, and citation quality.

The DRACO results were evaluated using OpenAI’s GPT-5.2 as the LLM judge - the strictest of the three judge models reported in the paper. We applied the same evaluation protocol and configuration published in the benchmark paper, helping ensure an apples-to-apples comparison. Across all measurements, results were computed by averaging scores over the full DRACO dataset, with each question evaluated across five independent runs.

To better understand the advantages of Critique, we compared the new architecture with the single-model Researcher (using the same GPT-5.2 judge) across the four evaluation axes that DRACO defines.

We see the largest improvement in Breadth and Depth of Analysis (+3.33), followed by Presentation Quality (+3.04) and Factual Accuracy (+2.58). All dimensions show statistically significant improvements (paired t-test, p < 0.0001).

Critique pushes Researcher to identify missing analytical angles, close coverage gaps, sharpen formulations, and produce responses with stronger organization and clearer narrative flow. This accounts for the substantial improvements to the breadth and depth and presentation quality scores. The factual accuracy gain shows that Critique is challenging weak claims and enforcing higher precision. Citation quality improvements primarily reflect better use of existing sources, as the new layer emphasizes evidence selection and citation rather than increasing source coverage.

The DRACO query set spans 10 domains across medicine, technology, law and more. Researcher with Critique achieves higher scores than the single-model approach across domains, reinforcing its value as a horizontal quality layer for Researcher. At the domain level, statistically significant improvements are observed in 8 of the 10 domains (paired t-test, p < 0.05). The exceptions are Academic (p=0.27) and Needle-in-a-Haystack (p=0.16), both of which exhibit high variance.

Council & how it works

Council is an alternative approach, designed for side-by-side comparison across multiple models. Available when Model Council is selected in the model picker in Researcher, Council runs an Anthropic and OpenAI model simultaneously, with each model producing a complete, standalone report—surfacing facts, citations, and analytical framings that the other may overlook or weigh differently. Once both reports are generated, a dedicated judge model evaluates the reports to create a distilled summary of key findings and highlights where the models meaningfully agree or diverge - including differences in magnitude, framing, or interpretation - and calls out unique contributions from each model. 

Get started with Critique and Council in Researcher

Today, Critique and Council are broadly available in the Frontier program. Learn how to power your Frontier Transformation with Copilot and agents, and experience the power of multi-model intelligence.

Announcing the Microsoft Copilot Connector v2 for Veeva Vault

wbaer — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 15:03:17 GMT

Next steps in the Microsoft-Veeva AI Partnership

Target release: Q2 2026 | Preview expected June 2026

Life sciences customers manage some of the largest, most complex, regulated data environments in Microsoft Copilot. As they test connectors across millions of documents, one requirement stands out: not just access, but how quickly newly approved content appears in Copilot results.

Current connectors excel at discovery. The Microsoft Copilot Connector v2 for Veeva Vault takes this further—delivering improved freshness and enterprise scale so Copilot always reflects the latest approved content with predictable day-to-day performance. (Freshness: time from Veeva Vault approval to Copilot availability.)

This release represents the next evolution of Microsoft’s connector for Veeva Vault and introduces two foundational upgrades—incremental crawling for faster content refresh and tight integration with Veeva’s Direct Data API—plus a standardized Graph Connector Agent (GCA) model across all current and future Copilot connector applications. Together, these changes unlock enterprise-grade Copilot performance with current, reliable, and predictable results on Veeva content.

What’s new in the Microsoft Copilot Connector v2 for Veeva Vault

1. Incremental Crawling

Instead of reprocessing the entire Veeva Vault on every crawl, the connector now has the ability to process only what has changed. This dramatically improves freshness, reduces load on Veeva and Microsoft 365, and enables predictable update cycles aligned to business needs.

When to use the current v1.5 connectors: For smaller content footprints, low-change environments where customers do not require incremental crawling, the current v1.5 connectors remain the recommended approach. This path is typically a good fit for smaller Vault deployments, stable content sets with infrequent approvals/updates, pilot or proof-of-concept rollouts, and use cases where same-day content freshness is not a business requirement.

2. Veeva Direct Data API Adoption

The connector now uses Veeva’s modern Direct Data API—a high-throughput, read-only interface for bulk Vault data extraction. This aligns with Veeva’s philosophy of leveraging fit-for-purpose integration approach, delivers timely access to changed data via scheduled incremental files, boosts overall reliability, and significantly reduces Vault API calls (lowering Vault load and quota risk).

3. Graph Connector Agent

Introduces a unified Graph Connector Agent (GCA) model that works consistently across all Veeva Vault applications. This includes today’s available Copilot connectors—(for Veeva PromoMats, Veeva QualityDocs, and Veeva RIM)—as well as future connectors currently under consideration, such as Veeva CTMS and, Veeva Vault CRM, and other Vault applications. The unified model simplifies deployment, operations, and lifecycle management by using a single agent architecture. Delivered within the Microsoft 365 Copilot ecosystem at no additional licensing cost, the GCA follows the same self-installation approach as former Microsoft Copilot connectors for Veeva Vault, enabling customers and partners to deploy independently without Microsoft-managed onboarding. Note: Requires a Windows device hosted on-premises or within customer-managed infrastructure.

Schema and property model changes

To improve performance and reliability, the property model for Veeva content in Microsoft Graph has been streamlined.

Built for Veeva Vault applications: The GraphConnector Agent uses a unified schema approach that works across Veeva apps, without assuming a single data model.

Minimal defaults, customization by design: Only common fields (such as ID, name, and content) are provided by default; customers can extend the schema with app- and domain-specific properties as needed.

Avoids one-size-fits-all schemas: Reducing default properties from ~20–30 to ~5–10 prevents unnecessary fields when supporting diverse Vault apps.
Reliability and scale as outcomes: Fewer enforced defaults naturally improve crawl stability and operational efficiency, while preserving full extensibility through custom fields.

Target release timing and next steps

The Microsoft Copilot Connector v2 for Veeva Vault release is targeted for Q2 2026, with preview expected in June 2026 and general availability to follow validation and customer feedback.

For customers and partners, we recommend:

Identifying priority Vault workloads where Copilot can drive the most impact.

Planning infrastructure for the GCA on-premises installation and engaging Microsoft FastTrack or your preferred partner for optional installation support.

Reviewing existing schemas to decide which properties should remain default and which should be modeled as custom fields in the new connector.

Copilot Notebooks: Enhancements to support creation, collaboration and learning

ezrapark — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 15:09:02 GMT

Copilot Notebooks are AI-powered workspaces for a project or topic built on your reference materials—bringing together your work context behind a project in one place for you, your team members, and Copilot to collaborate on. Whether you need a mind map to better understand a complex concept or a stakeholder-ready presentation, these new features offer fresh opportunities to support creation, collaboration, and learning.

Now available in the Frontier program, these features enhance the way you work in Notebooks for a collaborative and powerful experience.

Take a closer look at what’s coming to Frontier.

Create documents and presentations from your notebook

Copilot Notebooks now also becomes a reference source and workspace for chat-first artifact creation, letting you move easily from collaboration into app native work. Create documents and presentations directly from your notebook with Word and PowerPoint agents that use references already in your workspace.

Use quick create to access artifact creation

Without switching context between tools, Copilot can create Word documents with the Word agent. Quickly generate documents like reports, summaries, and proposals straight from your notebook content and references so you can leverage your notebook into high quality documents. Specify what you need in your prompt, and customize document type, main topic, audience and themes to create a first draft that fits your purpose and audience. As a native Word file, you can then polish your document into a final draft in Word.

Create a PowerPoint deck for audiences, team, or executive meetings with the PowerPoint agent. Copilot can pull from notes, references, and structure already in your notebook to help draft slides that are consistent, ready to refine, and preloaded with visuals. Choose the primary focus, level of detail, slide deck length, and design theme and PowerPoint agent can create a presentation for your unique request. The PowerPoint agent creates a fully editable PowerPoint file as its output, so you can refine your presentation further in PowerPoint as you wish.

Continue editing with Copilot while working in your Notebook

As you chat with Copilot to get answers to your questions or generate new insights, you can use the Edit in Pages option to add that response into a Copilot Page in your notebook. And now, you can continue to leverage Copilot to iterate and refine the content further. Just ask Copilot for the edits and changes you want to make and see the content update directly on the Page.

Share Notebooks More Easily

Copilot Notebooks isn’t just a space for you and Copilot to collaborate, team members can join your notebook as well. Copilot makes it easy for teams to collaborate in real-time and share knowledge in one place. Instead of adding each person individually, it is now simpler to collaborate with larger teams by sharing directly to existing Microsoft 365 Groups in your company. Notebooks can be shared with the group all at once, and as people come and go from the group, access will be automatically updated accordingly.

Bring whole SharePoint folders and OneNote notebooks as references

Add references to your notebook, now including SharePoint Sites and folders

Your notebook can draw from the files you already use every day—Word documents, PowerPoint decks, Excel spreadsheets, OneNote pages, PDFs, and Copilot Pages. And we’re continuing to expand the list of supported references, so it’s easier to bring the right context—and your team’s shared knowledge—into one place.

In addition to being able to bring individual OneNote pages as references, you can now bring a whole OneNote notebook for Copilot to leverage. You can also go beyond individual files and point your notebook to SharePoint sites and folders, giving Copilot the ability to reason across your team’s documents and enable it to generate smarter answers, insights, and content. Instead of manually adding references one by one or creating a copy of your file to upload, link to a SharePoint site page or an entire SharePoint folder directly in your notebook. Copilot respects existing Microsoft 365 permissions while tapping into shared knowledge, historical context, and supporting files. As the content evolves in SharePoint, your notebook stays in sync automatically, so Copilot will work with the latest, most relevant context as your project progresses.

Understand your content in new ways

Copilot Notebooks can help you leverage AI to quickly build an understanding of the content in the notebook in different ways. In addition to asking Copilot questions about your notebook like "flag key action items or decisions that need attention" and generating an audio overview for a podcast-style summary to listen to, now there are new ways to interact with your notebook for deeper understanding.

Explore your notebook’s content and see how key themes, concepts, or topics connect visually through an interactive mind map. Copilot can generate a map of key topics and relationships from your notebook, helping you understand how information fits together at a glance. See connections, view quick summaries of individual nodes, and ask Copilot to help explain a concept further. Mind maps help you make sense of your complex work.

New learning tools in study guide help you learn faster from your notebook. Start with a summary, explore deep-dive topic pages, and test your knowledge with flashcards and quizzes. Whether you’re preparing for a meeting, onboarding on a new project, or learning unfamiliar material, Notebooks can help you get up to speed and build your expertise.

Use Study guide to quickly create summaries, topic pages, flashcards and more

Explore the new features

Together, these updates make Copilot Notebooks a more powerful workspace for your personal knowledge and team collaboration. Add references to a notebook like Word documents, PowerPoint decks, Excel spreadsheets, OneNote pages, PDFs, Copilot Pages, and now SharePoint content and OneNote notebooks, explore your notes with the overview page, audio overview, mind maps and learning tools, generate Word documents and PowerPoint presentations, continue editing with Copilot while working in your notebook, and share notebooks with your team and groups.

These features are now available to users in the Frontier program—learn more about Frontier at https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365-copilot/frontier-program.

Microsoft 365 Copilot app learning series: Real‑world scenarios for your workday

Patrick_Gan — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 17:53:46 GMT

If you’ve heard more about Microsoft 365 Copilot and wondering where to begin, you’re not alone. With AI becoming part of everyday work, many people are looking for guidance that’s practical, approachable, and grounded in real workflows—not just feature lists.

That’s why we’re excited to introduce a new training video series designed to help you get started with the Microsoft 365 Copilot app, one step at a time. This series is built for people who want to understand how Copilot fits into a real workday—whether you’re brand new or just starting to explore what’s possible.

What this series covers

Across four short, focused videos, we walk through how Microsoft 365 Copilot supports everyday work—from starting your day, to running better meetings, to catching up when you miss one.

Each session is practical and scenario‑based, showing how Copilot works across the Microsoft 365 Copilot app, Microsoft Teams, and Outlook.

Here’s what you can expect:

Getting started with the Microsoft 365 Copilot app: A guided tour

Start with the basics. This introductory session walks through the features in the Microsoft 365 Copilot app that don't require a subscription. It shows how the Microsoft 365 Copilot app serves as a central hub for your workday.

You’ll learn how to:

Access the Microsoft 365 Copilot app
Find and open apps like Outlook, Teams, and Word
Search for files and get quick summaries
Use Copilot Chat for web‑grounded research and brainstorming
Create and save content like pages and images

This session focuses on getting comfortable quickly, and highlights features that are available to everyone—including experiences that don’t require an additional Copilot subscription.

Presenter: David Stephens

Link: https://aka.ms/M365CopilotAppSeries/S1E1

Run more focused meetings with Facilitator Agent in Microsoft Teams

Meetings are a part of everyone's work life, but you can make the time spent in them more efficient! In this session, you’ll see how the Facilitator agent in Microsoft Teams acts like a virtual teammate—tracking agendas, capturing notes, and surfacing action items in real time, saving you time during and after the meeting.

You’ll walk through:

Adding an agenda before a meeting
Keeping discussions on track
Capturing decisions and follow‑ups automatically
Leaving meetings with shared clarity on what happens next

Presenters: Alice Lu and Vibha Valsan

Link: https://aka.ms/M365CopilotAppSeries/S1E2

Missed a meeting? Learn how to catch up with Microsoft 365 Copilot

Missed a meeting? Double‑booked? Returning from vacation?

This session shows how Copilot helps you catch up fast. You’ll see how to:

Use meeting recording and recap features
Jump directly to key moments
Turn meeting discussions into actionable documents
Share outputs with your team where they already work

Presenters: Constance Gervais and Jay Ongg

Link: https://aka.ms/M365CopilotAppSeries/S1E3

How Executive Admins get more done with Microsoft 365 Copilot

The final session brings everything together through the lens of an Executive Assistant’s workday. You'd learn how they use Microsoft 365 Copilot to manage busy schedules and keep their boss's day organized and on track.

You’ll see real examples of how Copilot helps with:

Preparing for meetings
Drafting and refining emails
Planning travel and events
Summarizing emails and meetings
Finding information across files, chats, and sites

Presenters: Amy LaFranca and Heather Goetz

Link: https://aka.ms/M365CopilotAppSeries/S1E4

And watch the Live AMA for Microsoft 365 Copilot app on demand now to get answered to frequently asked questions and more!

Microsoft 365 Copilot Declarative Agents Are Getting Smarter with GPT‑5.2

Shikha_Varshney — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 16:00:00 GMT

We’re continuing to improve the intelligence behind Microsoft 365 Copilot Declarative Agents. As part of this effort, Declarative Agents are being updated to use GPT‑5.2, a newer large language model designed to deliver higher‑quality responses across complex agent scenarios.

This update focuses on improving how agents reason, plan, and produce structured outputs - helping them perform better on the tasks that matter most to your organization.

Note: This update is gradually rolling out to all the tenants worldwide. Rollout is expected to be completed by end of March 2026.

What’s new with GPT‑5.2?

GPT‑5.2 brings meaningful quality improvements for agent experiences that involve:

Reasoning and multi‑step tasks
Better handling of workflows that require planning, iteration, or decision‑making across multiple steps.
Tool usage and orchestration
More reliable tool calling and coordination when agents interact with data sources, APIs, or enterprise tools.
Document analysis
Improved comprehension and synthesis of longer or more complex documents.
Structured, well‑formatted outputs
Clearer tables, summaries, and formatted responses that are easier to consume and act on.

What does this mean for customers?

Because the underlying model is being upgraded, you may notice:

Improved response quality across many agent scenarios
Subtle changes in behavior for some prompts or workflows, especially those that rely on reasoning, formatting, or tool usage

These changes are expected and reflect the model’s improved capabilities. In most cases, agents should perform the same or better than before.

How will this update roll out?

The GPT‑5.2 update is rolling out gradually. Not all users within a tenant will receive the update at the same time. This phased approach helps ensure a smooth transition and allows us to monitor quality closely as the update expands.

What should admins and agent builders do?

No configuration changes are required to receive this update. However, we recommend a few simple steps to ensure a smooth experience:

For admins

Inform agent builders that a model update is rolling out so they can plan light validation.

For agent builders

Validate your most important scenarios
Run a quick check on your top workflows (for example, your top 5–10 prompts or use cases).
Confirm expectations are still met
Pay attention to accuracy, tone, reasoning, and formatting.
Adjust agent instructions if needed
Small prompt or instruction refinements can help agents take full advantage of GPT‑5.2’s capabilities.

Share feedback to help us improve

Your feedback plays a critical role in improving Copilot experiences. If you notice issues or unexpected behavior:

Use thumbs up / thumbs down on agent responses
Include #GPT52 in your feedback description to help us route it quickly

This helps our teams identify patterns, address issues faster, and continue improving quality.

Looking ahead

GPT‑5.2 is another step forward in making Copilot Declarative Agents more capable, reliable, and helpful for real‑world work. We’ll continue to evolve the models behind Copilot while prioritizing quality, transparency, and customer trust.

Stay tuned for more updates as we continue to enhance Copilot experiences across Microsoft 365.

In Case You Missed It: Frontier Transformation and Wave 3 of Microsoft 365 Copilot Announcements

Maryleen — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 20:30:09 GMT

March brought a major set of Frontier Transformation and wave 3 of Microsoft 365 Copilot announcements across Microsoft 365 Copilot, Copilot Chat, and agents—all focused on helping people move faster from intent to action and helping organizations scale AI responsibly.
If you missed any of the updates, here’s a quick recap of what’s new and why it matters.

Copilot Transforms Knowledge Work

These updates deepen how Copilot shows up inside the flow of work—grounded in your content, context, and tools.

Word, Excel, and PowerPoint Agents

From Copilot Chat, users can ask Word, Excel, or PowerPoint agents to create content, take next steps, or execute tasks, helping them move from intent to action without copying and pasting or switching contexts.

👉 Learn more

Edit with Copilot in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint

Copilot now creates, edits, and refines content directly inside Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, grounded in the context of a user’s work through Work IQ, so people can iterate and improve content without leaving the app they’re working in.

👉 Learn more

Sequences shortened for demonstration purposes.

Copilot Chat in Outlook

Copilot Chat in Outlook enables users to draft and refine emails, manage calendars and RSVPs, and use the Outlook email widget to take action directly from chat, streamlining everyday communication and scheduling tasks.

👉 Learn more

Outlook customer calendar instructions & proactive RSVPs

Copilot finds available meeting times, sends invites, and keeps calendars up to date based on custom instructions, notifying users of changes directly in chat to reduce manual coordination.

👉 Learn more

Copilot Cowork

Built with Anthropic, Copilot Cowork brings a multimodel approach to Microsoft 365 Copilot—so your work isn’t tied to a single model. Cowork moves Copilot beyond prompts into long‑running, multi‑step work. With full awareness of your work context through Work IQ, it lets you delegate meaningful work and stay informed as it progresses.

👉 Learn more

Claude Sonnet available in Copilot Chat

Users can select Claude models directly in Copilot Chat, alongside next‑generation OpenAI models, bringing leading models from multiple providers into a single Copilot experience.

👉 Learn more

Dataverse in Work IQ

Work IQ connects signals from Microsoft 365—including documents, meetings, email, and chat—and will soon access operational data in Dataverse through Copilot in Dynamics 365 and Power Apps, bringing work context and business data closer together.

👉 Learn more

Work IQ Memory (Chat History)

Work IQ Memory enables more relevant, personalized Copilot responses shaped by a user’s work and Copilot chat history over time.

👉 Learn more

Extensibility: Work IQ API / MCP

Work IQ APIs provide access to production‑ready AI capabilities that work directly with enterprise work context, enabling extensibility through APIs and MCP.

👉 Learn more

Launch Demo

Copilot in Dynamics 365 & Power Apps

Microsoft 365 Copilot is accessible directly within Dynamics 365 Sales, Customer Service, and Power Apps, extending Copilot experiences into business applications where operational work happens.

👉 Learn more

Agents That Help Run the Business

These announcements focus on building, deploying, and scaling agents across the enterprise.

Apps SDK

The Apps SDK provides tools to build ChatGPT apps based on the MCP Apps standard, with additional ChatGPT functionality to support agent and Copilot experiences.

👉 Learn more

Model Context Protocol (MCP) Apps

MCP Apps turn Copilot from a text interface into a governed, interactive execution layer by surfacing interactive app experiences directly in Copilot Chat.

👉 Learn more

Apps in Agents: Outlook, Dynamics 365, and Power Apps

Agents can bring Outlook, Dynamics 365, and Power Apps directly into chat, allowing users to review information and take action without leaving the conversation.

👉 Learn more

Agent Recommendations in Microsoft 365 Copilot

When users prompt Microsoft 365 Copilot, the system analyzes intent and recommends an installed, IT‑approved agent directly in the flow of work, making agents easier to discover and use at scale.

👉 Learn more

Evaluate agents in Copilot Studio

Copilot Studio provides structured, repeatable testing to help catch issues early, reduce the risk of bad answers, and maintain agent quality as agents evolve.

👉 Learn more

Visibility, Governance, and Control at Scale

As agent usage grows, these updates help organizations move from experimentation to enterprise readiness.

Agent 365

Agent 365 serves as the control plane for agents, helping organizations move from experimentation to enterprise‑scale operations by enabling them to observe, govern, and secure agents.

👉 Learn more

Microsoft 365 E7: The Frontier Suite

Microsoft 365 E7 unifies Microsoft 365 E5, Microsoft 365 Copilot and Agent 365 into a single solution powered by Work IQ and integrated with the productivity apps and security stack customers already rely on. It includes Microsoft Entra Suite and advanced Defender, Intune and Purview security capabilities, delivering comprehensive protection across agents and employees.

👉 Learn more

To explore what’s available now—and what’s coming next—visit the Microsoft 365 roadmap and related announcement blogs.

👉 Explore the roadmap

Act Now: Lock in Current Pricing on Microsoft 365 Copilot Business Bundles

bryallen — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 16:00:00 GMT

If you’re considering Microsoft 365 Copilot Business, or planning your next renewal, now is the time to act.

Starting July 1, 2026, Microsoft will update pricing for Microsoft 365 + Copilot Business bundles. Purchasing now lets you lock in today’s lower prices and take advantage of limited time promotional discounts available through June 30, 2026.

Built for SMBs: Microsoft 365 + Copilot Business

When we introduced Copilot Business last December, we designed it specifically for small and medium-sized businesses. Alongside it, we launched simplified Microsoft 365 + Copilot Business bundles, making it easier and more affordable for SMBs to get a complete, secure AI solution.

Copilot Business brings the power of AI directly into the Microsoft 365 apps your team already uses: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and more.

Draft and summarize content fast
Analyze data and uncover insights
Automate everyday tasks
Work confidently with built-in security, privacy, and admin controls

Pricing Update Effective July 1, 2026

Beginning July 1, Microsoft 365 pricing will increase for some products, while Copilot Business remains $21 per user, per month.

Microsoft 365 + Copilot Bundle	Current Price	New Price
Business Basic + Copilot Business	$27	$28
Business Standard + Copilot Business	$33.50	$35
Business Premium + Copilot Business	$43	$43

USD list prices per user, per month, paid yearly. See terms and conditions.

Limited Time Promotional Pricing

For a limited time, you can save up to 35% on select Microsoft 365 Copilot Business bundles:

Microsoft 365 + Copilot Bundle	Promotional Price	Regular Price	Savings
Business Standard + Copilot Business	$22	$33.50	~35% off
Business Premium + Copilot Business	$32	$43	~25% off
Copilot Add-on	$18	$21	~15% off

USD list prices per user, per month, paid yearly. See terms and conditions.

Bottom line: If you’re planning to adopt or expand your deployment of Copilot Business, purchasing before July 1 helps you maximize savings and avoid upcoming price increases. Check out these bundles at our website.

Enterprise Grade Security for SMBs

Security remains a top concern for growing businesses, especially with limited IT resources. To help, Microsoft offers optional add-ons that deliver enterprise grade protection at SMB-friendly pricing:

Defender Suite – $10/user/month (paid yearly)
Includes identity protection, endpoint detection and response, plus email and cloud app security—helping reduce phishing, malware, and shadow IT risk.

Purview Suite – $10/user/month (paid yearly). Get 50% off Microsoft Purview Suite for Microsoft 365 Business Premium when you purchase Microsoft 365 Copilot. See terms and conditions.
Provides governance and compliance tools like data loss prevention, eDiscovery, audit, message encryption, and AI-aware data security posture management.

Defender + Purview Suite Bundle – $15/user/month
Combines both suites for comprehensive protection against cyber threats and accidental data leaks.

Learn more about these security suites here.

New Copilot Capabilities—Included at No Additional Cost

Copilot Business continues to evolve, helping SMBs do more with less. Earlier this month we announced Wave 3 of Microsoft 365 Copilot, bringing new capabilities designed to handle more complex, real-world work:

Copilot as a true collaborator inside Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook—so work stays in the document, with permissions and governance enforced
Create directly from Copilot Chat, including documents, spreadsheets, and presentations
Copilot Cowork helps Copilot handle longer, multi-step work—so it can take on bigger tasks from start to finish.
Model choice, Claude is now available, alongside the latest generation of OpenAI models.

These capabilities are included in Copilot Business today.

Take the Next Step

If Microsoft 365 Copilot Business is part of your plans, now is the best time to act. Lock in current pricing, take advantage of limited time promotions, and give your team AI that helps them work smarter—securely.

To learn more, visit our website or read this post and FAQ: Introducing Microsoft 365 Copilot Business: Empowering Small and Medium Businesses with AI

Microsoft 365 Copilot Business FAQ | Microsoft Learn

Meet the updated Copilot Notebooks experience: Your home for understanding work, projects, and more

ezrapark — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 20:14:41 GMT

Work today isn’t short-lived or linear. Projects span months, inputs come from everywhere across files, meetings, and conversations, and real progress depends on how well teams understand evolving information while turning all of it into clear decisions, updates, and deliverables. That’s why we’re excited to announce the general availability of the refreshed Copilot Notebooks experience across Microsoft 365 Copilot app and OneNote. With an updated three-column layout and powerful Copilot features like Audio Overview, Copilot Notebooks are your workspace for gathering and thinking on a topic or project over time.

What Is a Copilot Notebook?

Introduced last year, Copilot Notebooks are AI-powered workspaces where Copilot grounds its responses on a user-curated context based on a set of reference materials, such as Word documents, PowerPoint decks, OneNote pages, PDFs, and more related to your project or topic. Unlike a one-off chat, a notebook provides persistent memory and structure, allowing Copilot to reason across diverse and evolving content over time.

Think of a notebook as a long-lived collaboration space where AI works with your information, not around it. You can ask Copilot questions, synthesize themes, generate drafts, explore insights, and create artifacts, all while staying anchored to the same shared set of references and instructions.

What’s new?

Updated Three Column Design

The updated three-column layout brings your references, content in Copilot Pages, and Copilot chats into one seamless, side-by-side view. Now you can keep a Copilot conversation going while simultaneously capturing your thoughts in a Copilot Page, without losing context or breaking your flow.

Richer Reference Sets

You can now add a wider range of reference materials to a Notebook, including Word, PowerPoint, and Excel files, OneNote pages, PDFs, Copilot Pages, with more coming soon. Copilot reasons across everything you add, synthesizing insights that would otherwise require manual perusal and comprehension.

Note: For files already part of your work data in the cloud, there’s no need to upload or manage separate copies. Adding a reference to such files in your Notebook keeps it up to date even as changes are made to the referenced source file.

Overview Page with Notebook Level Summary and Insights

The new Overview page provides an instant summary of all the references in your Notebook and surfaces key insights, topics, and themes. The Overview page evolves with your Notebook and refreshes with the click of a button, so your understanding stays current without extra work.

Create with Copilot in your Notebook

In addition to chatting with Copilot to reason over your references, you can now transform them into quick drafts, audio overviews, flash cards, quizzes, and more using the Notebook’s ‘Quick create’ options. These tools turn raw content into structured, shareable artifacts in seconds, making it easier to synthesize information, and capture insights from your references.

Note: Study Guide is not currently available to all eligible customers and will roll out broadly soon.

Sharing and Collaboration

Copilot Notebooks are now shareable with your teammates, enabling teams to build a common understanding over the same source material. This is particularly powerful for maintaining a shared knowledge base, organizing project information, and supporting cross‑functional collaboration.

Putting Copilot Notebooks to Work

Copilot Notebooks are powerful but intentionally flexible. You can shape them around the way you work. Explore some proven ways to integrate Copilot Notebooks and accelerate your workflows.

Create a Home for your Project

Starting or ramping up on a new project? Bring together relevant files in a Copilot Notebook and use the Overview Page to quickly get a summary of the project and its key points. Customize and generate a quick podcast-style Audio Overview and listen to it on the go! Once you understand the context, ask Copilot questions like:

“What are the key risks or challenges highlighted in these materials?”

“Which action items should the team focus on first?”

“Where do stakeholders disagree?”

Supercharge your Recurring Reporting Workflows

Some work happens on a regular cadence on a team, such as weekly updates, business reviews, reports, or newsletters. Copilot Notebooks help by acting as a steady source of truth for these updates. Teams can reuse the same Notebook structure, add new inputs as they arrive, and rely on Copilot to:

Highlight what’s new or different
Identify patterns across updates
Produce consistent summaries or drafts using custom instructions

This reduces manual synthesis and helps teams focus on decisions instead of compiling updates. Trying adding your older reports and files to a Notebook, and ask Copilot to:

“Draft a brief summary of changes between January and February monthly performance reports”

“Flag key action items or decisions that need attention”

Stay Focused on a Specific Task or Deliverable

Sometimes, work is best supported by a short-lived, highly focused workspace, such as an academic paper, investigation, or case analysis. In these scenarios, a Copilot Notebook can serve as a dedicated space to:

Collect all relevant materials
Ask Copilot targeted questions related to the task
Keep reasoning and outputs tied to a single goal

Curating references helps Copilot provide reliable responses grounded in Notebook context, minimizing the chance of hallucinations. When the work is done, the Notebook captures not just the result, but also the context and insights, making it easy to revisit, share, or build on in the future.

Research a Particular Topic or Skill

When you need to get up to speed on a topic, whether it’s a new technology, market trend, or internal process, a Copilot Notebook can serve as a personal research hub, bringing together articles, reports, meeting notes, and other reference materials in one place.

With everything in one Notebook, ‘Quick create’ options and Copilot chat can help you:

Learn key topics through Topic Pages
Recall what you studied using Quiz or Flash cards
Summarize complex information across multiple sources
Create a study plan or step-by-step overviews

Sample Copilot prompts to try:

“Summarize the key trends from these research papers and highlight any conflicting perspectives.”

“Create a one-page overview of this topic for someone new to it.”

“Suggest a learning roadmap for these resources”

Get Started Today

Access Copilot Notebooks: Go to https://m365.cloud.microsoft/notebooks or open the OneNote Windows app. Find Copilot Notebooks in the left navigation pane.
Create Your First Notebook: Click ‘New Notebook’, give it a name, and start adding references such as Word documents, PDFs, PowerPoint decks, and Excel sheets.
Engage with Copilot: Ask Copilot questions, request summaries, or generate Audio Overviews, all grounded in your notebook content.
Collaborate with Your Team: Share your Notebook with colleagues to build shared understanding on a topic or project.

Availability and Requirements

The updated Copilot Notebooks experience is now generally available to commercial Microsoft 365 users with work or school (Entra ID) accounts. It is accessible in the Microsoft 365 Copilot app on Web, Windows, Mac, and Mobile and the OneNote app on Windows, for users who meet the following requirements:

Have a Microsoft 365 Copilot license – Learn more about Microsoft 365 Copilot licensing and plans.
Have an active SharePoint or OneDrive license.

The updated Copilot Notebooks experience is currently unavailable to Microsoft 365 Personal, Family, and Premium subscribers. However, consumer users can still access the original Copilot Notebooks experience with an eligible M365 Personal or Family account. Learn more here: Copilot Notebooks Now Available for Microsoft 365 Personal, Family, and Premium Accounts

Feedback

Tried Copilot Notebooks? We’d love to hear from you! Share your feedback and suggestions by selecting Help > Feedback in OneNote or "..." > Feedback in the Microsoft 365 Copilot app. Your input helps us keep improving Copilot Notebooks for everyone!

From draft to done: agentic Copilot in Excel, Word, and PowerPoint

Daniel_Vargas — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 13:01:42 GMT

Real work is iterative—context shifts, edits pile up, and version sprawl happens fast. Microsoft 365 Copilot is built for that reality. Copilot is now agentic, collaborating with you to take multi-step, app-native actions directly in Excel, Word, and PowerPoint so you can move work forward where you already work. With Work IQ, Copilot stays grounded in what’s current across your files, meetings, chats, and relationships. Changes are applied in the file—transparent, reviewable, and reversible—so you can iterate with confidence. And because everyone works in the same file, teams can coauthor and refine one version instead of passing copies around. Copilot honors Microsoft 365 permissions and sensitivity labels, and with built-in model choice, you can match the right model to the task without switching tools.

Here’s what that means when Copilot creates and edits your Excel, Word, and PowerPoint files.

Excel: natively build and refine spreadsheets

Sequences shortened for demonstration purposes.

Copilot in Excel helps you model scenarios, refresh inputs, and spot trends more efficiently by editing directly in your workbook with native tables, formulas, and charts. The goal isn’t just an answer—it’s a working model you trust. Copilot applies updates to the grid so you can review changes, tweak assumptions, and iterate as inputs shift. You can also choose the OpenAI or Anthropic model for in-app editing to match the task. This experience now supports locally stored workbooks, file uploads, and file search, with Work IQ grounding rolling out later this month. Additional model options—including GPT-5.4 and Claude Opus 4.6—will roll out in the coming weeks.

Prompts to try

Build a financial forecast from scratch: Create a P&L forecast using the latest data in [Operating Model.xlsx], including revenue, cost of goods sold, and operating expenses. Build out for 12 months starting January 2026 and design the model to show month-by-month growth, retention, and unit economics with adjustable assumptions.
Refresh sales performance data in a shareable format: Replicate last week’s analysis in a new sheet using the latest numbers shared in [Sales Weekly Update.docx] and show top insights on how our business is performing. And help me turn it into something easy to share, with visualizations of customer churn trends and clearly highlight the areas of concern.
Create a valuation model with sensitivity analysis: Create a discounted cash flow model for [company name] by pulling their latest disclosures from the web. Assume free cash flows grow at 12% annually for 5 years and use a discount rate of 9% with a terminal growth rate of 2%. Add sensitivity analysis tables showing how the valuation changes if the discount rate varies from 8% to 10%, growth rate from 10% to 14%, and terminal growth from 1% to 3%. Include a dropdown selector for best, base, and worst-case scenarios and use standard financial formatting.

Availability: Generally available today in Excel for Windows, web, and Mac for Microsoft 365 Copilot users.

Word: collaborate to turn drafts into review-ready docs

Sequences shortened for demonstration purposes.

Copilot in Word helps you turn working drafts into review-ready documents. It works in the same document your team is editing, so you can coauthor and iterate without creating—or reconciling—copies. Ask Copilot to update or fill in a template-based doc, add an executive summary, and suggest edits that incorporate stakeholder feedback into a draft that’s ready to share. It can restructure sections, rewrite for clarity, and apply Word-native styles so edits are easy to review. With Work IQ, Copilot can keep the document aligned to your latest work context (decisions, dates, and details), so you spend less time reconciling updates. This editing experience is available today, and model choice with OpenAI and Anthropic models will be available in April.

Prompts to try

Create a project status + decision brief: Create a project brief for [project title] using information from my meetings, files, and emails from the past [timeframe]. Include an Executive Summary at the top. Structure the document using Heading 1 and Heading 2 styles where appropriate. Include these sections: Current status, Key decisions and progress, Next steps, Unresolved issues or risks, Recommendations. Keep it factual and flag any missing inputs as questions at the end.
Refresh a recurring monthly exec report: This is last month’s executive update report. Help me update the entire report with this [month] updates by pulling the latest from my recent team emails and Teams chats. Remove last month’s updates and replace them with the newest ones. Only edit the last 3 columns of the table; update status with an appropriate icon (green = on track, yellow = at risk, red = off track). If a status is not on track, explain why in the “latest developments” column. Apply all new text updates in blue font.
Formatting and polish pass: Make the structure and formatting consistent and easy to scan—fix heading hierarchy, spacing between sections, fonts, lists, and tables. Reorganize any long or messy sections into clearer chunks using subheadings or tables where helpful. Align the tone and formatting with recent proposals or reports I’ve worked on so it matches our usual style. Tighten up wordy sections, flag places where the structure could be clearer, and sanity‑check any market, customer, or competitor claims using readily available high‑level information where it’s easy to do. The goal is a clean, professional document that’s ready to share without additional formatting or structural edits.

Availability: Generally available today in Word on Windows, web, and Mac for Microsoft 365 Copilot users.

PowerPoint: keep decks crisp and on-brand

Sequences shortened for demonstration purposes.

PowerPoint is introducing Copilot editing experiences to help you co-create presentations that are clear, visual, and on brand. Copilot respects your organization’s templates and themes by using approved colors, layouts, object styles, and images so presentations stay consistent without extra effort. Use Copilot in existing decks to sharpen a slide’s main message, simplify dense bullets, and turn text into clearer visuals like timelines, diagrams, and charts without redesigning from scratch. It’s useful when you’re polishing a slide for stakeholders—tightening the message in a shared deck so the team can iterate together, without version sprawl. This experience will continue to expand across more scenarios over time, including model choice with OpenAI and Anthropic models, explicit grounding in your files, emails, meetings, and chats, and implicitly through Work IQ.

Prompts to try

Create a branded presentation with web data: “Create an executive presentation on the major market pressures and trends shaping [industry]. Include a high‑level competitive analysis of leading players, outlining their relative strengths, weaknesses, and strategic focus areas, and conclude with implications for industry leaders.”

Transform text into a chart: “Transform text on this slide into a chart.”

Brand check (using established brand kit): “Check this slide for brand consistency from my organization’s guidelines.”

Availability: PowerPoint is rolling out to web for Microsoft 365 Copilot users. It will become available on Windows and Mac in the coming months.

This is about supporting real work the way it is done: turning in-progress work into outcomes you’re ready to share—review-ready docs, trusted models, and on-brand slides. Try agentic Copilot in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint today.

Additional helpful resources

Support documentation for editing with Copilot:

Managing your brand kit and templates for PowerPoint:

Enable agents to bring apps into the flow of work—while keeping IT in control

rob_howard — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 15:06:01 GMT

A seller needs to log a new opportunity. A manager wants to approve a request. A marketer has to update a campaign asset. Until today, these actions often meant taking insights from Microsoft 365 Copilot and switching tabs. Agents can now change that: helping people take action in their go-to work apps, without needing to leave chat in Copilot.

But enabling this kind of capability raises real questions for IT: What risks do these agents introduce? Are they actually being used? And are they behaving as expected?

The more agents you launch and the more powerful these agents are, the more these answers matter. That’s why we’re introducing three new capabilities across Copilot and Microsoft Copilot Studio that help people move work forward faster—while keeping IT firmly in control:

Enhanced agents that bring apps directly into chat in Copilot
New ways for employees to find the right agent, fast
Tools to continuously evaluate agent quality over time

With these capabilities, employees can use their go-to business apps directly in Copilot and get a simpler way to discover the right agents for their tasks. Meanwhile, IT gains objective signals that help validate agent behavior as usage expands. Here's what you need to know.

Interacting with apps through chat in Copilot

Today, the gap between AI insight and in-app execution starts to close—without IT needing to relax standards or introduce new risk vectors.

Launch Demo

When an employee prompts Copilot and calls an agent connected to an approved app, that agent can bring that app’s interactive experience directly into the conversation. From there, the employee stays in the driver's seat, using chat in Copilot to take real, in‑app actions such as:

Scheduling a new event in Outlook
Adding a new sales opportunity to Dynamics 365 Sales
Creating or editing a flyer in Adobe Express
Completing an approval form via Microsoft Power Apps

All of this happens without needing to leave Copilot. Employees interact with the app directly in chat or use follow-up prompts to carry out work in the app.

Get started quickly with pre-built app experiences

This month, we’re launching support for a focused set of early experiences, including:

Microsoft apps, such as Outlook, Dynamics 365 Customer Service (public preview by early April), and Dynamics 365 Sales (public preview by early April)
Custom line-of-business apps built with Power Apps (public preview this March)

Take Outlook, for example. You can now tell Copilot who you want to meet with, and it'll find time slots that work. Simply select one, and an agent will schedule that time together. This experience is currently generally available (GA). Similarly, you can ask Copilot to draft an email on your behalf, edit it, and hit send—without leaving the chat (currently in Frontier).

We will also introduce in-chat experiences for a handful of Microsoft partner apps, including Adobe Express, Adobe Acrobat, Base44, Box, Canva, Coursera, Figma, Miro, Monday.com, Optimizely, and Wix. All pre-built partner app experiences will be available via the Microsoft 365 Agent Store by mid-April.

“With the Figma app in Copilot, you can turn conversations into AI-generated FigJam diagrams to take ideas further,” says Brendan O'Driscoll, Figma’s VP of Product. “By connecting Figma with your favorite tools, it’s easier than ever to visualize, iterate, and collaborate with your entire team.”

Build the app experiences your team needs

You’re not limited to the apps we ship out of the box. Your team can build agents in Copilot that work with the mission-critical apps that your systems, processes, and workflows depend on.

Under the hood, two open extensibility standards make this possible: MCP Apps and the OpenAI Apps SDK. Both give development teams a structured way to connect the apps your organization relies on to agents in Copilot—so those apps can surface interactive experiences directly in chat. Agents built with either standard use familiar development patterns, so your team can build and iterate without requiring a steep learning curve.

MCP Apps and Apps SDK will roll out to GA on web and desktop later this month, with mobile following this spring. Share the Apps SDK and MCP Apps technical documentation with your development team to get started.

Get to know the IT controls

Even as agents become more powerful, we’ve designed this experience with governance in mind. Agents with interactive app experiences use the same governance and admin patterns you already trust for agents in Copilot, keeping IT control the top priority.

You decide which agents are available in your tenant, and who can use them—globally, per agent, or for specific departments. Each agent operates strictly within existing app permissions and identity boundaries, so you can enable richer experiences in Copilot without opening new, unmanaged entry points into your environment.

All agents can be monitored end‑to‑end using Agent 365—a unified control plane that gives IT a single place to see which agents are live, where they can act, and how they're being used. With it, you can control how agents are provisioned and scoped before rolling out this new experience broadly. Learn how to provision your organization's agents at scale.

Empowering employees to find the right agent fast

As agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot become more capable, employees need a reliable way to find the right agent for the task at hand. But when dozens of agents are available, employees shouldn't have to know which one to use when. Agent Recommendations (generally available) surfaces the right agent at the right moment, directly in the flow of work.

When users prompt Microsoft 365 Copilot, the system analyzes their intent and suggests an agent that’s already installed and approved by IT. No special syntax or prompt engineering required.

These recommendations are assistive, meaning employees can choose to start a new conversation with the suggested agent or continue in their current chat. All the while, discoverability only happens within known, governed boundaries —mitigating the introduction of new risks. This helps employees quickly find agents purpose-built for the scenario at hand, while IT maintains a consistent governance model as usage expands.

Holding agents to your organization's standards

As organizations rely on more agents for more impactful work, quality and reliability stop being nice‑to‑haves—they’re essential. Small changes to prompts, models, or data can introduce drift that can be hard to detect, especially as agent usage expands across teams and scenarios.

Agent Evaluations in Microsoft Copilot Studio (currently in public preview) gives you a structured way to answer the question: Is this agent actually doing what it's supposed to do?

Evals work by running agents against authentic questions and scenarios, then generating objective scores for accuracy and intent alignment—so quality isn't just assumed; it's measured. By comparing results over time, teams can help catch regressions earlier, validate improvements, and apply a consistent quality bar before agents reach broader use.

These signals reinforce that agents aren’t set‑and‑forget automation; they’re managed enterprise workloads. With objective evidence in hand, IT and makers can make informed rollout decisions and scale agent usage more confidently, knowing behavior is monitored, and reliability can be improved as usage grows.

Learn how to set up Agent Evals in Microsoft Copilot Studio, so you can assess agent quality and readiness before expanding usage.

Make agents more capable while staying in control

Support for apps in agents, Agent Recommendations, and Agent Evals are designed to work together as a system, helping organizations move faster—without compromising trust. By treating agents as first‑class, governed workloads, IT teams can enable more capable agents while maintaining the control their organizations expect.

To get started:

A closer look at Work IQ

Seth_Patton — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 20:26:33 GMT

Work IQ is the intelligence layer that personalizes Microsoft 365 Copilot to you and your organization. It is the “brain” behind Copilot that understands context, relationships, and work patterns, so Copilot and agents can be faster, more accurate, and more secure than model companies that are built on connectors alone.

Work IQ is comprised of three tightly integrated layers – data, context, and skills & tools. We’ll examine the components in each of these layers, highlight some of what’s coming to make Work IQ even better in the coming months, and share example prompts you can try to see the power of Work IQ in action.

Multi-Model

Before we discuss the components within the layers of Work IQ it’s important to note our approach to the use of foundation models. Microsoft 365 Copilot brings leading models from multiple providers directly into Copilot experiences. We offer Copilot chat users a choice of foundation models from Open AI and Anthropic and will be bringing advanced models from other providers as well. This means users can access – and Work IQ will complement – these models’ advanced reasoning and multi-step capabilities in their Copilot experiences, not just through specialized tools. Copilot applies the right model for the task and gives users the option to choose the model that best meets their needs.

Data

The foundation of Work IQ is its secure access to and understanding of both structured and unstructured data from Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, Power Apps, and Power BI (coming soon), and other connected business systems that represent work happening across your organization.

A customer’s Microsoft 365 tenant data provides Copilot with a foundational understanding of individual and collective work. Centered around the users and groups in an organization, it includes the permission-based, information-protected content stored in SharePoint and OneDrive, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint and other file types, as well as Outlook emails, and Teams meetings and chats. The data contained in your Microsoft 365 tenant also includes rich metadata and signals that further describe patterns of action, activity, collaboration, and communication between users and groups over time.

Customers can ingest business data from other systems and line-of-business applications into their tenant using Copilot Connectors, enabling Copilot to reason over data that may reside in non-Microsoft systems. Customers can choose from hundreds of pre-built connectors or build their own custom connectors.

In addition to Microsoft 365 data, we are integrating Dynamics 365 and Power Apps data into Work IQ. Dataverse is the container for the structured datasets that power customers’ Power Apps and Dynamics 365 applications. Later this month, customers will see Microsoft 365 Copilot embedded within Dynamics 365 Sales, and Dynamics 365 Customer Service as an in-app experience like Copilot in Word, PowerPoint and Excel. With this access, Copilot will have the ability to reason across both Microsoft 365 productivity data and the business data generated by their systems of record, making it possible for Copilot to answer complex questions like “Help me evaluate how issues raised by my parts supplier in our Teams call last week might impact my inventory and sales in the coming months” and to provide very detailed, specific answer connecting business communications with business data. For more information on Work IQ in Dynamics 365, check out this blog with additional details. We anticipate broad access to Dataverse via Work IQ across all Microsoft 365 Copilot experiences in Summer 2026.

Context

Implicit grounding in Microsoft 365 data – and soon Dynamics 365 and Power Apps data - serves as the baseline for understanding work context. Work IQ expands this with an additional, always-evolving layer of insights that enhance the speed and accuracy of Copilot’s response to queries. Work IQ helps Copilot learn how people and businesses work – the skills they have, the projects that are important, the frequency of collaboration, who they work with and for, critical workflows, the velocity of communication and much more.

Copilot’s memory is designed to further enhance Copilot’s ability to tailor its experience to Copilot users in Copilot Chat and Copilot in the M365 apps. Memory is constructed from a combination of persistent, explicit memory and query-dependent, implicit memory.

Explicit memory is provided to Copilot by the user. A user can personalize Copilot by creating “Custom Instructions” – for example a user may manually add an instruction to “Only provide responses to prompts in the active tense”. Alternatively, a user can also create “saved memories”. For example, prompting Copilot to “remember that I do not like responses in the passive tense” will result in Copilot creating a saved memory “Prefers responses written in active voice; dislikes passive tense”. In each case, Memory is explicitly created by a user action. Copilot also creates implicit memory. To do this, it uses chat history to infer a durable body of insights. As the body of insights grows, Copilot can provide increasingly personal responses and actions.

Beyond chat history, we are also working on incorporating activity – like workflows - that help increase the fidelity of Copilot’s memory. In the coming months, we will start incorporating other activity patterns generated from all of your everyday apps including Teams, Outlook, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Stay tuned for additional updates on enhancements to Copilot memory.

Understanding of data that provides work context about your Microsoft 365 tenant data is enhanced by the semantic index. Rather than relying solely on keyword or lexical matching, the semantic index enables Copilot to perform meaning‑based retrieval of your data, producing a bounded set of relevant candidates for downstream processing. Data ingested into the customer tenant using Copilot Connectors is also included in the semantic index. Indexed data retains customers’ existing security, privacy and governance policies – including permissions, sensitivity labels, and tenant boundaries.

Finally, we’re adding business understanding to Work IQ to provide Copilot and agents with a more comprehensive view of customers’ Power Apps and Dynamics data in Dataverse. To do this, we’ve created a layer of semantic understanding, consisting of ontologies and glossaries that capture procedural knowledge from existing business workflows. The result: Copilot can have an expert understanding of the tasks performed by the people, teams, customers, suppliers, and other business entities working together to run your business.

Skills & tools

Work IQ includes agentic skills that provide specialized instructions to Copilot & agents. These skills are designed to help Copilot perform specific tasks with more speed and accuracy. Microsoft is continuously adding skills to Work IQ that enable Copilot to deliver experiences that are highly tailored for specific tasks like “schedule a meeting”, “find and retrieve data from an external source”, or “access meeting details and transcripts”. For example, we have deployed skills designed to optimize retrieval of work content in response to complex user queries. The result is improved Copilot responses to queries that may contain deeply sourced references to vague and hard-to-find archived information.

If skills describe what to do, tools do it. We’re developing custom toolsets designed to execute against the intent of the agentic skills that power Work IQ experiences. We’re selecting the best-use tooling available – for example MCP server tools, agent flows, APIs and plugins – to help Copilot observe, retrieve, reason, and execute using the tool we create. Today customers can build agents and add skills and tools that, in combination with our orchestration services, can also be used with Work IQ.

Going back to our complex content retrieval query, these are the tools that when combined, help us search, open and find content as described by the skill. This supports faster and more accurate responses and actions - while respecting governance policies, privacy and security. We expect to continuously experiment with and release new skills and tools for Work IQ.

Security, Privacy, and Compliance

We know how important it is that customers trust the AI services they use. Like the other components of Copilot, Work IQ is designed from the ground up to respect our customers’ already-existing user permissions, Security Group assignments, sensitivity labels, and Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policies. Similarly, we are committed to compliance with the legal and regulatory requirements of countries and regions around the world in which we operate, including the GDPR and EU Data Boundary.

Experiences and Extensibility

Work IQ is deeply integrated into Copilot. Licensed Microsoft 365 Copilot users will experience Work IQ in the responses and actions offered in Copilot Chat with the Work toggle activated and with Copilot in the M365 apps like Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Teams. Licensed Microsoft 365 users working with Copilot in Dynamics and Power Apps will find work IQ enriched with Dataverse data. In the coming months we will unify Work IQ experiences across all licensed Copilot surfaces.

Developers can also integrate Work IQ into their own apps and agents. The Work IQ API exposes Copilot intelligence through a standard RESTful interface, enabling developers to build agents grounded in the live work context accessible through Copilot Chat - while inheriting Microsoft’s enterprise‑grade identity, security, permissions, and regulatory compliance. The Work IQ API will be available in Public Preview later this month. Note that we support CLI today, and we’re working to offer MCP and A2A support in the coming months.

Below are sample prompts that showcase Work IQ in action. We’ve left some blanks so you can test them in your own environment:

Copilot Chat: Over the past [timeframe] with I had a meeting with [person's first name], I asked about [specific topic or project]. Can you look for the information [person's first name] shared around this in that meeting?
Copilot Chat: Identify tasks or action items assigned to me from my manager in this week's emails, Teams chats, and meeting notes, and compile them into a checklist.
Copilot in Word: Draft an executive summary of [project] that highlights the purpose, progress, and implications of its impact on the business.
Copilot in Outlook: Recommend how to resolve conflicts on my calendar for tomorrow.
Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales: Find the email with the latest price changes, analyze impact to my opportunities, and recommend next steps for me to communicate the changes.
Researcher: What can you tell me about [Competitor name]? How do the offerings in [Competitor name] compare with [Company name] offerings? If you were in a compete situation against [Competitor name], what would you leverage as [Company name] response to our tooling and how a customer can accomplish the same thing? Pull in context from emails and Teams chats shared by the [Customer name] account team.

Conclusion

Work IQ combines powerful skills and tools with your work data and business context to help make Copilot more personalized, accurate, and trusted. We’re excited about Work IQ today and for the role it will play in helping our customers with their AI transformation. Whether you’re a Microsoft 365 Copilot user, an AI power user or a professional developer, we can’t wait to see what you do with Work IQ.

Can Your M365 Copilot Offer Actually Win Customer Deals?

MaheshKshirsagar — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 08:00:00 GMT

Note: This tool is designed for Microsoft partners operating within the AI Business Solutions commercial solution area who are building or publishing Microsoft 365 Copilot consulting service offers on the Microsoft Marketplace.

Creating Offers That Win Deals

Microsoft 365 Copilot represents one of the most significant opportunities for Microsoft partners. Organizations worldwide are seeking trusted partners to guide their AI transformation journey. The Microsoft Marketplace is where these customers discover partner services—making your offer listing your most critical sales asset.

A great Copilot service deserves a great marketplace listing—and getting there means balancing multiple dimensions at once:

Distributed Guidance: Offer development best practices are distributed across multiple documentation sources, slide decks, and training materials

Manual Review Burden: Evaluating whether your offer content addresses all required elements—value proposition, business outcomes, change management methodology, co-sell alignment—requires hours of cross-referencing

Quality Consistency: Without a systematic approach, offer descriptions may miss critical customer-facing elements that drive engagement

Co-sell Alignment Complexity: Achieving proper alignment with the AI Business Solutions solution area requires understanding evolving co-sell requirements

Iteration Overhead: Each content revision requires repeating the manual evaluation process, extending time-to-market

Getting these elements right is what separates offers that convert from those that get scrolled past.

Introducing M365 Copilot Offer Validation Assessment

M365 Copilot Offer Validation Assessment eliminates guesswork from marketplace offer development. This tool analyzes your offer content against Microsoft's official M365 Copilot Offer Development Guide and generates actionable, prioritized recommendations—in minutes.

How It Works

Document Upload: Assess your offer content before publishing by uploading PDF, Word, or PowerPoint documents containing your draft listing content

35+ Evaluation Rules: Comprehensive rule engine evaluates your content across 13 service areas derived directly from Microsoft guidance

AI-Contextualized Feedback: Every observation is translated into Copilot-specific improvement recommendations with references to source guidance

Local Execution: Runs entirely on your machine. Your offer content never leaves your environment

What You Get

The assessment generates detailed Excel report as shown:

Report showing the outcome after assessment.

Report includes:

Column	Description
Area	Category of guidance (Value Proposition, Business Outcomes, etc.)
Configuration	Specific rule being evaluated
Status	Pass, Needs Review, or Gap identified
Priority	High, Medium, or Low importance
Observation	What was found (or not found) in your content
Recommendation	Specific improvement action with guidance reference
Reference	Link to Microsoft documentation

Evaluation Coverage

The tool evaluates your offer against 13 critical service areas:

1. Offer Summary — 100-200 character value-led summary

2. Offer Description — Comprehensive 500-3000 character description with target audience, deliverables, and scope

3. Search Keywords — Copilot, M365, AI, and industry-specific discoverability terms

4. Value Proposition — Clear articulation of how you maximize Copilot ROI

5. Business Outcomes — Measurable productivity gains, time savings, and efficiency metrics

6. Functional Scenarios — Target roles (Sales, HR, Finance, Legal, Customer Service) with relevant KPIs

7. Service Pillars — Coverage of Advisory, Deployment, Extensibility, and Adoption services

8. Adoption & Change Management — Methodology, stakeholder engagement, training, and success measurement

9. Call to Action — Clear engagement path for interested customers

10. Pricing — Transparent pricing structure and engagement terms

11. Media Assets — Collateral references, case studies, and promotional materials

12. Security & Compliance — Data governance, oversharing risks, and technical readiness

13. Co-sell Readiness — AI Business Solutions solution area and Microsoft 365 product alignment

Value for Partners

Tool helps partners to:

Reach Quality Faster

Reduce the time from draft to polished offer. Automated validation shows exactly where to improve—so each revision moves you closer to a listing that converts.

Maximize Co-sell Opportunity

The tool specifically validates alignment with Microsoft's AI Business Solutions solution area and co-sell requirements. Properly aligned offers receive prioritized attention from Microsoft sellers—driving qualified customer referrals.

Differentiate Your Services

Stand out in the marketplace with offers that clearly communicate:

- Measurable business outcomes customers can expect

- Specific functional scenarios and target roles

- Formal change management methodology

- Security and governance expertise
Standardize Quality

Whether you're a large partner with multiple practice leads creating offers or a boutique firm with a single marketplace presence, the tool ensures consistent evaluation against the same Microsoft guidance standards.

Iterate with Confidence

Make changes to your offer content and re-run the assessment to verify improvements. Timestamped reports track your progress across multiple evaluation cycles.

Value for Customers

When partners use this tool, customers benefit from:

Clearer Value Communication

Offers created with guidance-aligned content clearly articulate what customers will receive, enabling faster and more confident purchasing decisions.

Outcome-Focused Engagements

Partners prompted to include measurable business outcomes help customers set realistic expectations and track Copilot deployment success.

Reduced Risk

Offers that address security, compliance, and governance concerns upfront give customers confidence that data protection is a priority—not an afterthought.

Better Partner Matching

Well-structured offers with specific functional scenarios and industry focus help customers identify partners whose expertise matches their needs.

Getting Started

M365 Copilot Offer Validation Assessment is available now. Requirements are minimal:

Python 3.8 or later

PDF, Word, or PowerPoint document with your offer content

Start in three steps:

1. Install Python dependencies: `pip install -r requirements.txt`

2. Run the tool: `python main.py`

3. Upload your document when prompted

Within minutes, you'll have a comprehensive assessment report with prioritized recommendations tailored to your specific offer content.

Elevate Your Marketplace Presence

In a crowded marketplace, quality matters. Customers searching for M365 Copilot partners have dozens of options—your offer listing is your opportunity to stand out.

M365 Copilot Offer Validation Assessment provides the objective, guidance-driven analysis you need to create marketplace listings that communicate your expertise, align with Microsoft co-sell priorities, and convert customer interest into engagement.

Stop guessing whether your offer meets the bar. Start validating.

Resources

M365 Copilot Offer Validation Assessment: microsoft/m365-copilot-marketplace-offer-assessment

M365 Copilot Offer Development Guide: https://microsoftpartners.microsoft.com/Downloads/?filename=abs/unprotected/M365-Copilot-Offer-Development-Guide.pptx

Microsoft Marketplace Documentation: https://learn.microsoft.com/partner-center/marketplace/

Available today: GPT-5.4 Thinking in Microsoft 365 Copilot

NitinAgrawal — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 22:29:40 GMT

Today, we’re bringing OpenAI’s GPT‑5.4 Thinking to Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft Copilot Studio—available in addition to the recent GPT-5.3 Instant update. With GPT‑5.4 Thinking, Copilot can think deeper on complex work by combining advances in reasoning, coding, and agentic workflows—helping it work through technical prompts and longer tasks with higher-quality outputs, and less back-and-forth. Work IQ brings relevant work context into Copilot so it can reason, personalize, and help you turn deeper thinking into context-aware drafts, slides, and spreadsheets.

Get started today

GPT-5.4 Thinking is now available in Copilot Studio early release cycle environments and begins rolling out today to Microsoft 365 Copilot users with priority access and Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat users with standard access. Learn more about standard versus priority access here.

In Copilot Chat, you can select GPT‑5.4 Think deeper from the model selector under More, and in Copilot Studio you can select GPT‑5.4 Reasoning.

Our team will continue to refine the experience based on your feedback. Learn more about Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft Copilot Studio and start transforming work with Copilot today. For model details, learn more about GPT-5.4 Thinking here.

For the latest research insights on the future of work and generative AI, visit WorkLab.

Available today: GPT-5.3 Instant in Microsoft 365 Copilot

NitinAgrawal — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 18:16:54 GMT

Today, we’re excited to announce the addition of OpenAI’s GPT‑5.3 Instant to Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft Copilot Studio. Building on GPT‑5.2 Instant, GPT‑5.3 Instant improves the quality of everyday conversations with more reliably accurate responses, stronger and more expressive writing, and more direct, useful answers—helping Copilot provide a useful response when appropriate, rather than defaulting to disclaimers or declining to proceed.

For questions that draw on information from the web, with GPT-5.3 Instant, Copilot now delivers clearer, more relevant responses by better synthesizing what it finds online with its own knowledge and reasoning—so answers are less shaped by retrieved content alone and more closely reflect the needs of the task.

Together, these improvements help Copilot provide responses that are more focused, relevant, and immediately usable in your work.

We are committed to bringing you the latest cutting-edge AI innovation and model choice tuned for work and tailored to your business needs—with the security, compliance, and privacy that you expect from Microsoft. Microsoft 365 Copilot licensed users will receive priority access to GPT-5.3 Instant, while users without a Microsoft 365 Copilot license will have standard access. Learn more about standard versus priority access here

Get started today

GPT-5.3 Instant begins rolling out today to Microsoft 365 Copilot users with priority access and Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat users with standard access. For agent makers, GPT-5.3 Instant is available in Copilot Studio early release cycle environments. Updates to Thinking will follow soon.

Microsoft 365 Copilot chat interface with the response mode menu open, showing Auto, Quick response, Think deeper, and GPT‑5.3 Quick response selected.

In Copilot Chat, GPT‑5.3 Instant appears as GPT‑5.3 Quick response in the model selector under More, and in Copilot Studio as GPT‑5.3 Chat.

Our team will continue to refine the experience based on your feedback as we build the future of work together. Learn more about Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft Copilot Studio and start transforming work with Copilot today. Learn more about GPT-5.3 Instant from OpenAI here.

For the latest research insights on the future of work and generative AI, visit WorkLab.

People Skills: Expanding skills intelligence to more users and surfaces across Microsoft 365

AniBajaj — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 17:01:32 GMT

Since launching in June 2025, People Skills has become foundational within Microsoft 365—powering Copilot, a new generation of Copilot agents, and experiences across M365 that help employees and leaders make better decisions about work, learning, and talent. People Skills is core to Work IQ, bringing skills intelligence into the fabric of how people work, collaborate, and grow—for everyone in the organization.

Today, we are announcing an expansion of People Skills in three key ways:

To more users: AI-powered skill inferencing is now available to Microsoft 365 E3 and E5 license holders, extending skills coverage to the majority of organizations' workforces.

To more surfaces: Beyond Microsoft 365 Copilot, skills data is now integrated into a new set of Copilot agents—including the Learning agent and Workforce Insights agent—and will soon appear on the Teams profile card, one of the most visited surfaces in the M365 ecosystem.

Flexible and simplified admin controls: Admins can now enable People Skills for specific users or groups and also import custom skills libraries directly from local files in addition to SharePoint-hosted files.

What People Skills is – and why it matters

Traditional skills systems rely on employees to manually update profiles, leading to incomplete and outdated data that can miss real employee capabilities. People Skills solves this with AI continuously inferring skills from everyday work activity across Microsoft 365, analyzing signals from documents, emails, meetings, and job context to build skills profiles mapped to an organization’s approved taxonomy. For eligible licensed users, these profiles stay automatically up to date as work changes, without ongoing manual input - early adopters report around 80%+ accuracy when validating their AI-inferred skills. For details on People Skills capabilities, see our People Skills adoption site.

People Skills also has strong admin- and user-level privacy and visibility controls to support flexible rollout, compliance alignment, and comprehensive user options for skill visibility and AI-inferred skill preferences. For details on data and privacy controls, see Manage Privacy and Sharing controls in People Skills.

People Skills Updates

Expanded AI-Powered Inferencing for E3/E5 Users

Admins can now expand AI-powered skill inferencing to users with Microsoft 365 Enterprise E3 and E5 licenses. Previously, this was available only to Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft Viva licensed users.

Enabling inferencing for E3 and E5 users improves skills coverage across the organization—resulting in richer workforce analytics for leaders and more robust results in people-based queries in Microsoft 365 Copilot and related agents.

Admins can turn on AI-powered skill inferencing for E3/E5 users in the Microsoft 365 admin center.
Users can always have complete control over their own skills profile and can opt-out of AI inferencing and sharing. Learn more at Manage your skills library in People Skills.
Note: This control is available to tenants with Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses. AI skill inferences for E3/E5 users are refreshed every 180 days, which differs from the standard 30-day refresh cycle for Copilot and Viva users.

People Skills in Teams Profile Card (Coming Soon in March 2026)

People skills will soon appear directly on the Microsoft 365 profile card in Teams – one of the most visited surfaces in the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. This will help employees discover colleagues’ skills, strengthen collaboration, and manage their own skills profile right within the flow of work.

People Skills in Learning agent (Frontier)

Recently announced at Ignite 2025, the new Learning agent guides employees along their skill development journey with personalized learning recommendations, curated learning paths, and interactive AI-powered role-play exercises from LinkedIn Learning. Learning agent uses skills data to suggest personalized learning content to users. Learn More: Agents in Microsoft 365 Adoption site.

People Skills in Workforce Insights Agent (Frontier)

Also announced at Ignite 2025, the new Workforce Insights Agent gives leaders a real-time view of their organization's skills distribution—helping identify strengths, gaps, and opportunities for workforce development. The agent provides actionable organizational insights through preloaded prompts that give a clear view of team structure, level mix, and skills distribution to help inform workforce planning decisions. Learn More: Agents in Microsoft 365 Adoption site.

Note

Skills Agent users in Frontier have helped shape how skills experiences work in Copilot—and we're now bringing these capabilities into M365 Copilot and dedicated agents so more users can benefit. As part of this transition, the Skills Agent will be removed from the agent store for new installations on March 16, 2026, and retired at the end of March 2026. All existing skills capabilities continue to be supported through M365 Copilot and the new Learning and Workforce Insights agents. If your organization is currently using the Skills agent, we recommend beginning your transition now.

People Skills in Skills Landscape Report

The Skills Landscape PowerBI Report in Viva Insights is now generally available. The report integrates People Skills data to give analysts and business leaders visibility into the specific skills being used across their organization—supporting more informed decisions on workforce planning, talent management, and skilling initiatives.

Learn more about this report here and setup documentation can be found here
Note: People Skills must be set up in your tenant before running this report.

Improved skill ordering

Users can now reorder skills on their profile card, choosing which skills appear first. This makes it easier to highlight the most relevant expertise and manage how colleagues see your skills profile across Microsoft 365. We've also improved how inferred skills are ranked on user profiles, making it easier for employees to review and confirm the most relevant skills first.

New People Skills User Experiences Control

Admins can now control the rollout of People Skills user experiences to target specific groups before enabling broadly across the organization – giving organizations the flexibility to pilot with targeted groups—validating value, gathering feedback, and refining configuration—before broader deployment.

The new People Skills user experiences control allows admins to enable or disable the full People Skills experience for specific users, groups, or the entire tenant. This includes the ability to scope the rollout to a pilot group while keeping the experience disabled for other users. For details on configuring this control, see Overview of People Skills User Experiences control.

Local Custom File Upload

Admins can now upload custom skills libraries directly from local devices, rather than requiring SharePoint-hosted files. This provides more flexibility for organizations that maintain skills taxonomies in local files or want a simpler import process without configuring SharePoint hosting. For details on importing custom skills libraries, see Manage your skills library in People Skills.

How Organizations Are Using People Skills data

Since GA, People Skills has seen strong adoption across thousands of enterprise customers. The scenarios resonating most strongly with early customers include:

AI-inferred skills in the flow of work: Accurate, automatically refreshed skills surface directly in Copilot and across Microsoft 365—so people can make skills-based connections in their daily workflows.

Data-driven workforce planning: Leaders identify capability gaps and make informed hiring, upskilling, and organizational design decisions grounded in real skills signal rather than assumptions.

Finding people for projects and networking: Employees and team leaders quickly identify colleagues with the right experience for project staffing, knowledge sharing, or ad-hoc questions—without relying on tribal knowledge or outdated directories.

Skills-based learning recommendations: Employees discover learning content aligned to their actual skills, powered by their inferred skills profile rather than generic content libraries.

Get Started with People Skills today

To deploy People Skills in your tenant, see Set up People Skills on Microsoft Learn.

For adoption resources, include video demos of our agents and capabilities, and deployment guides, visit the People Skills Adoption site.