Microsoft Copilot Blog articles

Available today: OpenAI's GPT-6.1 Sol and Claude Sonnet 5.5 in Microsoft Copilot

Xia_Song — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 23:28:22 GMT

Earlier this month, Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 and OpenAI's GPT-6 Sol joined model choice in Microsoft Copilot. Now, we're continuing to expand that choice by bringing GPT-6.1 Sol and Claude Sonnet 5.5 to Microsoft Copilot, giving users more model options for how they delegate work to Copilot. As customers take on different kinds of work with Copilot, expanded model choice gives them more flexibility to choose the experience that best fits the task at hand.

With Work IQ, Copilot grounds it in your organization's files, meetings, chats and business data, within your existing permissions, so responses are informed by the context of your work.

Get started

GPT 6.1 Sol and Claude Sonnet 5.5 begin rolling out today with usage-based billing in Copilot Cowork and Copilot Studio.

GPT 6.1 Sol and Claude Sonnet 5.5 will also begin rolling out in phases across Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Chat in the coming week as part of the user subscription license (USL)--limits apply but are designed to enable broad everyday AI usage across the organization, with the vast majority of users not expected to reach them. Users are warned as they approach a limit, and they can switch to Auto to continue working or select another model. Availability and usage may vary by license, access, and region.

For the latest availability updates, see AI at Work Roadmap and Microsoft Copilot release notes. For more on GPT-6.1 Sol, read OpenAI’s announcement and Anthropic’s announcement on Claude Sonnet 5.5.

What’s New in Microsoft Copilot | September 2026

Daniel_Vargas — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 15:30:00 GMT

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

We had some big announcements last week about how we’re introducing the new Copilot to connect the tools people rely on with the next generation of capabilities they’ll need to build, customize and scale AI across work. If you missed it, you can catch up on those announcements here: Introducing the new Copilot with Home, Code, and Autopilot.

Now let’s take a closer look at what else is new this month:

User capabilities:

New design and functionality for Copilot Chat
Plugins, connectors, and Work IQ enhancements to the Copilot App
Teams Phone agent for Copilot in Teams Phone
Citations and image modifications for Copilot in Word
Skills and connectors for Copilot in PowerPoint
General availability for Copilot in SharePoint
General availability for Copilot in OneDrive

IT admin capabilities:

Authoritative sources in the Microsoft 365 admin center
Targeted surveys in the Copilot Dashboard

User capabilities

New design and functionality for Copilot Chat

Copilot experiences in Teams and Outlook get a refreshed look aligned with the broader Copilot app design, simplifying Copilot navigation, streamlining the chat experience, and providing new ways for users to organize work. The updated design appears in both the full-screen Copilot experience in Teams and Outlook and the Copilot side pane. These updates rolled out in September.

The upgraded Copilot new tab page in Edge brings search, chat, and web exploration together in a single search box. Copilot-suggested actions and curated work content sit alongside it, so users can move to the next task without hunting for the right entry point. This feature rolls out in October.

Users can now bring agents and skills directly into their prompts for specialized tasks. Users can call up agents or skills inline by typing ‘/’ (agents) or ‘@’ (skills). This enables uninterrupted work and the ability to compose prompts in one continuous flow. This feature rolled out in September.

Copilot Chat now better matches search results from scanned PDFs. This enables users to quickly surface relevant information from more of their files, reducing the time spent manually searching through documents. These features rolled out in September.

Copilot in Word, PowerPoint, and Excel on Android brings Copilot-powered editing to mobile devices. Users can now make changes with Copilot wherever they’re working. This creates a more seamless editing experience and makes it easier to stay productive on the go. This feature rolled out earlier this year on iOS, and rolled out on Android in September.

Plugins, connectors, and Work IQ enhancements to the Copilot App

New connectors, plugins, and agents help users get more value from Copilot by bringing relevant business data and industry knowledge into their everyday workflows. Additional new connectors, plugins, and agents across industries and functions include:

Industrial & Manufacturing: Autodesk, Resilinic, Vista Finance (by Trimble)
Professional & Business Services: askpolly
Financial Services: Fiscal AI, D&B Risk Analytics, D&B Finance Analytics, Zacks, MT Newswires, PrivCo, S&P Global Kensho, Square, Morningstar Credit Analytics
Healthcare & Life Sciences: AMASS, Cortellis Regulatory Intelligence, SciLeads, Causaly, BioRender, ClinicalTrials.gov, PubMed, PopHive, bioRxiv, DrugBank, CAS, Open Targets, NPI Registry, MedlinePlus
Energy & Resources: Rystad Energy
Human Resources: TechWolf Analyst Agent
Software & Technology: Webflow
Retail & CPG: NielsenIQ, Cloudinary, Contentsquare

The Microsoft plugin registry provides a unified catalog of Microsoft, partner, and custom-built plugins that work across the Copilot app and Microsoft 365 apps. Plugins bring skills, connectors, and other capabilities to Copilot, helping users complete more workflows in the apps they use every day. IT admins can discover and approve plugins once, manage them centrally through the Microsoft 365 admin center and Agent 365, and make them available consistently across Copilot experiences. Developers and partners can publish once, so they can easily introduce trusted solutions at scale while helping IT maintain control. Learn more about plugins and the new plugin registry. This feature rolled out in September.

Apps built with SharePoint Framework can now include interactive UI directly in Copilot chat as UX components. This enables users to view information, interact with controls, and take action without leaving the conversation. This feature is rolling out to Frontier in September.

Soon, SharePoint content and action tools will be available in Work IQ, enabling Copilot to use SharePoint content intelligence and take action on that content. This feature is rolling out to Frontier in September.

With Record in the Microsoft Copilot mobile app, users can capture in-person conversations and voice notes on the go and turn them into content they can act on. Record brings real-world audio into Copilot and provides an AI-generated transcript and summary in Copilot Chat, so users can easily preserve hallway conversations, customer visits, and ideas that might otherwise get lost. Users can ask follow-up questions, extract action items, or continue working with the content directly in Copilot. This feature rolled out in September.

Teams Phone agent for Copilot in Teams Phone

Copilot can now help customers get answers and the right support faster with Teams Phone Agent, the AI-powered calling receptionist. For customer-facing organizations and departments using Teams Phone, like bank branches or IT Help Desks, the Teams Phone Agent manages calls with repetitive requests, so employees can focus on the conversations that truly need a human touch. With support for over 60 languages, the Teams Phone Agent picks up incoming calls to help customers with answering common questions or booking and rescheduling appointments. Teams Phone Agent can also intelligently route callers to the right department or employee with an AI-generated summary of the conversation, so customers don't have to navigate phone menus or repeat themselves. This feature rolled out in September.

Citations and image modifications for Copilot in Word

Citations in Copilot responses in Word let users see the sources behind Copilot’s answers. Users can view citations to relevant web and work content directly in the response. This provides greater transparency and helps users understand where Copilot’s information comes from. This feature rolled out in September.

Now users can arrange and modify images and shapes directly within their Word documents. Copilot makes it easier to create layouts where visual elements look polished and well organized. This helps users create professional-looking documents with less manual effort. This feature rolled out in September.

Skills and connectors for Copilot in PowerPoint

Skills in Copilot for PowerPoint package multi-step workflows into reusable capabilities. Users can call on a Skill to guide Copilot through each step instead of rebuilding the process prompt by prompt. This saves time and helps users produce more cohesive, consistent presentations. Learn more at Brand Kit and Skills in Copilot in PowerPoint.

Prebuilt Skills in Copilot for PowerPoint help users improve presentations using ready-made capabilities for common tasks. Skills such as Explain this presentation can assess the overall narrative, audience fit, and flow, while Sharpen slide titles can rewrite titles to better summarize each slide. This helps users quickly refine their presentations without having to create detailed prompts or workflows from scratch. These skills rolled out in September.

Administrators can now publish approved Skills to specific users, groups, or the entire organization. This makes an organization’s workflows available directly in PowerPoint, without requiring each person create or upload them individually. This feature rolled out in September.

Brand Kit in PowerPoint can bring together your organization’s visual identity and reusable Skills for common presentation workflows. Brand managers can now include Skills that capture the processes teams use repeatedly alongside guidance for how presentations should look. This helps teams create presentations that are consistent with both the organization’s brand and its ways of working. Learn more at Brand Skill support for Copilot in PowerPoint. This feature rolls out in October.

Connectors in Copilot for PowerPoint let users bring information from the apps and sources they already work with into their presentations. Users can incorporate relevant information from connected sources while building their slides, so they can easily create presentations grounded in the information they use across their work. These connectors rolled out in September.

Copilot in PowerPoint can now continue working on long-running tasks even after users leave PowerPoint, switch devices, go offline, or end their workday. Users can move on to other work without keeping PowerPoint open or monitoring the task, and notifications let them know when Copilot has finished or needs their attention. This gives users greater flexibility to work across desktop, web, and mobile while reducing the time spent waiting for Copilot to complete longer tasks. This feature rolls out in October.

General availability for Copilot in SharePoint

Copilot in SharePoint helps teams create and organize content, ask questions grounded in SharePoint, enrich libraries with AI-generated metadata, and build reusable skills for repeatable business processes. Users can now access advanced AI capabilities directly in SharePoint sites and document libraries, including image generation and editing, AI-generated site analytics reports, and near real-time metadata autofill. Together, these capabilities help organizations organize, understand, and turn content into actionable knowledge while handling more advanced content-management tasks with AI. Copilot in SharePoint rolled out in September.

Copilot Search is becoming the default search experience across SharePoint and OneDrive. It combines natural language understanding, semantic retrieval, and AI-generated answers so people can ask questions naturally and receive grounded answers based on supported content they are authorized to access. This feature is rolling out to Frontier in September.

General availability for Copilot in OneDrive

Copilot in OneDrive has been rebuilt on the same foundation as Copilot in SharePoint, creating a more consistent experience for creating content, organizing information, and working with files wherever content lives. Copilot in OneDrive follows the same licensing approach as Copilot in SharePoint. Updated capabilities in Copilot in OneDrive rolled out in September.

IT admin capabilities

Authoritative sources in the Microsoft 365 admin center

Admins can now manage authoritative sources for Copilot Search in the Microsoft 365 admin center. They can designate up to 100 SharePoint sites as authoritative, signaling that the sites contain verified, official content and helping improve the relevance and trustworthiness of Copilot Search and Chat results. From this centralized governance layer, admins can view, add, remove, and bulk import or export authoritative sources. This feature rolled out in September.

Targeted surveys in the Copilot Dashboard

Leaders can now launch targeted Pulse surveys using dynamic survey lists to understand Copilot adoption and impact. The survey audiences are dynamically created from Copilot adoption data and can be filtered using existing criteria, eliminating the need to manually build and maintain lists. By bringing employee sentiment together with Copilot adoption insights, organizations can better understand how users are experiencing AI and identify opportunities to improve adoption and impact. Privacy is maintained through aggregated, population-level reporting rather than individual user visibility. This feature rolled out in September.

Did you know? The AI at Work Roadmap is where you can get the latest updates on productivity apps and intelligent cloud services. Microsoft Copilot release notes is where you can see the Microsoft Copilot features that are generally available 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 the plugin registry - one place to discover and govern plugins for Microsoft Copilot

rob_howard — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 19:11:46 GMT

On September 25, we introduced the new Microsoft Copilot to connect the tools people rely on with the next generation of capabilities they’ll need to build, customize and scale AI across work.

Agents in Copilot already help you work with your organization’s knowledge and automate business processes. Now, we’re giving you more ways to customize Copilot with plugins that contain skills, connectors, and agents, adding the data and actions you need to get work done.

To make these plugins easier to discover and manage, today we’re also announcing the Microsoft plugin registry, rolling out now. The plugin registry is a shared place to discover, publish, manage, and govern plugins across supported Microsoft Copilot experiences—Home (Chat and Cowork), Code, and Autopilot, Microsoft 365 apps (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint) and SharePoint. Your users can find organization-approved plugins through a consistent Plugins menu, while you manage access and oversight centrally. In the future, the plugin registry will support such experiences as Copilot Studio, GitHub Copilot, and Microsoft Foundry.

What is a plugin?

A plugin brings together the capabilities users need to get work done in Copilot in a package that is easy to discover, use, and manage. Users will discover enabled plugins through a consistent Plugins page across supported Copilot experiences. This Plugins page replaces and expands on the existing Agents page, providing continued access to all of your Agents, as well as Skills and Connectors, in one place. As an admin, you can approve, assign, and govern each plugin.

Plugins can include

Skills, which provide reusable instructions for specialized work
Connectors, which give Copilot approved access to services and data
Agents, which customize Copilot for specific uses

While the term “Plugins” is replacing “Agents” in the top-level UI of Copilot, Agents remain an important part of Copilot extensibility. With this change we are bringing them together with skills and connectors in a single package that users can discover and admins can manage. Developers and partners can also create plugins tailored to your organization’s systems and workflows. Learn more about the plugin registry.

Help your users complete more work

We’re introducing a more consistent way for your users to discover and use access approved plugins across supported Copilot experiences. As these updates roll out, users will be able to find the plugins you enabled through a Plugins menu in Home (Chat and Cowork), Code, Autopilot, and supported Microsoft 365 apps. Plugins can connect Copilot to approved business data and actions, helping users complete more workflows without leaving the experience where they’re working. These updates will make it easier to find and use enabled capabilities as users move across apps and Copilot experiences, reducing repeated discovery and setup and helping them stay in the flow of their work.

Control plugin access from one place

Give IT centralized control over which plugins users can access across supported Copilot experiences. Through the Agent 365 experience in the Microsoft 365 admin center, under Agents > Tools, admins can review Microsoft, custom-built, and partner plugins, enable or disable which plugins are available, block or assign them to users or groups. This makes it easier to expand what users can do with Copilot while keeping plugin access centrally managed. ¹

Managing plugins under Tools in Microsoft 365 admin center

Microsoft 365 admin center MCP management view

Help developers and partners scale

Central management gives you a consistent way to control access and updates over time. As your users, groups, and business requirements change, you can adjust assignments, review new versions, see where a plugin is in use, and decide when to expand, limit, or retire it. This helps you keep plugin access and versions aligned with your organization’s requirements without managing each underlying component separately.

Developers and partners can package related skills, connectors, and the metadata and configuration needed to connect to MCP servers and other enabled tools in one plugin. They can publish and update that package once for your review instead of maintaining separate deployment artifacts for each Copilot experience. You remain in control of approval and assignment, while developers and partners gain a clearer path to reach supported Copilot experiences as availability expands.

Find plugins for common business needs

More than 100 plugins are already available, with more being added. They support work across areas such as finance, sales, project management, creative work, IT service management, market research, and software development.

For example, plugins can connect Copilot to customer data in HubSpot; work-management systems such as Linear, Atlassian, and Asana; content platforms including Webflow, Canva, and Notion; databases such as MongoDB; and research services from IDC, NielsenIQ, and CAS. Browse the available plugins^2.

Build and publish custom plugins to the plugin registry using Work IQ Developer Tools (WIQD)

Use Work IQ Developer Tools (WIQD) to move through the end-to-end custom plugin lifecycle: build, preview, validate, package, and publish through the plugin registry. Import an existing agent plugin or start with the business outcome you want to achieve and create a new one. You can work through your preferred coding harness, including GitHub Copilot CLI, or use WIQD commands directly. Learn how to bring your plugin to Microsoft Copilot with WIQD here.

The plugin registry brings together the capabilities your users need and the controls your organization relies on. It makes enabled plugins easier to discover, access easier to manage, and solutions easier for developers and partners to publish across supported Copilot experiences. The result: more ways to get work done, with less complexity for users, admins, and builders.

Get started with plugins today

¹Basic registry and management capabilities for Microsoft Copilot experiences are included with qualifying Microsoft cloud subscriptions.

²Some connectors are in the process of rolling out.

Change Management Best Practices to Drive Value with Agent Builder

SahitiKappagantula — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 15:00:00 GMT

Most organizations start in the same place: licenses are provisioned, a handful of enthusiasts begin experimenting, and excitement around AI is high. Yet for most employees, building and using agents remains largely unexplored. The technology is ready, but widespread adoption has yet to follow.

The challenge is rarely technical. More often, it is about driving awareness, building confidence, demonstrating value, and creating the right conditions for new behaviors to take hold. Successful agent adoption requires more than technical readiness. Change management can help organizations build awareness, confidence, and engagement as employees begin creating and using agents.

This guide brings together practical approaches organizations can consider as they scale agent creation and usage.

Whether you are part of an AI Centre of Excellence, Learning and Development team, or Change Management function, you'll find a practical framework for scaling both agent creation and agent usage across your organization.

Included in Microsoft 365 Copilot, Agent Builder makes it easy for users to create agents that support personal and team productivity and enables organizations to democratize agent creation at scale.

In this article, we share best practices for driving change management with Agent Builder and accelerating agent adoption across the enterprise.

Key takeaways

✅ Agent adoption is a change management challenge, not a technical challenge.
✅ Measure both agent makers and agent users.
✅ Champion-led co-build sessions can support stronger engagement than demonstration-only training.
✅ Business unit-specific use cases can help improve activation than generic AI sessions.
✅ Leadership sponsorship is an important enabler of sustained adoption.

What is Agent Builder and Why Does It Matter?

Agent Builder in Microsoft 365 Copilot provides no-code experience for anyone to create an agent. Users can build agents using natural language, configure them manually, or start from prebuilt templates for common business scenarios.

There are 3 ways to build an agent:

Use natural language to describe your agent, and Copilot builds it for you (recommended).
Configure your agent manually via the Configure tab.
Start with a template to create an agent for a specific use case. Under the templates section, you will find some high-value scenarios like Plan my Day, Project Delta Digest, AI Learn Advisor and much more.

Now that you know what Agent Builder is, let’s explore how to drive behavior change for scaled adoption.

Change Management Operating Model

To get started with scaled adoption for Agent Builder, you do not need a bespoke plan for every team. A simple, repeatable three-phase approach can scale effectively across business units and teams.

Plan:

Here are a few checklists that can help you get started:

Secure executive sponsorship from someone who can influence the extended leadership team, who, in turn, encourages their people to attend.

Take a data-driven approach. Segment the user base by intent, then group audiences by license category to simplify delivery.

Work with your program lead, AI Center of Excellence, and L&D teams to agree on a campaign name. For example, “Be an Agent Boss,” “AI for All,” or “Agent BUDDY program: Build, Unleash, Deploy, Democratize Yourself.”

Define success metrics up front. Focus on the Users by creator type metric in the Microsoft 365 Copilot Agents Usage Report in the Microsoft 365 admin center. You can also track attendance to usage conversion and session satisfaction scores. View the usage report documentation.

You can also track additional metrics such as attendance-to-usage conversion rates and session satisfaction scores.

Prepare:

Clear access and licensing friction before the session, not during it. A quick readiness check with IT beforehand removes the most common blocker.
Use the adoption content in the Build agents with Agent Builder guidance to run your sessions. Open the build guidance.
Land use cases tied to real work, not feature tours. Show how an agent can support part of someone’s actual job to make the experience relevant to their day-to-day work. The templates and examples gallery is a good place to start. Open the templates gallery.
Send a short primer and a reminder before every session so the audience knows what to expect and arrives with some anticipation.

Common bottleneck	Lever that clears it
Licensing and access friction	A mandatory access and license check with IT before the session
Technical or sync issues during the session	Preload and validate the demo environment before the session
Login and access confusion	Share reading material and access instructions ahead of time
Low turnout from broad invitations	Segment by team and add personal nudges before the session
Newcomers overwhelmed by mixed content	Separate learning to use Copilot from learning to build agents

Execute:

Teach by building, not by presenting. Make every session practical so people leave having created or run a working agent. Start with a horizontal use case that works for everyone, such as the Plan My Day template, and walk through the capabilities. Then show a vertical use case that sits in their daily workflow. Ask people to build alongside you rather than watch.
Share ways to keep the momentum going: scheduling a prompt for M365 Copilot licensed users , post session recaps, leaderboards, and certifications where applicable.

Encourage people to showcase and share the agents they build and set up a feedback channel, so questions have somewhere to go.

Your 30-Day Agent Builder Adoption Checklist could look like this:

Plan

Secure executive sponsorship.
Identify champions.
Define success metrics.
Validate licensing and readiness.

Prepare

Start with templates available in Agent Builder
Expand with business-unit-specific use cases.
Publish campaign branding.
Run co-build sessions.
Capture attendance and feedback.

Execute

Celebrate agent creators.
Share success stories.
Review creator and usage metrics.
Plan the next wave.

The following HCLTech customer story shows how the organization approached Agent Builder adoption through a structured change management program.

HCLTech: Driving Agent Adoption at Enterprise Scale

From mid-May’26 to the end of June’26, HCLTech invited 80K+ employees through a structured adoption campaign designed to make agent creation practical, accessible, and relevant to everyday work.

We observed an increase in active agent users increase from 3,056 to 13,727, a 349% rise during the campaign. This included 8,722 active licensed users and 5,005 active unlicensed users. What began as a focused enablement program evolved into a broader organizational movement, showing that enterprise-scale agent adoption can be measurable and repeatable.

Making Adoption Practical

The Agent Buddy Program moved beyond demonstrations by offering hands-on co-build sessions grounded in real work, business-unit priorities, and business challenges.

Employees explored scenarios across research and analysis, enterprise knowledge discovery, planning and productivity, reporting and tracking, employee learning, communications, and development and quality assurance. During this campaign, participants generated more than 1,100 agent ideas, with planning and productivity emerging as the largest category.

The program gave employees opportunities to build and experiment with agents around day-to-day business scenarios.

“This initiative reinforced an important lesson: technology adoption succeeds when organizations focus as much on people and behaviors as they do on the technology itself. By combining Microsoft 365 Copilot innovation with HCLTech's structured change management approach, we demonstrated how organizations can scale agent adoption and accelerate value realization across the enterprise”.

- Carol Criner, Senior Vice President, Strategic Accounts, HCLTech

Building a Creator Ecosystem

HCLTech recorded 36,286 agents, with 27,375 created during the first half of 2026. User-created agents represented 73.9% of total agents used.

By July 2026, user-created agents generated 71.4% of all recorded responses, alongside continued use of agents created by Microsoft and HCLTech teams. Together, these metrics provide a view into how employees were creating and using agents across HCLTech.

Sustaining Momentum

Engagement continued after the formal sessions ended. Employees returned with new use cases, requests for additional hands-on practice, deeper learning content, and opportunities to build more advanced agents.

Post-session follow-up and continued support extended beyond the formal sessions. Employees began sharing ideas, supporting colleagues, and contributing to a broader community of agent creation across the organization.

What Made the Difference

Leadership sponsorship: Executive support made agent adoption a visible business priority and created credibility at scale.
Relevant engagement: Business-unit segmentation and role-specific use cases connected agent capabilities directly to employees’ work.
Hands-on enablement: Co-build sessions gave employees opportunities to build, test, and refine their own agents.

HCLTech paired its Agent Builder adoption efforts with a change management approach that incorporated leadership sponsorship, practical enablement, relevant use cases, and sustained engagement.

The outcome was more than increased usage or agent creation. The program combined increased agent creation and usage with continued employee participation in agent-building activities.

“Enterprise AI delivers value when it becomes part of everyday work. This program helped employees create agents for real business needs while establishing a scalable model for adoption.”

— Avishek Chattopadhyay, CVP and CIO, HCLTech

Successful organizations do not start by asking employees to build agents. They start by helping employees solve a real problem with an agent. Agent creation is the outcome of value realization, not the starting point.

What We Learned from Scaling Agent Builder Adoption

One lesson stands out from these adoption efforts: focus less on teaching people about agents in the abstract and more on helping people apply agents to real business problems. Five practical patterns can help shape your approach:

Give users an opportunity to build an agent during the session so they can gain hands-on experience with Agent Builder.
Complement horizontal productivity scenarios with business-unit-specific use cases connected to employees’ day-to-day work.
Build a champion network to complement centralized enablement and help extend adoption efforts across the organization.
Address access requirements before sessions and set expectations in advance to reduce potential friction for participants.
Track both agent makers and agent users to build a more complete picture of adoption.

Scaling agent adoption takes more than providing access. It requires thoughtful change management that helps employees connect agents to the way they work. Secure sponsorship, meet teams in the context of their work, address potential friction early, and make sessions hands-on. Start with one team, introduce a prebuilt agent connected to their work, and help them build their own. Then use what you learn to inform the next wave of adoption.

Where to go next

Overview and admin controls: Agent Builder in Microsoft 365 Copilot
Step-by-step build guidance: Build agents with Agent Builder
Ready-made use cases: Agent templates and examples
Track adoption: Microsoft 365 Copilot Agents Usage Report

Evolution of the Copilot pricing model

Nicole Herskowitz — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 17:09:45 GMT

You need to know what AI is going to cost so you can plan for it and manage it. That’s a fair ask. As AI becomes more agentic, we’re committed to delivering predictable value for everyday AI, while enabling state-of-the-art AI experiences that deliver more value and cost more to run. That’s why Copilot pricing is evolving to combine predictable per-user pricing with usage-based pricing

Everyday AI

Everyday AI is what you give your whole workforce. It's covered by the Copilot user subscription license (USL), priced per user per month (the way you've bought software for years), and there are no changes to the value you already have.

We price it this way on purpose. Some vendors put everyday AI work on a meter. We think that's the wrong deal, because when every task has a meter, companies may ration access and only some people get to use AI. We think everyone should.

Microsoft internal analysis, September 2026. Cost comparison modeled two user profiles across 40 prompts, with each prompt tested 10 times: everyday AI users (15 prompts: 9 Chat, 6 across Word, Excel, and PowerPoint) and advanced AI users (25 prompts: 5 Cowork plus 20 everyday work prompts: 11 Chat, 9 across Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, with a higher proportion of app-based tasks to reflect the advanced user’s broader use of AI across Microsoft 365 apps). Copilot used Auto for Chat and Microsoft 365 apps; Copilot Cowork used Opus 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol with high effort. Claude used Opus 5 with medium effort for Chat, extended thinking for Microsoft 365 add-ins, and Opus 5 with high effort for Claude Cowork. ChatGPT used GPT-5.6 Sol with medium effort for Chat and Microsoft 365 add-ins, and GPT-5.6 Sol with high effort for ChatGPT Work. Copilot costs reflect subscription list pricing, with Copilot Cowork costs calculated using variable rates based on model, context, tools, and runtime. Claude and ChatGPT costs were modeled using publicly available list pricing and API rates at the time of analysis. Costs exclude discounts, promotions, negotiated rates, and other special pricing. Actual results may vary based on customer usage, configuration, pricing, and other factors.

A fixed price fits everyday AI because of what we call saturation: the point where a more capable model stops changing the result, because the task never needed it. Tasks like turning a meeting transcript into bullet points or summarizing a document from a teammate are saturated.

Auto in the Copilot model picker is built around that idea. When you use Auto, it weighs accuracy, speed, and cost on each request to route to the model and level of reasoning effort best suited to the job. You get the best quality for a fixed price without thinking about which model to pick. If you'd rather choose, you can, because model selection is part of the USL. GPT-5.6 and Sonnet 5 are included—and new models like Opus 5 will be included with limits.

The USL has always come with fair use, and that won’t change. We're setting usage limits so that the vast majority of people never reach a limit. For the heaviest users, hitting a limit is not hitting a wall. You get a clear warning first, then a choice: switch your model selection to Auto at no additional cost or move to credits.

The USL is the foundation of Copilot, and we remain committed to adding more everyday value to it.

Advanced AI

Advanced AI is work you hand off: agents that run for hours, workflows without supervision, business processes rebuilt with agents doing much of the work. A multi-step financial model running all afternoon. Cowork, Code, Autopilot, new advanced experiences in apps like SharePoint, and frontier models like Fable and Astra. When you need the best possible quality or the best model for a task, that work runs on usage-based billing (UBB) with Copilot Credits. UBB builds on the USL, which is required to access these capabilities.

Both the USL and UBB run on models from multiple labs. Today that means OpenAI and Anthropic, with more labs and open-weight models coming soon. The benefit goes beyond choice. Models from different labs have different strengths, so they complement each other.

Think of our commercial model as a plug-in hybrid. The USL is the battery: it covers most of your driving at a fixed monthly cost. UBB is the gas tank, there when a task needs more range than the battery can give. The choice is yours, task by task.

FinOps

You stay in control. UBB capabilities are visible in the product, because we want everyone to see what Copilot can do. For enterprise customers, UBB services stay off until an admin creates a spending policy in the Microsoft 365 admin center, and nothing is billed before that.

The spending policy is where the decisions get made. Admins set budgets at the tenant and group level, including user-level caps inside group policies, and set alerts when spend hits a threshold. You decide what happens when someone approaches a limit: a warning, a way to request more, or no prompt at all if you'd rather users never see it.

Spend maps to your org the way the rest of your budget does. If you manage departmental costs through Azure subscriptions or resource groups, you can assign usage to the right one, so AI shows up in the same place as everything else that team spends money on. Reporting follows the same logic, broken out by user, group, workload, policy, and payment method.

We’re listening to customers and moving quickly to improve FinOps. Today, we’re rolling out additional capabilities to make AI spend easier to understand, manage, and optimize:

More workloads under cost management: Cost management now covers Code and Managed Runtime alongside Cowork and the Work IQ APIs, with Copilot Studio agents coming in October. More AI workloads will follow.
Manage model choice: Tailor model family access for different groups, giving admins the ability to match the right models to the right user or scenario to maximize value generated. Rolling out in Cowork with plans to expand to additional workloads.
Consumption insights for Cowork: See which scenarios are driving credit consumption and what they produced, so you can decide where to sustain, expand, or optimize.
Programmatically manage policies with APIs: Use Microsoft Graph API to manage spending policies at scale in your own business intelligence and FinOps tools of choice. This helps organizations automate with the systems and processes they already work in.
Spend visibility for end users: Your people can view credit usage, remaining credits, and usage history directly within Microsoft Copilot to manage their own use.

For more information, see here.

What's next

Models keep getting better and more efficient, so some capabilities will start on UBB and move into the USL as the economics allow. Sometimes they'll arrive with a usage limit at first, which lets people use them sooner than they otherwise could.

Most customers already use Copilot for everyday work. As you hand off more complex work, compare the total cost with the alternatives, the way you would for any other investment in getting work done.

To learn more about the new Copilot, see here.

More Models, One Copilot

Xia_Song — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 21:34:06 GMT

Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 and OpenAI's GPT-6 Sol are rolling out to Microsoft Copilot today across Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Chat, Cowork, and Copilot Studio.

Bringing Claude Opus 5.5 and GPT-6 Sol to Microsoft Copilot reflects Microsoft's commitment to giving customers access to the latest AI innovations as they emerge. As AI continues to evolve, Microsoft is expanding model choice in Copilot so customers can benefit from the unique strengths of different models within a familiar, trusted, and enterprise-ready experience.

No single model is ideal for every task. That's why Microsoft Copilot provides access to multiple frontier models, giving users the flexibility to choose the one that best fits the work they need to accomplish. But model choice is only part of what drives a great response. Equally important is what the model knows about your work. Through Work IQ, Copilot grounds responses in your organization's files, meetings, chats, and business data, helping deliver results that are relevant, informed, and connected to the context of your work.

Get started

Claude Opus 5.5 and GPT-6 Sol begins rolling out today. Availability may vary by license, access, and region.

For the latest rollout status, see the AI at Work Roadmap and the Microsoft Copilot release notes. For more detail on the models themselves, see Anthropic's announcement of Claude Opus 5.5 and OpenAI's announcement of GPT-6 Sol.

Brand Kit and Skills in Copilot in PowerPoint

Derek Johnson — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 15:00:00 GMT

You have a presentation to finish by the end of the day, but instead of focusing on the story, you are searching for the latest template, fixing fonts and colors, and repeating the same review steps you completed last time. What should be a creative process can quickly turn into a checklist of small, time-consuming tasks.

Brand Kit and Skills in Copilot in PowerPoint can help with those hurdles. Brand Kit helps presentations to start with the appropriate look from your organization, while Skills make familiar workflows repeatable, so you can spend your time shaping the message.

Company branding at scale with Brand Kit

First, there is the challenge of getting the look right. Brand Kit brings your organization’s templates, imagery, icons, fonts, and other assets into the PowerPoint creation experience. Instead of hunting through folders or reworking slides at the end, you can give Copilot the visual foundation it needs from the start, rather than requiring a separate clean up pass later.

Start with an approved Brand Kit

When starting a presentation, choose an approved Brand Kit so Copilot can create with your organization’s visual identity in mind so it’s not inferring what “on brand” means.

From there, Copilot can draw on the kit’s templates and assets as it builds or updates slides, helping the presentation feel familiar and cohesive.

Prompts to try after selecting Brand Kit:

Create a 10-slide deck for my marketing team based on our latest campaign
Add an executive summary slide to this deck based on my last monthly business review
Add an image for this product from my Brand Kit

Add guardrails where it matters

In some cases, like for presentations that have highly regulated internal requirements, brand managers can take governance one step further. Now, with a mode for stricter brand adherence, Copilot follows approved layouts aligned with company standards instead of suggesting creative layouts. Brand managers can also add slide-by-slide direction. Since these notes live inside an organization’s Brand Kit, the presentation a team builds incorporates the same guidance from the brand manager. These controls give organizations additional ways to support brand consistency. Learn more here

How to try it

When you create a presentation in PowerPoint, select an available Brand Kit and describe the presentation you want Copilot to create. You can also ask Copilot to use approved assets by your organization or bring an existing slide into alignment with the selected brand guidance.

Automate repeatable presentation workflows with Skills

Getting a unified visual foundation is one part of the work. Once the slides are on-brand, you may still need to review the story, anticipate questions, or rethink how a slide communicates its point. These are familiar tasks, but they can take a fresh round of prompts and edits every time.

Skills package those multi-step workflows into capabilities you can use again. Instead of rebuilding the process prompt by prompt, you can call on a Skill to guide Copilot through the steps for cohesive results.

Start with prebuilt Skills

Microsoft provides prebuilt Skills for common presentation tasks directly in the Copilot chat pane in PowerPoint. The list is growing, but some example for end users include:

@Prepare for Questions is generally available and helps users get ahead of difficult questions with slide-level support
@Review Presentation is generally available and provides slide-by-slide, executive-level feedback on a presentation.
@Visualize Slide turns the content of a slide into a polished image or infographic.

Build reusable personal Skills

If users need flexibility beyond a prebuilt skills, they can also create personal skills for custom workflows such as improving a story, applying a preferred review framework, or creating follow-up material. Instead of rewriting and refining the same prompt every time, the workflow becomes a reusable skill that can be uploaded, accessed and managed directly within Copilot in PowerPoint so it’s ready the next time you need it.

How to try it

Open the Copilot chat pane in PowerPoint and choose a prebuilt Skill for a common task, or create a Custom Skill for a workflow you want to reuse. You can keep favorite Skills turned on and switch off the ones you use less often. Learn how to upload you own custom skill here

Scale custom skills specific to your organization

Personal Skills make your own workflows repeatable, but many presentation practices, such as following messaging guidance or using a preferred review framework, need to be shared across a team. Administrators can publish approved Skills to specific users, groups, or the entire organization. This means the workflows from your organization are available directly in PowerPoint, without each person having to create or upload them individually.

Get Started with Brand Kit and Skills in PowerPoint today

Brand Kit in PowerPoint and Skills in PowerPoint are generally available today with a Microsoft 365 Copilot license. Join our live webinar to learn more right from the PowerPoint product leader or visit the following resources below:

Expanding model choice in Copilot with Grok

Xia_Song — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 00:41:27 GMT

Today we are expanding model choice in Copilot with the addition of Grok models from SpaceXAI¹. This continues our commitment to bring the latest AI innovation in the industry to Copilot, tuned for work and tailored to business needs.

Adding SpaceXAI as a subprocessor

To support access to SpaceXAI models in Copilot, SpaceXAI has been added to Microsoft's Online Services Subprocessor List. Access to SpaceXAI models is managed through a dedicated administrative setting that is disabled by default.

Organizations that want to use these models enable the setting first, and administrators keep transparency and control over the data processed by SpaceXAI models in supported Copilot experiences.

Access to Grok models is rolling out through the Microsoft Frontier Program in Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. We are starting with a focused release to gather customer feedback and learn how customers use the model across common productivity scenarios.

Grok is not available to Frontier customers in the European Union (EU), European Free Trade Association (EFTA), and the United Kingdom during the preview.

Expanding based on customer feedback and usage

Our multi-model strategy gives customers access to leading AI models while maintaining the trusted Copilot experience, and what we learn in the public preview shapes what comes next. We will evaluate customer feedback, usage patterns, and product fit before broadening model availability across additional Copilot experiences and surfaces.

Before models are made available to customers, Microsoft evaluates them through testing, safety validation, and Responsible AI reviews.

¹ Grok is the model family from SpaceXAI available as a preview to eligible Frontier customers in the coming week with admin opt-in.

Measuring the value of Cowork: From AI interactions to completed work

Mike_Walsh — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 15:15:10 GMT

You have invested in Copilot. Adoption is climbing, prompt volume is up, and your dashboards are full of engagement charts. Yet the question leadership keeps asking is: How do we quantify the value of AI when it helps us across so many kinds of work?

Value has always been incredibly hard to define for software, and as a result organizations looked to signals like usage trends as a proxy. These metrics were good approximations of value and made sense in a world where products and product costs were simple. The only assumption you need to make is that monthly usage of a product is at least equal to the monthly cost of that product, and you're confident that your active usage numbers are correlated with positive ROI (i.e. value).

With AI, usage is incredibly dispersed and produces a massive variety of outputs and outcomes, from simple to complex. Additionally, costs vary with usage, so the old proxy measures are likely insufficient for more complex tasks.

Most AI assistance today is transactional. A person prompts, reads the response, and takes the next step themselves. Copilot Cowork works differently. People describe an outcome, and Cowork helps plan, execute, and deliver work across Microsoft 365, with checkpoints that keep users in control. It can work across emails, meetings, files, documents, calendars, and Teams, turning intent into completed actions rather than a single answer.

A practical starting point for measuring Cowork value

When AI moves from answering questions to completing work, value can no longer be measured by prompts alone. The Consumption Dashboard in Insights now uses Cowork assisted hours and value: a directional estimate of the time Cowork returns to people by helping complete a wide range of tasks, including long-running work. The metric builds on assisted hours with research-based methods tailored to Cowork’s varied outputs. These metrics remain a proxy, not a precise measure, and estimates are intentionally conservative. It does not account for things like quality improvements, faster decision making, quantity of sources reviewed, ability to take on additional work, run simultaneous tasks across projects, and more. The value your teams realize may be greater depending on the outcomes Cowork delivers.

The rest of this post explains how we calculate the metric and why it offers a more useful and practical view of value than prompt counts. This evolution of measuring Cowork value should be viewed as a starting point to your value conversations, and just as important, we will continue to evolve this approach as new research, customer feedback, telemetry, and capabilities come forward.

From counting prompts to understanding work

With a typical AI assistant, a person prompts, reviews the response, and orchestrates what happens next. They move information between apps, refine the output, and turn it into something usable. In that model, prompts are a useful proxy for discrete assists.

Cowork is different. A person sets the intent, and Cowork orchestrates the work: planning, gathering inputs, running tools, and producing deliverables. The unit of value is therefore the workload required to fulfill the goal—not a single prompt.

That is why our measurement approach is evolving: from counting interactions to understanding the work AI helps complete.

Start with intent

We first organize activity around what a person intends to accomplish, grouping work into discrete tasks defined by their goal rather than by the number of turns or prompts.

A task might be building a customer proposal, analyzing documents, preparing for a meeting, drafting a stakeholder update, or creating a briefing. This maps measurement more closely to business outcomes.

For consistency, we use a classifier model to categorize tasks into eight common types of work:

Analysis and research
Document and content creation
Email workflows
Meeting workflows
Communication workflows
Specialized workflows
Writing or debugging code
General assistance

This helps organizations understand not just that Cowork was used, but what kind of work it helped with.

Break the task into real activities

Next, we identify the typical activities required to complete each task.

For example, document and content creation can involve gathering source material, understanding context, structuring the narrative, drafting, editing, formatting, and finalizing the deliverable. That is the work Cowork is completing, and it is why a task-based model tells you more than a prompt-based one based on counts.

By breaking work into typical activities, we can create a clearer and more explainable view of where AI assistance is showing up. The goal is not to claim that every task is identical. The goal is to ground the estimate in the kind of work a person would normally need to do.

The same logic is applied consistently across all eight task types, which is what lets leaders compare value across very different kinds of work. The image below is an example of the task categorization process.

Informed by research, and built to be conservative

An estimate is only useful if you trust it, so the methodology is built to be conservative and used as a starting point for value discussions.

Without assistance, a person completes every step: switching tools, finding inputs, drafting, editing, formatting, and preparing the final output. With Cowork, the person sets the intent and remains in control while Cowork orchestrates parts of the workflow, including gathering inputs, generating artifacts, taking actions, and carrying context across tools.

To value that work fairly, the methodology anchors task categories in published productivity research from Stanford, Microsoft Research, NBER, and Forrester[1]. It expresses time savings as conservative, typical, and optimistic ranges, allowing customers to interpret results using their own environment and assumptions. Every per-category band traces back to the supporting research, so you can see where a figure comes from and pressure-test it against your own experience.

Categories are valued differently because the work differs. Document creation may include drafting, rewriting, formatting, and polishing, while analysis and research may require learning new material, weighing evidence, solving problems, and making recommendations.

Read the full methodology here Cowork_Methodology.pdf

Why this matters for leaders

For leaders, the key question is not simply how much AI was used, but what work it helped accomplish and what value that might represent.

A task-based approach helps answer more practical business questions:

Where is Cowork helping with higher-complexity, multi-step work?
How much capacity might be returned to teams?
How does usage compare with cost and consumption?
Where should we expand, govern, or optimize adoption?

The dashboard image below shows a helpful visual representation of the different tasks Cowork is used for by assisted hours and credits used. From this view you can start to answer some of those key business questions like where to accelerate usage to potentially capture more value.

This matters as AI becomes more agentic and usage-based. Customers need to understand usage, cost, and value together to guide rollout, governance, and investment.

It is also important to be clear about what the metric represents. Assisted hours provide a directional estimate of capacity returned to people, helping organizations identify opportunities to create value and complement their own business outcome measurement.

This is the next step, not the final answer

AI value measurement must evolve with the technology. We will refine this approach as task-level signals improve and customers share feedback. But the direction is clear: as AI moves from assistance to orchestration, value will be defined less by interactions and more by the work AI helps people accomplish.

Take a look at the Consumption Dashboard in Insights and view Cowork details to see your top Cowork tasks and assisted hours. You can learn more about this new Cowork report on MS Learn here. These views will also come to the Cowork report in the M365 admin center soon.

Available today: OpenAI GPT-6 Astra in Microsoft Copilot

Bas Brekelmans — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 20:28:50 GMT

GPT-6 Astra joins the frontier models available in Copilot Cowork and Copilot Studio, giving customers more choice for complex work they want to delegate to AI. Astra expands the range of work that can be handed off to Copilot. Instead of breaking work into smaller pieces and guiding it step by step, you can delegate larger tasks and focus your time on reviewing results, making decisions, and moving work forward.

As more work is delegated, the quality of the outcome depends on both the model and the context it can reason over. Work IQ grounds GPT-6 Astra in your files, meetings, chats, and business data within existing permissions, resulting in more relevant and accurate responses.

Get started today

GPT-6 Astra is rolling out today to users in Copilot Cowork and Copilot Studio.

Availability may vary by region and organization. Admins can manage access and configure availability for their organization through the Microsoft 365 admin center.

For the latest rollout information, see Roadmap and Microsoft 365 Copilot release notes.

To learn more about the model, see OpenAI's announcement of GPT-6 Astra

Available today: Anthropic Claude Fable 5.1 in Microsoft Copilot

Bas Brekelmans — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 15:16:45 GMT

Claude Fable 5.1 is now joining the frontier models available in Copilot Cowork and Copilot Studio, giving customers more choice as they delegate more complex tasks to AI.

Fable 5.1 is designed for long-running work, financial analysis, and front-end visual coding, with tighter plans up front and more concise summaries at the end.

As more work is delegated to AI, the quality of the result depends on both the model and the context. Work IQ grounds Fable 5.1 in your files, meetings, chats, and business data—within your existing permissions—so it can reason over your work instead of the prompt alone resulting in more relevant and accurate responses, with sources you can trace back to your work.

Get started today

Claude Fable 5.1 is rolling out today to eligible users in Copilot Cowork and Copilot Studio.

Availability may vary by region and organization. Admins can manage access and configure availability for their organization through the Microsoft 365 admin center.

For the latest rollout information, see Microsoft 365 Roadmap and Microsoft Copilot release notes.

To learn more about the model, see Anthropic’s announcement of Claude Fable 5.1

What’s New in Microsoft Copilot | August 2026

Daniel_Vargas — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 16:04:01 GMT

Welcome to the August 2026 edition of What's New in Microsoft Copilot! Every month, we highlight new features and enhancements to keep Microsoft 365 customers 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:

More control for effort level and cost in Cowork
Text selections, session sharing, and more for Copilot Chat
New ways to work in Copilot Notebooks
Change languages for meeting recaps with Copilot in Teams
Hyperlinks, image understanding, and highlights for Copilot in Word
Chat history and change history skill for Copilot in Excel
Personal skills in Copilot in SharePoint
Agents, email drafting, and management enhancements for Copilot in Outlook
Improved file capabilities with Copilot in OneDrive
Status reports and task enhancements for Copilot in Planner
New Connectors and Plugins

IT admin capabilities:

Data export and GitHub Copilot AI Credits

User capabilities

More control for effort level and cost in Cowork

Users can now choose an effort level to control how Cowork balances quality, speed, and credit usage. Medium is the default for everyday work, while Light is designed for simpler tasks. High, Extra High, and Max give Cowork more room for deeper analysis, complex reasoning, and more thorough responses, but may take longer and use limits faster. Model and effort controls now appear directly in the compose box together. This feature rolled out in August.

The /cost skill now provides more visibility into Cowork credit usage. In addition to estimating the credits used for the current task session, it now shows the percentage of the monthly credit limit remaining, credits used month to date, and when the monthly limit resets. This feature rolled out in August.

The Scheduled tab in Cowork is now called Automations. The updated section gives users one place to view and manage all of their automated tasks, including both scheduled and event-triggered tasks. This feature rolled out in August.

Text selections, session sharing, and more for Copilot Chat

Now in Copilot users can select a sentence, paragraph, or table in a Chat response and ask Copilot to work only on that content. The selected text is previewed in the prompt before sending, enabling more focused explanations, summaries, translations, and next steps. This feature rolled out in August.

Copilot users can now share either a full chat session or an individual response through a simple link. Recipients get a read-only view and can continue the chat like it was their own, so they can easily reuse work and collaborate within organizational controls. Users can share their full chat session by selecting ’Share chat’ from the Share menu located in the top right of the chat UX. Or they can share an individual response by selecting ’Share response’ from the More options menu at the end of a response. This feature rolled out in August.

Copilot can now reason over enterprise data from Power BI reports and semantic models in both Chat and Cowork. Users can ask natural-language questions and receive accurate, grounded answers directly from data they have access to. This feature rolled out to Public Preview in June and rolled out worldwide in August.

New model-driven answer cards dynamically display content in Chat like weather, sports, finance, images, video, places, and news. The cards surface rich answers for Entra and Microsoft account users based on the user prompt across supported experiences in Copilot. This feature rolled out in August.

Users can now generate a new response to their latest prompt in Chat without having to start over. They can select ‘Try again’ to generate a new response with the same model or they can select a new model and have Copilot run the same prompt. This lets users explore different answers and refine output quality without restarting their conversations. This feature rolled out in August.

Mobile users can now turn an idea into a ready-to-send email. They simply describe the message they need, and Copilot will create an embedded Outlook draft directly in Copilot Chat. Users can then open the draft directly in Outlook mobile to edit and send. This seamless experience helps users move from idea to action without leaving their flow of work. This feature rolled out in August.

New ways to work in Copilot Notebooks

Copilot Notebooks now gives users two connected ways to work: a lightweight experience in the Copilot app, and a workspace experience in OneNote. In the Copilot app, users can quickly chat with Copilot, explore references, and create artifacts. In OneNote, users will get a workspace experience for deeper project work, expanded artifact creation, and team collaboration. Because notebooks stay in sync across the Copilot app and OneNote, users can move between the two without losing context. To go directly from the Copilot app to OneNote, users simply select “Open in OneNote.” This feature rolled out in August.

Copilot Notebooks proactively let users easily generate relevant documents by recommending artifacts based on WorkIQ and their notebook content. Selecting a suggestion prompts Copilot to generate a more specific Word, Excel, or PowerPoint artifact based on the user’s notebook content and current project. This feature rolled out in August.

Multimodal capture on Android helps users bring conversations, meetings, brainstorms, and other work moments into Copilot Notebooks. Users can capture audio, images, and notes in one experience, and Copilot automatically generates structured notes for their Copilot Notebooks. Multimodal capture is also available in the OneNote app on iOS and iPad. This feature rolls out in September.

Change languages for meeting recaps with Copilot in Teams

Users can now change the language of a meeting recap after it has been generated. A translation button makes multilingual recaps more flexible when users need the recap in a different language. This feature rolled out in August.

Hyperlinks, image understanding, and highlights for Copilot in Word

Creating polished documents is now easier with Copilot. Users can simply ask Copilot to add hyperlinks, and it can insert and format linked text directly in their document, helping them create professional, connected content without manual editing. This feature rolled out in August.

Copilot can now understand images in a user’s reference documents and incorporate them into the content it creates. Whether users are drafting a new document or building on existing materials, Copilot can use relevant text and visuals from referenced files to help create more complete documents. This feature rolled out in August.

When Copilot rewrites or refines text, it now highlights the exact words it edited rather than marking entire paragraph. This more granular view makes it easier for users to review, understand, and accept changes with confidence. This feature rolls out worldwide in August.

New Copilot in PowerPoint capabilities for further brand curation and faster collaboration

Now users can assign tasks and notify relevant stakeholders in comments using Copilot in PowerPoint. Users can ask Copilot to pull in stakeholders and automatically assign follow-ups directly in the comment thread. This helps teams move from feedback to action faster, keeps presentation reviews organized, and reduces the manual effort needed to track next steps across stakeholders. This feature rolled out in August.

Strict brand adherence restricts Copilot to your approved template and slide master layouts. When it's on, Copilot won't add or remove placeholders or invent new layouts. Use it when brand consistency matters more than creative flexibility—for official, customer-facing, or regulated presentations. This feature rolled out in August.

Note steering lets you guide Copilot with plain-language instructions written in a slide's notes for slide by slide governance. Copilot reads those notes each time it creates a presentation from your template, so you don't have to repeat the same preferences in every prompt. Learn more here Manage template settings in your Brand Kit for Copilot in PowerPoint | Microsoft Support This feature rolled out in August.

Users can now upload, create, edit and delete their own custom skills in PowerPoint. Skills turn repeated instructions into reusable guidance that Copilot can apply in the flow of a user’s presentation work. To learn more, visit Use custom skills with Copilot in PowerPoint. This feature rolled out in August.

Translation capabilities in PowerPoint have now been moved from the ribbon to Copilot in PowerPoint. Translation is now faster, with the ability to dynamically resize text boxes depending on the text. This feature rolled out in August.

Copilot can now edit smart art while staying on brand. Use copilot to edit diagrams and shapes on the canvas instead of manually adding and aligning smart art. This feature is in Frontier in August.

Chat history and change history skill for Copilot in Excel

Change history skill helps users understand how a workbook has evolved over time. Copilot can summarize recent changes, identify who made edits, and explain how both people and AI have modified the workbook. It can also help undo specific edits or restore formulas by returning the workbook to a previous working state. This feature rolled out in August.

Chat history helps users pick up where they left off with Copilot by preserving past conversations and sessions. To access chat history, use the menu icon in the upper left corner of the Copilot in Excel pane to open your previous conversations. Conversations are listed based on recency, with your most recent chat at the top of the list. Select a conversation from the list to view it. This feature rolled out in August.

Personal skills in Copilot in SharePoint

Users can create personal skills in Copilot in SharePoint and use them across SharePoint sites and OneDrive. Each user-owned skill is saved as a markdown file in OneDrive, so users don’t need to recreate skills for every site. This feature rolled out to Public Preview in August and rolls out worldwide in December.

Agents, email drafting, and management enhancements for Copilot in Outlook

Custom engine agents are now available directly in Outlook. Users can access these agents where they manage their work, making their capabilities available within the Outlook experience. This feature rolled out in August.

Copilot in Outlook can help users manage more email and calendar tasks using natural language. Users can ask Copilot to organize messages, apply categories, create folders, manage inbox rules, and take action on meetings and events—all from chat. By bringing more Outlook actions directly into the chat experience, Copilot helps them stay in flow and get work done more efficiently. This feature rolled out in August.

Improved file capabilities with Copilot in OneDrive

With improved Copilot file capabilities in OneDrive, users can go from files to finished work directly from chat. Copilot helps users find the right content, analyze files and data, create polished outputs like summaries, dashboards, and presentations, and collaborate by saving or sharing the results from OneDrive. This feature rolled out to Public Preview in August and rolls out worldwide in December.

Status reports and task enhancements for Copilot in Planner

Planner Agent can help turn plan data into a polished status report covering progress, risks, overall status, and next steps. Users can specify the audience, tone, length, and sections to quickly produce a stakeholder-ready update. This feature rolled out to Frontier in August.

Copilot will now support creating Planner tasks and querying Planner task information. This lets users manage task work across Copilot and Planner more seamlessly. This feature rolls out in September.

New Connectors and Plugins

Microsoft continues to grow the Microsoft Copilot ecosystem with new connectors and plugins spanning multiple industries. By connecting Copilot to valuable business data and domain-specific knowledge, organizations can unlock richer context, deeper insights, and more relevant experiences across everyday workflows. These include:

Financial Services: Mercury, Xero
Legal Services: iManage Work, Boardwise, Harvey, Descrybe Legal Engine, Relativity, Everlaw
Professional and Business Services: Statista, Crossbeam, ZoomInfo, IDC
Energy & Resources: S&P Global Energy
Healthcare & Life Sciences: Scite and Consensus
Software & Technology: Adobe Journey Optimizer, GoDaddy, Asana

IT admin capabilities

Data export and GitHub Copilot AI Credits

Admins can create custom reports with new data export capabilities from the Copilot and Agent 365 Dashboards. These dashboards now support exporting de-identified, row-level metrics and attributes. Admins can get deeper insights into organizational Copilot and agent usage and user-level interactions while removing personal identifiers. These features roll out in September.

The Consumption Dashboard in Insights now supports GitHub Copilot AI Credit usage. Admins can analyze how developers use GitHub Copilot to manage adoption and credits. Managers, Insights analysts, and Global admins can compare spending with budgets and make data-driven decisions about GitHub Copilot investment. This feature rolled out in July.

Did you know? The AI at Work Roadmap is where you can get the latest updates on productivity apps and intelligent cloud services. Microsoft Copilot release notes is where you can see the Microsoft 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.

Copilot Notebooks now works with Markdown, plain-text, and rich-text files

abhkaushik — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 16:00:00 GMT

Add your READMEs, wikis, logs, and transcripts to your notebook

Your most useful project knowledge does not always live in a polished document. It might be captured in a README, project wiki, system log, meeting transcript, research export, or a simple text file.

Copilot Notebooks can now use Markdown (.md), rich text format (.rtf) and plain text (.txt) files as references—helping you bring more of the content your work runs on into one focused workspace.

Add the files to a notebook, chat with Copilot, and generate grounded insights and useful artifacts from your project context.

Bring structured knowledge and raw data together

Markdown often contains the structured knowledge behind a project: READMEs, technical documentation, project wikis, architecture notes, release notes, and runbooks.

Plain-text files often contain raw data: system logs, exported transcripts, ticket dumps, customer feedback, and working notes.

Rich Text Format (.rtf) files preserve formatted notes and documents—such as reports, drafts, and exported content.

With support for Markdown, rich text, and plain-text files, Copilot Notebooks helps you bring together documentation, notes, logs, and transcripts into a single workspace for deeper insight and outcomes.

Scenarios to try

Here are a few ways to get started in notebooks:

Turn a transcript into action: Add an exported meeting transcript and ask, “What did we decide, who owns each action, and what remains unresolved?”
Find patterns in feedback: Add a plain-text export of support tickets and ask, “What are the most common issues, and which themes appear to be emerging?”
Investigate an incident: Add a README and system log, then ask, “Compare the expected behavior with what happened before the failure.”
Get up to speed on a new project: Add a project wiki, meeting transcripts, release notes, and working notes, then ask, “What do I need to know to contribute effectively to this project?”

How it works

Add a .md, .txt, or .rtf file as a reference in Copilot Notebooks, then chat with Copilot about its content.

There is no need to reformat a log, convert a transcript into a traditional document, or manually summarize a long README first. Copilot can reason over the files in the context of the notebook and provide answers grounded in the source material.

Feedback

We want to hear from you. Try bringing a README, project wiki, log, transcript, or another text-based source into a Copilot Notebook—and let us know which scenarios help you move from complex files to useful work.

More to come

We’ll continue expanding the range of content you can bring into Copilot Notebooks—including new and emerging input types—so you can work with more of the context that matters to you.

This feature is rolling out to all Copilot Notebooks users starting this week.

Built for business: How Microsoft 365 Copilot keeps you in the flow of legal work

carolinestanford — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 16:00:00 GMT

The tools that run a business rarely live in one place. For a small business owner, that means stepping out of the document you're writing to search for an attorney, digging through a folder for the LLC paperwork you half-remember filing, or pausing a client deliverable to figure out if a contract clause is enforceable. Every one of those detours pulls you out of the work you were doing to go chase down something that should've been a quick answer. For a small business, where focus is one of the most valuable resources there is, constant switching adds up.

Microsoft 365 Copilot is designed to keep your work moving, bringing your data, expertise, and workflows into the apps you already use like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams - now powered by AI. And through built-in and custom agents, Copilot extends to include specialized tools and services that run your business, so you can use their capabilities all in one place. That ecosystem of partner agents is growing quickly, and LegalZoom is a great example of what it makes possible: chat with a LegalZoom Legal Assistant, get a recommended business formation plan, or connect with an experienced attorney - all without needing to leave Copilot.*

Handle legal tasks with LegalZoom, directly in Microsoft 365 Copilot

With the LegalZoom agent, resources are provided to help answer a legal question the moment it comes up, right inside Microsoft 365 Copilot. Instead of jumping out to another tool, the work continues where you already are. And when a task calls for something more, the agent provides a streamlined path back to LegalZoom, which remains the home for its services and the professionals behind them.

That’s the shift that agents make possible in Microsoft 365 Copilot: the tools a business depends on coming to where work is already happening, rather than living in separate siloes.

“Small business owners shouldn’t have to leave their work environment to get reliable legal guidance. With LegalZoom inside Microsoft 365 Copilot, we are helping entrepreneurs find answers, understand their options and connect with attorney support at the exact moment they need it.”*

— Jeff Stibel, Chairman & CEO, LegalZoom

*Microsoft 365 Copilot does not provide legal advice or legal services.

Built on a foundation of trust

Bringing more of your business into Microsoft 365 Copilot only works if it’s secure. Microsoft 365 Copilot provides enterprise-grade security, privacy, and compliance tools and it honors the access permissions your business has already established. Your data remains within your organization's Microsoft 365 security and permissions boundaries. Microsoft does not use your prompts, responses, files, emails, chats, or other Microsoft Graph data accessed by Microsoft 365 Copilot to train the foundation LLMs used by Microsoft 365 Copilot. And we don't sell your information to advertisers. Stay tuned for more in this series and learn more about Microsoft 365 Business with Copilot.

The promise is simple: the tools and expertise a business relies on, brought into the flow of work rather than scattered across it. The LegalZoom agent is available now through the Microsoft Marketplace. To learn more, visit legalzoom.com.

About LegalZoom

LegalZoom is a leading online platform for legal services, transforming how individuals and small businesses navigate the legal system. By combining intuitive technology with access to experienced attorneys through their vast independent attorney network or their own law firm, they offer the tools and guidance people need to confidently manage everything from LLC formation and compliance to intellectual property protection and ongoing business management and legal support. For more information, please visit legalzoom.com.

ICYMI: Partner Blog | From AI curiosity to Copilot adoption in 30 days

JillArmourMicrosoft — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 17:00:00 GMT

Thirty days. Twenty-five users. One clear path to AI.

For small and medium-sized businesses, AI is no longer a someday conversation, it's a right-now decision. SMB customers aren't asking whether AI matters anymore; they're asking how to put it to work in ways that are practical, fast, and secure. The hard part isn't interest. It's the starting line.

Customers are looking to identify relevant use cases, experience AI in their everyday work, and evaluate its value before making a broader commitment. This creates a significant opportunity for Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) partners to lead customers from initial interest to sustained adoption. The SMB segment represents a Microsoft-estimated $625 billion* market opportunity in FY27, yet most organizations remain early in their AI transformation journey.

Continue reading here

What’s New in Microsoft 365 Copilot | July 2026

Seth_Patton — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 15:30:00 GMT

Welcome to the July 2026 edition of What's New in Microsoft 365 Copilot! Every month, we highlight new features and enhancements to keep Microsoft 365 customers 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:

Adding agents in Copilot Chat
Model update, search enhancements, and push notifications in the Copilot app
Model update and new ways to work in Cowork
Additional reference support for Copilot Notebooks
Workflows for Copilot in Word
New skills and Power BI context for Copilot in Excel
Branded assets, custom skills, and more for Copilot in PowerPoint
Meetings recaps app for Copilot in Teams
Access heatmap, AI summary, and document creation for SharePoint and OneDrive
More Copilot connectors

IT admin capabilities:

New controls and reports in Microsoft admin center

User capabilities

Adding agents in Copilot Chat

Users can now add the Word, Excel, and PowerPoint agents directly into their Copilot Chat prompt. After opening Copilot, users simply @mention the agent, and it’s added to the chat. This enables users to create documents, spreadsheets, and presentations without leaving the Copilot app. This feature rolled out in July.

Model update, search enhancements, and push notifications in the Copilot app

OpenAI's GPT-5.6 family of models is now available in Microsoft 365 Copilot. Optimized for knowledge work in Microsoft 365, GPT-5.6 delivers stronger reasoning for complex, multi-step tasks, helping Copilot turn initial ideas into polished drafts in Word, reason over deeper analysis in Excel, generate richer presentations in PowerPoint, produce clearer responses in Chat, and carry end-to-end deliverables through in Cowork. Grounded in users’ work context, GPT-5.6 helps Copilot take on the complexity of knowledge work. This model rolled out in July.

Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 5 is now available in Microsoft 365 Copilot. Designed for agentic, multi-step work, this new model helps with tasks like drafting documents, analyzing spreadsheets, and creating presentations. Available today in Copilot in PowerPoint, Word, and Cowork, it expands the growing set of models available in Copilot, giving people more flexibility to choose the right model for the task at hand. Combined with Work IQ, Copilot grounds its work in files, meetings, chats, and business data to deliver results that are relevant to the user’s work context. This feature rolled out in July.

New updates to Copilot answers within the Copilot Search module help organizations take advantage of Copilot in a more targeted way. Copilot answers now provide more concise responses. They also highlight more prominently that users can continue the conversation in Copilot Chat on the sidebar. The benefit is a smoother user experience with less manual effort, while giving IT teams a clearer path to support rollout and adoption. This feature rolled out in July.

New push notifications from Microsoft 365 Copilot mobile app help users quickly catch up on their work items on their iOS and Android devices, reducing the need to manually check across apps such as Outlook, Teams, and other Microsoft 365 experiences. Users receive relevant Copilot prompts like 'Your Day at a Glance' and 'Items waiting for you' as push notifications to their mobile devices. When users open a notification, they are taken to the Copilot mobile app, where the prompt’s corresponding response already appears on screen. This feature is only available for users with Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses. This feature rolled out in July.

Model update and new ways to work in Cowork

Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5 is now available in Copilot Cowork as a model update for users who need help with longer, more complex work. Anthropic describes Claude Fable 5 as built for ambitious, long-running projects, with stronger sustained reasoning, deeper context handling, and the ability to plan, execute, and check work across multi-stage tasks. In Cowork, this gives users another model option for agentic work that requires more persistence and depth, helping them delegate complex workflows with less step-by-step supervision while staying grounded in the context of their work. This model will be off by default and rolled out in July.

Copilot Cowork local browser automation with Microsoft Edge enables users who are signed into Edge to use Cowork to work across the web-based systems they work in all day, such as SaaS tools, internal portals, and more. With Cowork acting across websites on the user's behalf, users spend less time manually switching tabs to get work done.. This feature rolled out in July.

With event-triggered tasks in Cowork let users forget about constantly refreshing their inbox or worrying about missed pings. Instead, users can ask Cowork to watch mail and Teams for the moments that matter, catch them the instant they land, and have a response ready before users ask. To do this, users can create event-driven tasks triggered by a sender, an @mention, a keyword or topic, or an event name. Users can simply describe the trigger in plain language, and it will execute across Teams chats, channels, Outlook email, and meetings. This feature rolled out in July to Frontier.

By customizing Cowork with skills and plugins, users can easily tailor Cowork and extend it into the systems they rely on. Now, in the Customize tab, users can add a skill through a guided ‘Create new’ flow or by dragging and dropping an existing .md, .zip, or .skill file to ‘Upload skill.’ Plugins work the same way, with Claude or Open-Plugin zips auto-converted into publishable packages, bundled skills and MCP connectors included. The benefits are less manual setup plus easy sharing, since users can share any skill or plugin with specific people across the org while remaining the owner, so every edit flows out automatically. This feature rolled out in July.

Additional reference support for Copilot Notebooks

Copilot Notebooks now offer support for Markdown (.md), TXT (.txt), and RTF (.rtf) files as notebook references to help organizations reason over additional project context. With this update, users can add Markdown, TXT, and RTF files for content like software documentation, video transcripts, and rich-text notes directly to their notebooks and use Copilot to turn those inputs into helpful project artifacts. Reference support for TXT and RTF files rolled out in July, and support for Markdown files will roll out in August.

Workflows for Copilot in Word

Using review workflows for Copilot in Word, users can edit documents with Track Changes on, so proposed revisions are transparent and easy to review. With changes visible by default, users can easily see and approve every edit. Users can also ask Copilot to add, read, reply to, and manage comments, helping keep feedback organized and connected to the right content. This feature rolled out in June.

With drafting workflows, Copilot can now insert and update tables of contents so documents stay organized as they evolve. It can also help manage headers, footers, page numbers, dates, and footnotes, so documents are easier to format and users can maintain polished, professional documents without manual effort. This feature rolled out in July.

New skills and Power BI context for Copilot in Excel

The brand kit skill enables Copilot in Excel to format workbooks with an organization's Brand Kit from the Microsoft 365 brand center, automatically applying approved colors, fonts, and logo to tables and charts so every report follows the company branding guidelines. Users can use the Brand-kit skill and ask Copilot to brand their Excel sheet for a polished, on-brand, presentation-ready report, without manual formatting. This feature rolled out in July.

With the theme design skill, users can now apply a coordinated design theme to their data, choosing a harmonized color palette, styling charts, and structuring the layout so their key insights stand out. Users can use the @theme-design skill and ask Copilot to design or polish their sheet, and it delivers formatting with clear visual hierarchy, turning raw data into a clean, readable report and saving users the manual design work. This feature rolls out in August.

Copilot in Excel can now ground analysis in governed Power BI data, bringing trusted business metrics directly into the Excel grid. Users can attach a Power BI report from the work content selector, then ask Copilot to analyze performance, identify trends, and build summaries or supporting calculations in Excel. Copilot works with the underlying report data while respecting existing row-level security, eliminating the need to export data, manually copy and reconcile figures, or switch between Power BI and Excel. This feature rolls out in August.

Copilot in Excel is now available in more cloud-saved workbooks, including files where AutoSave is turned off on Windows and Mac. Previously, Copilot required AutoSave to be on, which meant some users could not use Copilot in otherwise supported workbooks. When AutoSave is off and the workbook has unsaved changes, Excel reminds users to turn on AutoSave before Copilot starts making changes, helping protect unsaved work. Users can still choose to continue with Copilot without turning on AutoSave. This feature is rolling out in August.

Branded assets, custom skills, and more for Copilot in PowerPoint

Users can now use their company’s branded assets like logos, icons, themes, and fonts from their Microsoft 365 Brand kit directly in Copilot in PowerPoint. Brand managers can securely update and rollout their preferred brand kit to ensure consistent design across company assets. Users can choose their company’s template and apply their brand colors, images, and icons right within PowerPoint to create on brand presentations. These features rolled out in July.

Custom user skills are now available in Copilot in PowerPoint. This enables users to create, upload and update their own custom skills in OneDrive. Skills turn repeated instructions into reusable guidance that Copilot can apply in the flow of presentation work. To learn more, visit Use custom skills with Copilot in PowerPoint. This feature rolls out in August.

Copilot in PowerPoint can now write, reply to, and resolve comments right inside a presentation. Users can ask Copilot to draft a new comment, respond to existing feedback, or resolve completed comment threads without switching context. This makes it easier to organize slide feedback, move reviews forward faster, and collaborate on presentations with less manual effort. This feature rolled out in July.

Additionally, users can soon assign tasks and notify relevant stakeholders within comments using Copilot in PowerPoint. Users can ask Copilot to turn feedback into assigned follow-ups and bring the right people into the conversation directly from the comment thread. This helps teams move from feedback to action faster, keeps presentation reviews organized, and reduces the manual effort needed to track next steps across stakeholders. This feature rolls out in August.

Copilot in PowerPoint users now have more key capabilities in iOS Mobile and iPad. First, Copilot can now plan multi-step actions like creating, editing, and analyzing. Second, Copilot can now ground implicitly based on the current slide and explicitly based on attached files. Finally, to support on-the-go mobile tasks, users can keep working or switch apps while Copilot works in the background. These features rolled out in July.

Users can now create new presentations or restyle existing ones using another presentation as a reference with Copilot in PowerPoint. Users can either attach a PowerPoint file to reference or open a PowerPoint deck and ask Copilot to create a new or existing presentation using the reference deck's visual style. Copilot applies the reference deck's layouts, theme, and visual system to create a polished, consistent deck. This new feature lets users easily reuse trusted designs, align content to brand guidelines, and match the look and feel of an existing presentation without manual reformatting. This feature rolled out in June.

Meetings recaps app for Copilot in Teams

The new Meeting recaps app brings AI-generated meeting recaps together in one convenient app that can be pinned in the Teams sidebar, so users can easily find recaps and catch up. Users can apply quick filters to instantly surface the meetings that matter, browse and revisit meetings with recaps from the past 30 days, or generate an audio recap to catch up on meeting highlights on the go. This feature rolled out in July.

Access heatmap, AI summary, and document creation for SharePoint and OneDrive

The new Agent Access Insights heatmap for SharePoint and OneDrive sites helps organizations take advantage of Copilot in a more targeted way. It provides a visual heatmap of agent activity to help admins quickly detect patterns, hotspots, and unusual access behavior. The benefit is a smoother user experience with less manual effort, while giving IT teams a clearer path to support rollout and adoption. This feature rolled out in July.

Users can access an AI-generated audio summary of their SharePoint News posts in the SharePoint app for Teams (Viva Connections). This helps users consume news updates more efficiently, helping them stay informed without interrupting their daily workflow. This feature rolled out in June.

Now users can generate documents using forms in SharePoint with Power Automate. This helps organizations take advantage of Copilot in a more targeted way. The new Power Automate action enables automated document generation using document generation (DocGen) forms in SharePoint. Generate document from form (Preview) enables customers to create documents from a template by mapping data inputs to predefined template fields. This feature rolled out in June.

More Copilot connectors

More Copilot connectors are now available, bringing industry-specific knowledge directly into the flow of work while honoring existing security, compliance, and permissions. Connectors enable users to search, reason over, and act on data from the business systems their organizations already use. Newly available connectors span a wide range of industries:

Financial services: Daloopa, FactSet, Fitch Solutions, Morningstar, PitchBook, S&P Global
Professional services: Dice, Forrester, HG Insights
Industrial and manufacturing: Infor Nexus, Sight Machine

Software and technology: Granola
Healthcare and life sciences: Article Galaxy, and Nyquist AI

Retail and consumer goods: Passby Pulse, Polar Analytics
Cross industry: CB Insights, Sprouts.ai

Users can now discover and connect to data sources directly from the Add and manage sources menu and scope prompts to a specific connector for more targeted results. By connecting specialized enterprise data to Copilot, organizations can help employees access more relevant insights, richer context, and industry-specific knowledge across Copilot experiences. These connectors are now generally available for administrators to manage. These connectors rolled out in July.

Organizations in US government DoD clouds can now bring knowledge from external business systems directly into Copilot using Microsoft-built connectors, including Atlassian Jira and Confluence. Previously available in GCC and GCC High, these connect business data from CRMs, databases, document repositories, and other enterprise applications, so organizations can give Copilot access to more of the information employees rely on every day. This helps Copilot deliver more relevant, accurate, and grounded responses, reducing time spent searching across systems and enabling employees to work more effectively. Content is securely indexed into Microsoft Graph and remains within the organization’s Microsoft 365 tenant boundary. Existing permissions, compliance policies, and security controls continue to govern access, helping organizations meet their security, privacy, and data residency requirements. This feature rolled out in June.

IT admin capabilities

New controls and reports in Microsoft admin center

Domain exclusion for web grounding enables organizations to exclude up to 1,000 specified domains from Copilot web grounding results. This helps organizations limit the use of content from specified websites in Copilot web search, reducing the likelihood of responses being influenced by unwanted or non-compliant sources while providing administrators with greater oversight of web-grounded content. This feature rolled out in July.

Data Loss Prevention to restrict external emails from being referenced gives organizations greater control over how email data is used in Copilot responses. We are expanding Microsoft Purview DLP for Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Chat to prevent external emails from being referenced. Admins can now exclude messages from external senders from being summarized, referenced, or used as grounding data in responses. This feature rolled out to Public Preview in June.

The Agent 365 Dashboard in Insights helps business leaders track agent usage and adoption for their teams. Analysts can also use the dashboard for org-wide reporting with organization filtering. The dashboard unifies data from Agent 365, giving leaders greater visibility into their team’s use of agents, across different sources and agent types. View adoption by group, track retention, identify top agents, and compare usage trends to better inform agent deployment strategies and optimization. Drill down into individual agent usage for deeper insights and trends. Historical reporting for Copilot Studio agents will also be available via a toggle in the same dashboard. This feature rolled out in July.

The new Copilot Connectors usage report is now available in Public Preview in the Microsoft 365 admin center, helping IT admins understand how Copilot users are benefiting from connected enterprise knowledge. The report shows how often responses across Copilot Chat, Copilot Search, and agents are grounded in content from connectors deployed in the organization, giving admins a clearer view of connector adoption, engagement, usage patterns, and connector-level impact. Admins can use these insights to evaluate which connected data sources are driving value and optimize their connector deployment strategy over time. This feature rolled out in June.

Copilot Chat usage report for customers in GCC, GCC High, and DOD are now available in the Microsoft 365 admin center, helping customers understand and drive Copilot Chat adoption. Admins can view organization-level usage to track trends and view user level details to inform Microsoft 365 Copilot licensing decisions. This report includes total active users, Copilot Chat usage with a breakout per Microsoft 365 app, and user-level activity insights (anonymized by default). This feature rolled out in July.

Cost Management updates in Microsoft 365 admin center improve spending controls for usage-based billing services through more reliable alerts, clearer policy enforcement, better overage handling, and improved visibility into Copilot Credits. These updates give admins greater confidence in monitoring and managing AI consumption costs across services such as Cowork and Work IQ APIs.

Highlights include:

Improved spending alerts helps admins stay informed and act quickly when consumption approaches policy thresholds. As part of this update, admins should recreate alerts on existing spending policies where notifications are required.
Clearer spending policy logic ensures users governed by multiple spending policies remain on the policy with the highest per-user limit. Users stay on that policy and aren’t moved to another policy if they hit their limit.
Overage handling allows users that hit their spending policy limit during a task to finish that task without incurring billable overages. These overages are not charged and will not show up as credits consumed in cost management reports.

Learn more about managing AI experiences enabled by usage-based billing. These features rolled out in July.

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.

More control over web grounding with Domain Exclusion for Microsoft 365 Copilot

Suhel_Parekh — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 16:15:19 GMT

**UPDATE** Please see new announcement here: Update: Domain Exclusion for Microsoft 365 Copilot | Microsoft Community Hub

We are excited to announce Domain Exclusion for Microsoft 365 Copilot, a new web search control that gives organizations more choice over which external web sources can be used to ground Copilot responses. As customers bring Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Chat (Copilot) into more business-critical workflows, admins need practical controls that help web-grounded experiences stay aligned with organizational policies, compliance expectations, and trusted source strategies.

Give admins more control over web grounding

Web grounding helps Copilot deliver more timely and relevant answers by allowing Copilot to reference current information from the public web when it can improve the response. With Domain Exclusion, administrators can now specify external sites that Copilot should not use for web grounding, giving organizations a more precise way to align Copilot responses with internal policies, compliance needs, and trusted source strategies.

What is Domain Exclusion?

Domain Exclusion for Microsoft 365 Copilot enables administrators to define domains that are excluded from Copilot web grounding. Once configured, excluded domains are not used in Copilot responses that rely on web grounding. This capability applies to Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Chat web grounding scenarios and is designed to give organizations additional control over which external web sources can influence AI-generated responses.

Organizations can configure up to 1,000 domains for exclusion. The feature is not enabled by default and requires administrator action to configure through the provided PowerShell script. This gives admins flexibility to adopt the control based on their organization’s specific governance requirements.

Figure 1: Info tip for users showing that Admin policy may restrict certain sources with Domain Exclusion for Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Chat.

Why it matters

Customers want the productivity benefits of web-grounded AI while maintaining confidence that Copilot experiences reflect their organization’s policies and risk posture. Domain Exclusion adds targeted control between allowing web grounding broadly and turning web search off entirely. Admins can continue to enable web-grounded answers where they add value, while excluding domains that are not appropriate for their environment.

This is especially important for organizations with strict compliance obligations, brand safety requirements, regional content considerations, or internal policies around approved sources. By helping admins reduce the influence of unwanted or non-compliant web sources, Domain Exclusion supports a more governed approach to AI adoption.

How admins can get started

Admins can configure Domain Exclusion using the Configure Tenant Domain Exclusions PowerShell script. The script supports common configuration tasks, including creating a new exclusion list from a CSV file, updating an existing configuration, exporting the current configuration, deleting a configuration, and generating a template CSV file. Learn more at aka.ms/copilot/DomainExclusion.

Review the domains your organization wants to exclude from Copilot web grounding.
Prepare a CSV file with the required domain information.
Run the PowerShell script as a Search Administrator or Global Administrator.
Validate the configuration and update it as organizational policies evolve.

Closing

Domain Exclusion gives organizations another practical control to adopt Microsoft 365 Copilot with confidence—helping admins shape how web-grounded experiences align with their policies, compliance requirements, and trusted source strategies. As AI becomes more deeply embedded in everyday work, capabilities like Domain Exclusion help organizations move faster without giving up the transparency, security, and governance they need. Domain Exclusion builds on Microsoft 365 Copilot web search controls, giving admins a more targeted way to manage which external domains can be used to ground Copilot responses.

Related

Domain Exclusion Learn documentation - https://aka.ms/copilot/DomainExclusion
Domain Exclusion PowerShell script - https://aka.ms/Copilot/DomainExclusionScript
Data, privacy, and security for web search in Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat | Microsoft Learn
How web search works in Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat and agents | Microsoft Support

Available today: Anthropic Claude Opus 5 in Microsoft 365 Copilot

Bas Brekelmans — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 21:11:08 GMT

Today we’re expanding model choice in Microsoft 365 Copilot with the addition of Anthropic’s latest model—Claude Opus 5.

Claude Opus 5 is the newest model in Anthropic’s Opus family. Designed to be used every day for complex, multi-step work. It improves on Opus 4.8 across agentic coding, professional knowledge work, and long-horizon reasoning¹.

With Opus 5, Copilot takes on more of the steps between idea and finished work across the apps you use every day—while keeping you in control of the final outcome:

Word: Move from rough idea to a complete draft, holding structure and flow together across longer documents.

Excel: Work through complex analysis with higher-quality modeling and more polished workbooks.

PowerPoint: Build and refine presentation drafts from first outline to polished deck, with more visual polish, creative layouts, and better use of slide space

Copilot Chat: Tackle open-ended, novel problems—comparing options, structuring plans, working through ambiguity—with stronger reasoning.

Copilot Cowork: Stay focused on long-running tasks, orchestrating work across tools and files with the context Work IQ brings from your organization to carry a project through start to finish.

Copilot Studio: Build agents on Claude Opus 5 for advanced reasoning, workflow automation, and multi-step tool use in the preview orchestrator.

We’re committed to bringing you the latest AI innovation and model choice for AI at work, supported by Microsoft’s enterprise-grade security, privacy, and compliance.

Get started today

Claude Opus 5 is rolling out to the model selector in Copilot in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Chat, Copilot Cowork, and Copilot Studio.

Availability may vary by region and tenant configuration; refer to the Microsoft 365 Roadmap and Microsoft 365 Copilot release notes for the latest rollout status.

For more details on the model, see Anthropic’s Opus 5 announcement1

1 million documents to 300+agents: Building an enterprise-scale Microsoft 365 Copilot connector

supramo — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 18:57:12 GMT

1 million documents. 100,000+ monthly users. 300+ Copilot Studio agents. Here's what we learned building the Microsoft 365 Copilot connector behind them.

Most enterprise knowledge lives in portals and repositories that people trust but rarely visit in the flow of work. That's the gap this connector was built to close.

At Microsoft, we built an enterprise-scale Microsoft 365 Copilot connector to make internal documentation available as grounded context across supported Copilot experiences. The connector runs in production today, serving teams across engineering, support, and field roles.

Who this post is for: platform teams, developers, and connector owners who are past prototype and thinking about production. We cover the design choices, security and governance considerations, schema decisions, operational patterns, and retrieval-quality practices that helped us make enterprise knowledge easier to discover and reuse through Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Understand why a Microsoft 365 Copilot connector matters

New to Microsoft 365 Copilot connectors? Start with the Microsoft 365 Copilot connectors overview and the Copilot connectors API documentation.

The real power of a Microsoft 365 Copilot connector isn't the ingestion — it's what becomes possible once your content is in the platform.

The moment your connector is live and configured for supported Microsoft 365 Copilot experiences, your content can become available as grounded context in those experiences. That means:

Copilot Chat — users ask questions in natural language and get answers grounded in your content, alongside emails, files, and Teams messages. No portal visit required.
Copilot in Microsoft 365 apps — in Copilot for Word, PowerPoint, and Excel (where supported), your knowledge can appear as context when users draft, summarize, or build presentations.
Copilot Studio agents — users with appropriate permissions and licensing can build custom agents scoped to your connector's content. In our case, 300+ agents were created by teams within Microsoft — incident response assistants, onboarding copilots, domain-specific Q&A bots — all without additional work from us.
Copilot CLI and developer tools — Copilot CLI is the command-line experience for developers working in a terminal. Engineers get answers in their terminal or IDE, grounded in the same authoritative content.
The Copilot Retrieval API — teams with appropriate access can programmatically query the indexed knowledge to build custom experiences we never anticipated.

The key insight is that a connector is not just an ingestion pipeline. When you invest in clean schema, reliable ingestion, and the right access controls, supported Copilot experiences can reuse that content without requiring a separate integration for every surface.

A quick note on terminology. This post describes a Microsoft 365 Copilot sync connector (previously known as a Graph connector). Sync connectors ingest and index your content into the Microsoft 365 substrate, which is different from federated connectors that query content in place.

Plan for production gaps

The public documentation gets you from zero to a working connector. Getting from a working connector to a production one uncovered four gaps we hadn't planned for: tenant configuration, security and compliance readiness, discoverability, and shared throttling limits.

Validate tenant configuration early

The documented path starts with creating a connector in your tenant and ingesting data. In our environment, we had to validate architecture before full production, and hit a few things that weren't in the docs. Watch out for:

Cross-tenant data flow. There is no supported model for cross-tenant data flow between Entra ID tenants today. We resolved this by consolidating connector operations into a single tenant.
"Draft" state limbo. Connectors can get stuck in "Draft" state despite correct permissions. Escalating through the platform team was the fastest unblock.
Ownership gaps. Multiple platform teams have overlapping responsibilities and no single owner. Identify your escalation path before you need it.
Dev tenant lifecycles. Dev tenants may have undocumented auto-deletion policies. Don't rely on a dev tenant as a long-lived staging environment.

Start security and compliance early

Registering an app and configuring permissions is the easy part. For a cross-tenant connector at enterprise scale, we also needed:

A threat model.
A privacy review.
A Responsible AI review.
Design reviews from platform teams.
Security exception approvals.

No template existed. No checklist. No predefined path. This was a significant effort that started well before we wrote code.

Make connector content discoverable

Even with successful ingestion, Copilot may not prioritize your content. Emails and user files rank higher by default. Connector content ranking varies across clients. There's no visibility into why a result was or wasn't surfaced.UserPrincipal support — the ability to attach a user identity to an indexed item so it's ranked with the same signals as that user's emails and files — is an important platform improvement for us. We plan to adopt it in the near future, with the goal of making connector content show up more reliably alongside a user's other work in Copilot results.

Design for throttling and shared limits

At approximately 1 million documents, throttling became an important design consideration. We handled it with retry logic, exponential back-off, monitoring for 429 responses, and operational alerts so we could detect ingestion slowdowns quickly.

The Microsoft 365 Copilot connectors platform has a global rate limit shared across all connectors in a tenant. If another connector spikes ingestion, yours gets throttled — and the 429 doesn't tell you why or who's consuming the budget. Today, there's no visibility into the shared quota, no priority system, and no way to reserve capacity, so it's worth designing your pipeline to tolerate unexpected back-pressure.

Build the connector for scale

Our architecture focused on one principle: keep the source content separate from the ingestion compute. That choice made the pipeline easier to retry, easier to monitor, and easier to evolve as the documentation platform changed.

Separate data from compute

A core design principle was keeping the data layer completely separate from the ingestion compute. The documentation platform stores content in Azure Blob Storage — that's the source of truth. The ingestion pipeline never owns or duplicates that data. Instead, it reacts to changes and transforms on the fly.

Blob Change Feed — Azure Blob Storage's change feed emits events whenever documents are created, updated, or deleted. This is the trigger for all ingestion work — no polling, no scheduled full crawls.
Azure Function (event-driven) — an Azure Function listens to the change feed and processes each event. It reads the blob, transforms the content, enriches metadata, and pushes the item to the Microsoft Graph connectors API. The function is stateless — all state lives in the storage layer and the Microsoft Graph platform.
Storage as the boundary — the function has read access to blob storage but never writes back. Data flows one direction: storage → function → Graph API. This keeps the pipeline simple to reason about and safe to retry — reprocessing a blob event is always idempotent.
Graph API ingestion — items are pushed with retry logic, back-off on 429s, and observability via Application Insights.

This separation means:

The documentation platform can evolve its storage independently — new formats, new metadata, reorganizations — without touching the ingestion pipeline.
The pipeline scales horizontally via Azure Functions consumption plan — spikes in content updates don't require capacity planning.
Failures are isolated — a bad blob doesn't block other ingestion, and the change feed provides natural retry semantics.

Iterate on schema design

We treated schema design as the highest-leverage decision. Through four iterations, we significantly improved retrieval quality — entirely through schema and metadata refinement:

Mapped document types (TSGs, runbooks, architecture docs, onboarding guides) to distinct property sets.
Wrote detailed connection descriptions optimized for Copilot's ranking.
Added custom properties for freshness and ownership signals.
Tested with real user queries, not synthetic data.

Use secure authentication and deployment patterns

A few patterns kept the deployment story simple across environments:

Managed Identity for service-to-service communication in production.
Infrastructure-as-code for consistent deployment across commercial and sovereign clouds.
Environment-specific configuration abstracted from the start.

Measure retrieval quality

One benefit of onboarding to the Microsoft 365 Copilot platform was access to the Search Evaluation framework used by the Copilot team. This helped us measure retrieval quality, including precision and recall against real user queries, without building evaluation infrastructure from scratch. We used this framework to test pipeline changes and catch regressions before they reached users.

Monitor connector health

A healthy connector is a prerequisite for everything else, so we built:

Alerting on ingestion failures and throttling spikes.
Recovery automation for re-ingestion scenarios.

See the impact

Once the connector was live, three things stood out: the portal became a platform, an ecosystem of agents formed on top of it, and we kept the controls we needed while gaining new ways to measure quality.

From portal to platform

The documentation platform moved from being a destination people visited to a knowledge source that powers AI experiences across Microsoft. Users no longer need to navigate to the portal — knowledge surfaces directly in Copilot Chat, Copilot in Word, Copilot in VS Code, and Azure Copilot. Consumption is ambient and contextual, embedded in existing workflows.

An ecosystem of agents

The core value proposition of the Microsoft 365 Copilot platform is this: push your content once, and it's enabled across multiple AI surfaces. That's exactly what happened.

300+ Copilot Studio agents now build on the connector. Content surfaces in Copilot Chat, Copilot CLI, Work IQ (Microsoft's workplace intelligence experience), and other AI-powered developer tools — all from a single ingestion pipeline. Teams within Microsoft created:

Incident response assistants that help surface relevant troubleshooting guides.
Onboarding copilots that pull architecture docs contextually.
Domain-specific Q&A agents scoped to their team's content.
Support augmentation workflows with human oversight.

Because we invested in getting the connector right once — clean schema, proper access controls, reliable ingestion — supported Copilot experiences reuse that content automatically. None of the 300+ agents required additional integration work from our team.

Measurable quality and preserved governance

Alongside the new capabilities, the shift preserved what mattered most: existing controls and a way to measure what we were doing.

Programmatic access at scale. The Copilot Retrieval API lets teams with appropriate access query the indexed knowledge programmatically, without the documentation team's involvement. Single ingestion, multi-surface consumption.
Governance stayed centralized. Despite AI integration, the connector continues to rely on existing Microsoft 365 security and access controls. Governance policies and access restrictions remain centrally managed. This was critical for sovereign cloud deployment and regulated environments.
Quality became measurable. With evaluation frameworks in place, we can quantify answer quality and continuously improve — something that wasn't possible when the platform was purely a static portal.

Apply these recommendations when building connectors

If you are planning a Microsoft 365 Copilot connector, these are the practices we would prioritize before moving from prototype to production:

Start security and compliance conversations before writing code — budget significantly more time than you expect.
Treat schema design as your highest-leverage decision — test with real Copilot queries early and iterate aggressively.
Build evaluation from day one — you need to measure whether Copilot is actually using your content effectively.
Build health monitoring for the connector itself — not just the pipeline.
Design for the ecosystem — if you build it well, people will build on it in ways you didn't anticipate.

Make the investment worthwhile

The public docs for Microsoft 365 Copilot connectors cover the "what." This post covers the "how" — and more importantly, the "why it's worth it."

Security approvals took months. Schema iteration took four rounds. Operational readiness took ownership none of us had budgeted for. But the payoff is real: your organization's knowledge becomes accessible through AI, grounded in authoritative content and available across supported Microsoft 365 Copilot experiences.

The platform is powerful. Getting there takes work. In our first year of production, 300+ agents were built on the connector — none of which required additional integration work from our team.

Get started

Join the conversation

Have you built a Microsoft 365 Copilot connector at scale? We'd love to hear what you learned — share your experience in the comments below, and let us know which patterns worked (or didn't) in your environment.

Did you know? The Microsoft 365 Roadmap is where you can track upcoming updates across Microsoft 365 apps and services. Microsoft 365 Copilot release notes are where you can review generally available Copilot features by platform. Check both resources regularly for the latest status, and note that roadmap dates are tentative and subject to change.

Join Us Live: Understanding Copilot Cowork and Managing Copilot Credits

JonJones_MSFT — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 16:36:52 GMT

The way we work with AI is evolving rapidly, and so is the way organizations manage and scale those experiences. If you're exploring Copilot Cowork, navigating Copilot Credits, or looking for guidance on consumption-based AI experiences, you won't want to miss our upcoming live event.

🎙️ Live AMA: Understanding Copilot Cowork and Managing Copilot Credits

Tuesday, July 21, 2026
9:00–10:00 AM Pacific Time

Join us for a live webinar and Ask Microsoft Anything (AMA) featuring experts from the Microsoft 365 Copilot team as they dive into the latest capabilities of Copilot Cowork and share practical guidance for managing Copilot Credits across your organization.

During this session, we'll explore:

Who should be using Copilot Cowork
How to allocate and manage Copilot Credits effectively
Best practices for adoption and governance
Strategies for scaling Copilot Cowork while maintaining visibility and control over costs

This is your opportunity to hear directly from the experts, learn from real-world scenarios, and get answers to your most pressing questions. Whether you're an IT administrator, adoption lead, business decision-maker, or Microsoft 365 enthusiast, you'll leave with actionable insights to help your organization maximize the value of AI-powered collaboration.

Bring Your Questions

The session will include a live Q&A where attendees can submit questions and receive answers directly from Microsoft subject matter experts. The team is specifically focused on helping customers better understand Copilot Cowork, credit management, and the evolving landscape of AI consumption and governance.

👉 Register and join the conversation: aka.ms/CopilotCoworkAMA

We look forward to seeing you on July 21!