Introducing Copilot in the Microsoft 365 admin centers
Streamline daily admin tasks with AI-powered insights, natural language queries, and automation using Copilot in Microsoft 365 admin centers. Quickly recap key updates, monitor service health, and track important changes — all in one place. No more digging through multiple pages — just ask Copilot for the answers you need, grounded in real-time data from your tenant. From finding users and managing licenses to generating visual insights and automating tasks with PowerShell, use Copilot to simplify complex admin workflows and save valuable time. For Copilot in the admin center to light up, all you need is one active Microsoft 365 Copilot license for any user in your tenant and from the Microsoft 365 admin center, you can get started right away. Jeremy Chapman, Director of Microsoft 365, demonstrates how to leverage Copilot for proactive guidance, whether in the Microsoft 365 admin center or directly within Copilot Chat. Save time with Copilot. Type Recap to instantly see critical admin updates and actions in one view. Check it out in the Microsoft 365 admin center. Stay on top of changes. Copilot summarizes new features & updates from the Message Center, so you never miss an important rollout. Get started. Instant visual insights. Ask Copilot how many Copilot licenses are left and see a breakdown, no manual reports needed. Watch it here. Watch our video here. QUICK LINKS: 00:00 — Copilot in Microsoft 365 admin centers 00:42 — Use Copilot for change management 02:13 — Stay ahead of upcoming changes 03:31 — User and licensing queries 04:21 — Generate Visual Insights for Licensing and Usage 04:50 — Author PowerShell scripts for bulk operations 06:07 — Copilot Chat using Microsoft 365 Admin agent 07:37 — Copilot coming soon to other admin centers 07:51— Wrap up Link References For more information, check out https://aka.ms/CopilotinMAC Start using Copilot in the Microsoft 365 admin center at https://admin.microsoft.com Unfamiliar with Microsoft Mechanics? As Microsoft’s official video series for IT, you can watch and share valuable content and demos of current and upcoming tech from the people who build it at Microsoft. 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In the next few minutes, in fact, I’ll show you how you can interact with it using natural language, get contextual guidance, and find proactive suggestions for common admin tasks. For the experience to light up, all you need is one active Microsoft 365 Copilot license for any user in your tenant. And from the admin center, you can get started right away. That said, before we get started, in case you’re wondering, Copilot Microsoft 365 admin centers does not make configuration changes autonomously on your behalf. As I’ll show you, it’s designed to save you time and many of the things that you do every day as an admin or business owner. -And I’ll start by showing you an example of how you can use it for change management. I’m in the Microsoft 365 admin center, and now Copilot can help you keep track of new capabilities rolling out, as well as changes that you need to action as an admin. In fact, you can use the starter prompt recap, and I’ll add the latest admin info, and you’ll see that Copilot is generating an up-to-date view of important information and key insights across service health, message center, and Microsoft 365 Copilot usage insights. This summary is personalized to you based on your specific admin role, highlighting the parts of the admin center that you use most, and your real-time individual tenant information. So this saves you time looking for information and insights that are typically spread across multiple locations in the Microsoft 365 admin center. And you can click on the see details controls to expand each area, and find out more, as well as where you can go to take any corresponding actions. For example, with these now expanded, I can see my tenant service health status, and a summary of active incidents, issues and advisories. In this case, I have one issue and three total advisories across Microsoft 365 suite, Microsoft Purview, and others. -From here I can even use these as deep links to click into my active issue for the updated attack simulations, and training URL endpoint, in this case, to find out more. Copilot can also help you stay ahead of upcoming changes, along with the items that you need to take care of from the message center. For example, back in my recap, I can see details highlighting three new features, and also three feature updates. So for this new feature, I can see details about Copilot in Edge, new contextual features to find out more about its capabilities and rollout details. I can also use the view in buttons for deep links directly into service health or the message center, like you’re seeing here with all my recent unread messages. -So as we saw, Copilot helps you stay on top of issues with its suggested prompt starters, like recap, and, of course, you can author your own prompts too, and they’ll also be grounded on data from your individual tenant. In this case, I’ll type in “Summarize my announcements for Outlook,” and Copilot generates a full summary with feature updates from the past week for Outlook. For example, here’s a new capability rolling out for the Microsoft 365 app, getting updated to be the Microsoft 365 Copilot app, and corresponding changes to the Outlook apps for iOS and Android. This change will allow more people to experience Copilot chat from their mobile apps. And now you have all the details you need to prepare for the update. -Next, let me show you how Copilot can help you with common admin tasks, like user and licensing queries using natural language. So I’ll prompt Copilot to find users in the marketing department with a Copilot license, and submit. Now, behind the scenes, it’s combining a directory attribute, the marketing department, with a licensing attribute for Copilot, what would’ve previously required advanced filtering or PowerShell. And it finds three people that match the query. And if it’s a larger group of people, you can use the CSV file option to export a list that you might use for a broader email campaign or with PowerShell scripting. -To be clear, everything that you’ve just seen is running under the permissions context of the admin using Copilot, so it can only find information that the individual account specifically has access to. Now, another area where Copilot can help is with generating visualizations for bulk insights into things like usage and licensing. For example, you might want to see how many Copilot licenses in your tenant have been acquired, and how many are available to assign. So for that, I can prompt Copilot, “How many Copilot licenses do I have available to assign?” And it generates an inline bar chart with details about Microsoft 365 Copilot, Copilot Studio, and Sales Copilot licenses available to assign. -And since this is Mechanics, let me show you an early look at a more advanced admin scenario to help author PowerShell scripts for bulk operations. Now, this is useful where performing specific tasks in the admin center at scale might be too manual or in cases where the control is not available in the admin center. For example, as part of my Microsoft 365 Copilot rollout, if I want to enable restricted SharePoint search using a list of allowed sites, which is only possible using PowerShell, I can prompt Copilot with “How do I get the SharePoint online PowerShell module, then enable restricted SharePoint search using a CSV file with a allowed sites using PowerShell?” And Copilot will use the Microsoft 365 admin documentation and PowerShell reference guides so that I can save time by not having to look that information up myself. And notice that everything is formatted so I can easily parse what the commands are doing, and I just need to change the placeholder values for the URL and file path, and I can run what’s presented. -Okay, and just to prove that it will work, let’s test it out. So these are the cmdlets that we just saw from Copilot with updated placeholders. So I’ll go ahead and run it. You’ll see there are no errors. Now, I’ll get the status of the feature. It’s enabled. Then get the list of allowed sites, and there they are. Next, let me show you another early look for performing these tasks in Copilot Chat using a Microsoft 365 admin agent. If your day-to-day Microsoft 365 account is the same account that you use for admin tasks, and you don’t use a separate admin-only account, you’ll be able to access these admin experiences from Copilot Chat. I’m in the Microsoft 365 Copilot app. I just need to type the @ symbol to pull up a list of available agents or I could directly type @Microsoft365Admin. -And from here I can run the same admin recap we saw earlier by typing “recap important info for me” as my prompt. You’ll see that it surfaces the same information that we saw before in the admin center. In fact, when I expand the details under service health, there’s our attack simulation’s URL endpoint update. The view in buttons also link me directly to the Microsoft 365 admin center. And because it’s an agent, you’ll also be able to access the Microsoft 365 admin agent from other app endpoints, like you’re seeing here with Microsoft Word. I can get the same information with my recap from before, and once it completes, I can use that right from Word, for example, if I wanted to write a change management report. Now, it’s worth pointing out that whereas everything I showed from the admin center does not require a Microsoft 365 Copilot license for your admin account, to use the Microsoft 365 admin agent, your admin account would need one. Finally, Copilot in admin center’s experiences will extend to other surface areas, as we presented in November, including the admin centers for Microsoft Teams, as well as SharePoint online, and more details for those are coming soon. -So those are just a few examples of how Copilot can help you as an admin save time with your day-to-day work, and give you proactive suggestions for different admin tasks. Again, all you need is just one active Microsoft 365 Copilot license in your tenant, and you can get started right away. To find out more, check out aka.ms/CopilotinMAC, and start using it today in the Microsoft 365 admin center at admin.microsoft.com. Keep watching Microsoft Mechanics for the latest tech updates. Subscribe to our channel and thanks for watching.
