What’s New in Microsoft 365 Copilot | May 2026
Welcome to the May 2026 edition of What's New in Microsoft 365 Copilot! Every month, we highlight new features and enhancements to keep Microsoft 365 admins up to date with Copilot features that help your users be more productive and efficient in the apps they use every day.Introducing Themes by Copilot in Outlook
Copilot in Outlook now helps anyone with a Copilot enabled subscription or commercial license create unique and personal themes powered by AI. Outlook is also releasing new non-Copilot powered themes to make Outlook more beautiful and approachable. We are thrilled to unveil Themes by Copilot in Outlook, which harnesses the power of generative AI to help people create unique themes that reflect their personal preferences and style within their Outlook experience. Pairing well with the transformative ways Copilot in Outlook enhances your emails, this marks the first instance of dynamic AI-generated theming in productivity applications. For many, Outlook is the app that they use daily, and these innovations will help make their Outlook experience even more welcoming and inviting. These AI-powered themes are accessible to all users with a Copilot Pro consumer subscription and business accounts with Copilot enabled, starting today, November 7th. Themes by Copilot in Outlook will be available on our mobile iOS and Android apps, Outlook for Windows, Outlook on the Web, and Outlook for Mac. Take a look: Just as you might accent your desk with a candle or photos, spruce up your office with artwork or plants, or prefer the window seat on a plane, we believe that beautiful, personal digital surroundings will enhance your overall Outlook experience. How you, your personality and your tastes are represented in an app plays a significant role in how you engage with it and how it makes you feel. But your app shouldn’t only reflect the colors or lighting that you need; the artistry of imagery can connect with you, represent you, and inspire you. Over the past year, we’ve released a set of beautiful static themes with abstract imagery that caters to a variety of colors and lighting styles. Image themes now reach more surface area of the app for a truly immersive experience. Today marks an especially innovative step in our personalization journey because we’ve leveraged the best aspects of generative AI to bring imagination, surprise, and your unique context into personalization. With Themes by Copilot, you can take yourself to every corner of the world by building a theme inspired by any of the over 100 curated destinations available, or create a theme based on your own location. This personalization becomes magical when it evolves over time, considering your unique context or your own personal touch along the way. If you choose, you can make your Themes by Copilot dynamic by selecting how often you want it to update – every few hours, every day, weekly, or monthly. If you’ve enabled location permissions in Outlook, the My Location theme will bring you imagery uniquely inspired by your locale, dynamically updating for you as you head out the door on a trip or vacation. Similarly, a dynamic theme based on the weather would be updated to reflect the current weather conditions where you are. Every Copilot-generated theme automatically comes with a fun accent color, and you can further tune your theme to be in a realistic, oil painting, or cartoon style. To help you shape your theme, we created a guided experience that is easy to use, responsible, and fun. Copilot-powered themes are available in the languages that Outlook supports. No two Themes by Copilot in Outlook are the same. Every creation is unique, dynamic, and exclusively yours -- an experience only available on Outlook. Themes by Copilot will be available to be turned on in Appearance Settings in Outlook. Beneath the Themes by Copilot header, select a topic thumbnail to generate a unique Copilot-powered theme in one click or launch the custom theme tile to create your own with a topic, style, and refresh cadence of your choosing. You can always change your theme in Outlook Settings. Themes by Copilot in Outlook builds upon the strong base of Copilot functionality already available in Outlook. Whether it’s getting help with drafting a mail, summarizing a long thread, or getting coaching on your emails – Copilot in Outlook is a great way to write better emails while saving time. For work accounts, there’s also the addition of Prioritize My Inbox by Copilot, which will be available in private preview for commercial customers in late 2024. Prioritize My Inbox is designed to help people manage their entire inbox by analyzing the content of messages given the context of their role. Themes by Copilot in Outlook is yet another step on our journey to infuse the power of Copilot into Outlook. We can’t wait to see what you create! Additional Outlook Themes for Everyone For those who do not have Themes by Copilot, we have released a collection of new non-Copilot powered themes, designed to make the platform more beautiful and accessible for everyone. Over the past year, we've introduced a variety of new image themes across Outlook for Mac, Outlook on the Web, the newest Outlook for Windows, and Outlook for iOS and Android. Beyond a basic color, you can now choose from vibrant imagery with hues of deep green, red, or purple to fit your mood or the vibe you’re going for. To choose a new image theme in Web, desktop, Mac or mobile, just navigate to Appearance Settings to pick the one that represents you best! It is our goal that today these themes bring joy, creativity and a bit of whimsy to your day. It’s just another way that Outlook is looking out for our customers to help make their experiences uniquely theirs. We are excited to hear what you think!In Case You Missed It: Frontier Transformation and Wave 3 of Microsoft 365 Copilot Announcements
March brought a major set of Frontier Transformation and wave 3 of Microsoft 365 Copilot announcements across Microsoft 365 Copilot, Copilot Chat, and agents—all focused on helping people move faster from intent to action and helping organizations scale AI responsibly. If you missed any of the updates, here’s a quick recap of what’s new and why it matters. Copilot Transforms Knowledge Work These updates deepen how Copilot shows up inside the flow of work—grounded in your content, context, and tools. Word, Excel, and PowerPoint Agents From Copilot Chat, users can ask Word, Excel, or PowerPoint agents to create content, take next steps, or execute tasks, helping them move from intent to action without copying and pasting or switching contexts. 👉 Learn more Edit with Copilot in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint Copilot now creates, edits, and refines content directly inside Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, grounded in the context of a user’s work through Work IQ, so people can iterate and improve content without leaving the app they’re working in. 👉 Learn more Sequences shortened for demonstration purposes. Copilot Chat in Outlook Copilot Chat in Outlook enables users to draft and refine emails, manage calendars and RSVPs, and use the Outlook email widget to take action directly from chat, streamlining everyday communication and scheduling tasks. 👉 Learn more Outlook customer calendar instructions & proactive RSVPs Copilot finds available meeting times, sends invites, and keeps calendars up to date based on custom instructions, notifying users of changes directly in chat to reduce manual coordination. 👉 Learn more Copilot Cowork Built with Anthropic, Copilot Cowork brings a multimodel approach to Microsoft 365 Copilot—so your work isn’t tied to a single model. Cowork moves Copilot beyond prompts into long‑running, multi‑step work. With full awareness of your work context through Work IQ, it lets you delegate meaningful work and stay informed as it progresses. 👉 Learn more Claude Sonnet available in Copilot Chat Users can select Claude models directly in Copilot Chat, alongside next‑generation OpenAI models, bringing leading models from multiple providers into a single Copilot experience. 👉 Learn more Dataverse in Work IQ Work IQ connects signals from Microsoft 365—including documents, meetings, email, and chat—and will soon access operational data in Dataverse through Copilot in Dynamics 365 and Power Apps, bringing work context and business data closer together. 👉 Learn more Work IQ Memory (Chat History) Work IQ Memory enables more relevant, personalized Copilot responses shaped by a user’s work and Copilot chat history over time. 👉 Learn more Extensibility: Work IQ API / MCP Work IQ APIs provide access to production‑ready AI capabilities that work directly with enterprise work context, enabling extensibility through APIs and MCP. 👉 Learn more Launch Demo Copilot in Dynamics 365 & Power Apps Microsoft 365 Copilot is accessible directly within Dynamics 365 Sales, Customer Service, and Power Apps, extending Copilot experiences into business applications where operational work happens. 👉 Learn more Agents That Help Run the Business These announcements focus on building, deploying, and scaling agents across the enterprise. Apps SDK The Apps SDK provides tools to build ChatGPT apps based on the MCP Apps standard, with additional ChatGPT functionality to support agent and Copilot experiences. 👉 Learn more Model Context Protocol (MCP) Apps MCP Apps turn Copilot from a text interface into a governed, interactive execution layer by surfacing interactive app experiences directly in Copilot Chat. 👉 Learn more Apps in Agents: Outlook, Dynamics 365, and Power Apps Agents can bring Outlook, Dynamics 365, and Power Apps directly into chat, allowing users to review information and take action without leaving the conversation. 👉 Learn more Agent Recommendations in Microsoft 365 Copilot When users prompt Microsoft 365 Copilot, the system analyzes intent and recommends an installed, IT‑approved agent directly in the flow of work, making agents easier to discover and use at scale. 👉 Learn more Evaluate agents in Copilot Studio Copilot Studio provides structured, repeatable testing to help catch issues early, reduce the risk of bad answers, and maintain agent quality as agents evolve. 👉 Learn more Visibility, Governance, and Control at Scale As agent usage grows, these updates help organizations move from experimentation to enterprise readiness. Agent 365 Agent 365 serves as the control plane for agents, helping organizations move from experimentation to enterprise‑scale operations by enabling them to observe, govern, and secure agents. 👉 Learn more Microsoft 365 E7: The Frontier Suite Microsoft 365 E7 unifies Microsoft 365 E5, Microsoft 365 Copilot and Agent 365 into a single solution powered by Work IQ and integrated with the productivity apps and security stack customers already rely on. It includes Microsoft Entra Suite and advanced Defender, Intune and Purview security capabilities, delivering comprehensive protection across agents and employees. 👉 Learn more To explore what’s available now—and what’s coming next—visit the Microsoft 365 roadmap and related announcement blogs. 👉 Explore the roadmap
