Microsoft Excel Beginners Tutorial (2026)
If you’re new to and getting started with Excel or coming from another app, in this video we teach the basics of Excel, the user interface, core concepts, and how to work with basic data. We’ll show you how to build a full Excel workbook from scratch using natural language prompts with Copilot. Format cells, write formulas, and analyze a year of data. Generate sample data, calculate totals, apply conditional formatting, and pin down outliers across columns and rows, all from your browser at excel.new. Share the workbook by name, group, or email and co-author with teammates across web, desktop, and phone. Every edit syncs to OneDrive in real time. Jeremy Chapman, Microsoft 365 Director, shares how to go from blank workbook to analyzed, shared spreadsheet in one sitting. A full data set with only one prompt. Copilot in Excel builds categories, columns, and currency-formatted cells from a natural language prompt. Try it now. Skip the formula syntax. Copilot inserts row and column totals from natural language prompts and exposes the underlying SUM logic so you can verify the math. See how it works. Pull reasoning out of your spreadsheet. Copilot in Excel surfaces the highest- and lowest-cost months and explains the drivers behind each. Try it in Excel. QUICK LINKS: 00:00 — Excel Essentials 00:57 — Start from a blank workbook 02:11 — Core terms and concepts 04:25 — Generate Sample Data with Copilot 06:16 — How to work with the numbers 09:35 — Copilot Writes Your SUM Formulas 09:57 — Conditional Formatting from a Prompt 10:40 — Outlier Analysis with Reasoning 11:36 — Real-Time Co-Authoring in OneDrive 12:22 — Wrap up Link References Check it out at https://microsoft.com/excel 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. Subscribe to our YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/MicrosoftMechanicsSeries Talk with other IT Pros, join us on the Microsoft Tech Community: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-mechanics-blog/bg-p/MicrosoftMechanicsBlog Watch or listen from anywhere, subscribe to our podcast: https://microsoftmechanics.libsyn.com/podcast Keep getting this insider knowledge, join us on social: Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MSFTMechanics Share knowledge on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/microsoft-mechanics/ Enjoy us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/msftmechanics/ Loosen up with us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@msftmechanics Video Transcript: -Microsoft Excel can help you organize information, perform calculations, and discover patterns in your data all in one place, and you can get to it on your PC, your Mac, your phone, or on the web. I’m Jeremy Chapman, and I’ve been part of the product team responsible for Office at Microsoft since 2012. And today, I’ll walk you through the essentials of Excel and how to use it. So first, if you have a Microsoft account, like outlook.com, OneDrive, or Xbox, or if you use Microsoft 365 at work, you can use Excel on the web, in your browser, and you can get to Excel by navigating to excel.new. And by the way, if you have the Excel app installed, you can open that on your computer or your phone and follow along. When you’re signed into your work or personal Microsoft account, Excel saves your files to OneDrive, so you can easily find them and pull them up on other devices later. -So for today, I’ll keep things simple. So I’ll start with a blank workbook Using Excel on the web. Wherever you use Excel, it’s designed to be a consistent experience on large screen devices, so you can follow along if you’re using the local app on Windows or on a Mac. And Excel is designed to organize any kind of information, numbers, dates, texts, and more. In the main view, you can see that I have columns and rows all ready to enter data. In most cases, there’s a one-time step to create what’s called a workbook in Excel, which I have one open here. Now this is where you’ll use and create a blank workbook, or you can choose from dozens of different templates that are filled in with sample data and formatting to get you started. At that point, you can enter your data, your headers, and start formatting your cells. -Now if you have existing data in a table in another app, you can open it with Excel or just paste in the contents to start working with it. On top, Excel has what’s called the ribbon, with groups of controls presented as tabs that you can use. Within each tab, there are smaller groups of controls, like you can see here with the fonts, alignment, and number. Now let me define a few core names and concepts that you’ll use when you work with Excel in this workbook to manage data. So each field or rectangle that you can see here as I’m highlighting them, these are called cells. Then you have columns, and those are the vertical lines of cells, and those are represented with letters on top. -Next you have rows, and those are the horizontal lines, and those are represented by numbers. For example, the upper left cell is called A1, A for the column name and 1 for the row name. Now a block of multiple connected cells is called a range. So here, for example, I’ve selected range A1 to D4. Right now I’m in a sheet called Sheet1, and you can see in the lower left corner, I can add more sheets, like I’ll do now, and then I can move between multiple sheets and reference data across them as well. But I won’t do that today. -So now I’m going to go ahead and go back to Sheet1. And if you right-click and go to Format Cells, you’ll find options for things like number formats, for example, currency, date, time, and percentage. And on the Home tab, the font group is another place to change these settings, as well as Fill, which lets you change the background color for cells, columns, or rows. I’m going to add some text in this cell as a title for what I want to create today, a monthly expense tracker. Now this text looks like it’s spilling into cell B1, but it’s actually just in cell A1. So I can widen or narrow the columns as much as I want. And if I want this title to span several columns, like in my case, I know that I’m going to need 12 months. So I’ll go ahead and select rows M1 all the way back to A1. Then in the alignment group, I’ll choose the Merge & Center option right here, and that makes my 13 cells into one with the text centered. -So now, in the font group, I can choose the fill color that I want. So in my case, I’ll pick blue. Then for the font color, I’d like to choose something contrasting. So I’ll choose white in my case. And by using these formatting options, you can make things a lot easier to understand as you work with your data. But we still need some content, so let’s add some. So for that, I can use AI with Copilot to generate sample data. So I’m going to go ahead and pull up Copilot and type, “Generate monthly personal finance data for one year with months for columns and expense categories as rows, including sample data. Do not add columns or rows with totals.” -Now I added that last sentence because I want to show you how to calculate totals yourself in a moment. The Copilot is part of Excel on the web and in the desktop and mobile apps if you’re using Microsoft 365 Personal or a work or school account. And you’ll see, once it’s finished, that Copilot generated a Category column and several month columns, as well as multiple rows with different expense types all filled in with the sample data that I asked for. Now notice that it also formatted the row 2 and column A using formatting options that I mentioned before. And each cell in the middle is also formatted as a currency number with a dollar sign. -So I want to add a row here, in my case, for car payment. And you’ll see that it doesn’t match the others yet, and I’ll fix that in a second. Now I’ll add an amount for January, 300. And since this is the same amount every month, I can just select the cell. Then using this square in the lower right corner, I can just drag across the other months, and each, in this case, will have the same number, 300. Let’s fix our formatting. Now, to make the dollar amounts match the cells above, I’ll select this one above my new row, then click on the Format painter, this paintbrush icon here, then I’ll select my new cells. And now they all match. Now I can do the same thing for my Car Payment label in cell A16. -So now I have some formatted data to work with and I can show you how to work with those numbers. I’ll use the Formulas ribbon where you’ll see the most common options to analyze data. For example, if I select all the cells with numbers in column B, then I go up and click on AutoSum, it adds all of the numbers in that column. In fact, now if I click on that cell in the formula bar, I can see a simple formula. Now these start with an equal sign, in my case, SUM as the function itself. Then I have an open parentheses with my range, in my case, B3 to B16, and close parentheses for what I want to calculate. Now that was an example of a very simple formula. Like I did before with the numbers, I can even drag formulas into blank cells. -So I’ll go ahead and grab this one again by the lower right corner square and drag it across all of my columns. So that now has copied the original formula from the B column and duplicated it for each of the other columns. But as I click into each one, notice something that just happened, I have the column letters B all the way through M to each corresponding formula. That makes each sum specific to each of these column months. Likewise, I can select and drag entire columns into blank areas to fill in that data too. And because Excel detected a series of month names in row 2, it even filled in Jan as the new month name for the new cells that I added. Now let’s try another basic formula. For that, I’m going to select all the numbers above the totals row in column B. -Now I’m going to choose Average, and that adds a cell with the average across the entire range that I just selected. So now I want to clean up a few cells. And when you go to delete data, you’ll need to know a few different options. So first, I’ll select the month cells that I just added. And if I just hit the Delete key, it leaves the formatting in those columns, like this blue cell here. This is also called clearing content. I’ll use the Control key + Z simultaneously to bring that content back and undo changes. Now I’m going to go ahead and select the same cells. And when I right-click, you’ll see that there are options to Insert or Delete along with Clear Contents like I just did using the Delete key. -So this time, I’ll choose Delete, and then I have options to delete a column or shift cells left or up. In my case, deleting column N and shifting cells left will clear the contents and formatting. I’ll choose Shift cells left. So now I’ll clear the contents of rows 17 and 18 with my sums and the average to get my content data ready for other ways to analyze it. And there are hundreds of formula options in Excel. In fact, if I expand Financial functions, there are dozens related to accounting and finance. and hovering over each explains how they are used. And in math and trig, for example, there are dozens more that may look familiar if you’ve ever used a scientific calculator. And here I’m just scratching the surface. Those are just a few highlights of the functions that you can use. -But what if you know how to describe what you want but don’t know the function for it? And that’s another area where Copilot helps you get started. So this time, I’ll use Copilot to calculate the totals. I’ll type, “Add a row and column with totals for each month in category.” And Copilot adds the totals by month and even a new column with the totals per category. Copilot will also help with cell formatting. So if I add, “Make the cells you just added with formulas white and bold text in black,” in my prompt, Copilot then reformats those cells too. And you can also add colors to each cell to easily spot differences across these numbers using something called conditional formatting, which is something else that Copilot can help with. I’ll type, “Add conditional formatting in each row to highlight low and high numbers.” -And now we can see where the numbers are the lowest and the highest compared to the others in the same expense category for each month. So you just need to describe what you want and Copilot will do the rest. Now let’s go ahead and move on to deeper analysis of our data. With conditional formatting applied, it’s easier to see each month and how it varies in costs across our different categories. So let’s find some outliers. So I’ll ask Copilot, “What months have the highest expenses and why?” And Copilot analyzes the information and finds the months with the highest expenses. -Then for each, it explains why with the most likely reasons. In this case, December is my highest, and that’s likely due to holiday spending and seasonality. July is the next highest, likely due to air conditioning for utilities costs and the rest of the summer activities that were happening in July. Then August was third highest, also with more travel, AC costs, and dining out. The key insights here summarize what Copilot found with reasoning for increases and decreases along with the lowest months as well. And one more core component that I’ll touch on today is how Excel lets you edit workbooks simultaneously with others. -As I mentioned in the beginning, when you’re using Excel, signed in with a Microsoft account, or using Microsoft 365 at work or at school, it stores your files in OneDrive by default. Now, it also means that when you share an Excel workbook with other people using their name, group, or email, I’ll add Adele here, for example, and hit Send. Then they will be able to open the Excel workbook on their computer or phone and simultaneously edit it with you. And while you co-author with other people as changes are made, like with Adele here, changing the amounts for dining out and entertainment in January, they are saved to the same file. -So those are the basic concepts to navigate Excel, format data, analyze it, and work with others using sharing. And I showed you how Copilot AI can help you as you get started. To learn more, check out microsoft.com/excel. And be sure to subscribe to Microsoft Mechanics for the latest updates, and thanks for watching.Work IQ | Data, Context, Skills & Tools for Copilot and Your Agents
Pull context from SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams, email, and meetings — all through Work IQ. Draft Word documents that carry your existing sensitivity labels, and resolve calendar conflicts in Outlook. Run multi-step Copilot Cowork workflows that generate files, schedule meetings, and send status updates from a single prompt. Extend the same knowledge layer to ServiceNow, CRMs, and other non-Microsoft systems with API and MCP Server connectors in the Microsoft 365 admin center, or build your own agents in code against the Work IQ API. Jeremy Chapman, Microsoft 365 Director, shares how data, context, and skills & tools combine into a single grounding layer for Copilot and your custom agents. Skip the manual prompt scaffolding. Work IQ delivers data, context, skills & tools as the built-in knowledge layer behind Microsoft 365 Copilot and agents. See how it grounds every response. Kick off Copilot Cowork with one prompt. Generate a briefing doc, customer presentation, and Excel forecast in parallel. Queue up meeting scheduling and email drafts while it works. See how it runs. Your agent. Your code. Work IQ’s grounding. Integrate Work IQ data, MCP servers, plugins, and skills into custom agents via the Work IQ API. Start here. QUICK LINKS: 00:00 — Work IQ Knowledge Layer 01:32 — Copilot Chat experiences 02:16 — Work IQ in your apps 03:03 — Auto-Applied Sensitivity Labels 04:20 — Copilot Cowork Agentic Workflow 06:11 — Admin Center Connectors 07:21 — Work IQ API for Developers 08:50 — Wrap up Link References Check out the latest updates at https://aka.ms/WorkIQ 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. Subscribe to our YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/MicrosoftMechanicsSeries Talk with other IT Pros, join us on the Microsoft Tech Community: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-mechanics-blog/bg-p/MicrosoftMechanicsBlog Watch or listen from anywhere, subscribe to our podcast: https://microsoftmechanics.libsyn.com/podcast Keep getting this insider knowledge, join us on social: Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MSFTMechanics Share knowledge on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/microsoft-mechanics/ Enjoy us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/msftmechanics/ Loosen up with us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@msftmechanics Video Transcript: -Imagine AI that understands your individual work context without you having to author long, detailed prompts, manually upload reference content, or query and add business data. That’s what Work IQ is all about. Today, I’ll explain what Work IQ is, how it works, and show you what it can do. So, Work IQ is the brain behind Microsoft 365 Copilot and agents. It’s a built-in knowledge layer that comprises data, with secure access to your unstructured work data across SharePoint, emails, Teams chats and meetings, as well as your structured business data in Dynamics 365 and Power Apps. And you can extend Work IQ data even further to securely interact with external systems using Copilot and Power Platform connectors. -Then context adds semantic understanding of your business data and relationships, like who you work with, work patterns, like projects important to you. This context also includes personalization in Copilot, consisting of the instructions you provide to format its responses, as well as saved memories comprising personal interests and important facts that Copilot retains from chat. -And finally, skills and tools as actions that AI can take with specialized capabilities like generating different files, workflow automation for business processes, scheduling relevant meetings, and more. Together, all of these elements are added to your prompts and subsequent reasoning steps performed to generate more relevant responses and outputs. If you’re using other AI tools today, these are things that you would need to bring in manually, sometimes moving files from policy-protected locations to services without your security controls or visibility, so let me show you a few examples of how this works, starting with a few that use data and context. -So, I’m in Copilot Chat and want to follow up on a recent project discussion, so I’m going to I’ll prompt it, “What did Daichi say about the solar promo timelines earlier this week?” Even though this is a vague statement and could be information in email, Teams, or a recent meeting, Work IQ finds the conversation and its details, then presents those to me. It also finds a related meeting series in my calendar that Daichi scheduled on the topic. And these Work IQ experiences are also available in your apps, like Outlook or other Microsoft 365 apps. -In this case, my calendar is packed with meetings and I’m double-booked in three different time slots. From Outlook, I can ask Copilot to recommend how to resolve conflicts on my calendar for May 12. Copilot, using information from Work IQ, analyzes my schedule, along with my priorities and past meeting patterns. It finds the three timing conflicts on top. Then for each conflict, it reasons over the adjacent meetings, my role, and work patterns to create detailed recommendations for each conflict time. Below that in the summary, it suggests which meetings to reschedule, who to notify, and some actions to take. And Work IQ can help as you write or edit your files in apps like Word. -So, here, I want to to write a summary for a project, and as you can see, there are no project details in this document. It’s just a blank page. So I’ll open Copilot and I’ll prompt it to draft an executive summary about our expansion strategy that highlights our products, the market for outdoor gear, our unique position, and go-to-market strategy. Copilot, together with Work IQ, finds and pulls in data from relevant project files in SharePoint and OneDrive, recent updates from meetings, and relevant emails and Teams conversations. You can see that it automatically applied a sensitivity label based on my existing information protection policies. -Then it generates a detailed summary using all of the data and context that it found, and assembles a fully formatted Word document with specific details about our connected outdoor products, the market opportunity, go-to-market strategy, and our expansion plan with details for carrying it out. As you saw, I didn’t need to author a super long detailed prompt with the project details and have to upload any content or even directly reference files using links. It automatically retrieved relevant content that was aligned with my access permissions as well as my company’s data security policies. -Now let me show you an example using intelligent skills and tools. In this case, I need to prepare for a customer meeting where I need to have several files generated, internal briefing document, a customer presentation, and data insights in a spreadsheet. So, for that, I’ll use Copilot Cowork. I’m going to paste in my prompt where I’m asking it to create those files. Now, I’ll kick off the process. And now it’s using Work IQ data, context, skills, and tools to find relevant data and information and then generate the files I want. -Now, this process can run several minutes, so I’ll speed things up a little to save time. As it works, I can even request more tasks while it’s running using other skills and tools. Here, I ask it to schedule prep time with people on my team and send an email status update to the account team. As it continues working, it checks and finds a mutually open time on our schedules, and it proposes a meeting with participants with all of the details filled in. I can create it right from here. Then it uses another skill to author an email to my contact on the account team that I can even edit right from here. Once everything’s done, you’ll see that it’s created a Zava client presentation, a customer briefing doc, and a customer overview Excel file. I’ll open the briefing document first, and it has everything relevant to the meeting and uses our standard briefing template. -Now, I’ll open the presentation it generated. It explains our work at a glance with key metrics from Work IQ and referenced files, as well as revenue and growth highlights. Now, if I move on to the generated Excel file and open that, it’s laid out year-over-year performance and used that to generate forecasts for this year And you can see the growth trends and more, all from the data it discovered via Work IQ. And like I mentioned, the data can be securely extended to systems from non-Microsoft services using connectors, allowing you to pull in other information like your online CRM systems, content management, databases, ticketing system, and more. -Now, these can be added and configured under Copilot Connectors in the Microsoft 365 admin center. The gallery lets you select from dozens of pre-built connectors or you can create your own. And these can be API-based or MCP server-based. API connections are indexed for read operations and MCP servers are not indexed and support read and write. To add one, like this API-backed connector for ServiceNow Knowledge, you’ll set up the REST API endpoint, provide its namespace and URL to your instance. And since I already have a few MCP server connectors configured, I’ll cancel out of this view and then go to my connections to show you those. Now, here, you can see all of the MCP connections that I have configured in my tenant for things like financial apps, creative suites, collaboration services, and more. -Once connected, these in turn can be accessed via Work IQ by Copilot or your agents. In fact, as a developer, if you are building agents, you can integrate Work IQ into your code with connections using the Work IQ API. Here, I’m using the GitHub CLI. It’s connected to Work IQ and using its underlying MCP servers, plugins, and skills. I have my prompt already entered to find a conversation with Ben and Darrel asking about the availability of an MCP server from the claims team. Now, I want this agent to build another agent based on our discussed feature requests, so I’m going to kick it off. And you can see that it reasons immediately and looks for the conversation to find the features that it needs. -So, after it’s found that, it lists out the features and connects to the insurance claims MCP server and looks at its available tooling. Then it starts to build the scaffolding files for the new agent as JSON and text files. And then deploys a local instance of the agent to test out with a link, so I’ll open that and run a prompt to stack-rank my open claims by age so I can clear the backlog. Then the agent builds a nice claims dashboard with a tiled view of each stack ranked claim. And below that, it even summarizes my priorities so that I can easily focus on what’s important and work through the list. -So, even as you develop new agents or work in other solutions, you can use the data, context, skills, and tools from Work IQ to power those experiences and save time. Work IQ works with Copilot and your agents to deliver personalized, accurate, and grounded outputs based on your real work data, context, and specialized skills and tools. -To learn more, check out the latest updates at aka.ms/WorkIQ. Keep watching Microsoft Mechanics for latest deep dives about AI and what makes it work. And thanks for watching.AI in Windows 11
Access Copilot and agents right from the taskbar; find answers across your files, email, and meetings, and turn ideas into polished content using voice or text. AI is right there where you already work, so you can move faster, stay in your flow, and make better decisions without switching context, opening other apps or moving to the browser. And if you do have a Copilot+ PC, you can use fluid voice dictation across apps, find files with natural language search, take action on anything on your screen, and refine writing anywhere, even offline. Jeremy Chapman, Microsoft 365 Director, shows how whether you’re planning projects, collaborating with teammates, or building solutions, you can move faster, stay focused, and turn context into real outcomes. Stop searching across apps. New Copilot capabilities in Windows Search understand your work context and surfaces answers using data from your Microsoft 365 environment. Get started with Copilot experiences in Windows 11. Run AI tasks without interrupting your workflow. Agents stay visible and trackable in the Windows 11 taskbar. Watch here. Interact with content on your screen using Click to Do. Extract text, send content to Microsoft 365 Copilot, or convert a static table into a usable Excel file. Take a look. QUICK LINKS: 00:00 — Ask Copilot 00:55 — Use voice with Copilot 02:30 — Agents on Windows 11 taskbar 04:19 — Copilot in File Explorer 05:19 — Copilot+ PC capabilities 07:04 — Click to Do 07:52 — Writing Assistance with Copilot 09:15 — Wrap up Link References Check out https://aka.ms/Windows11AI 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. Subscribe to our YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/MicrosoftMechanicsSeries Talk with other IT Pros, join us on the Microsoft Tech Community: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-mechanics-blog/bg-p/MicrosoftMechanicsBlog Watch or listen from anywhere, subscribe to our podcast: https://microsoftmechanics.libsyn.com/podcast Keep getting this insider knowledge, join us on social: Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MSFTMechanics Share knowledge on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/microsoft-mechanics/ Enjoy us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/msftmechanics/ Loosen up with us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@msftmechanics Video Transcript: -Windows does a lot more than launch and run apps. Now with built-in AI, it can do much more for you and you don’t need special skills to make that happen. There are capabilities that light up on any hardware that runs Windows 11, and some that go even further on Copilot+ PCs with on‑device AI processing. Let’s go ahead and start with what anyone running Windows 11 can use right now. So to pull up AI experiences with advanced reasoning, you’ll start with the Search box in the Taskbar, where your familiar search still remains the same, but now you can also use it with AI prompts. So here, I’ll type, “When is my performance review due?” And by drawing on information from my Microsoft Teams and Outlook calendar, Copilot identifies my performance review meeting so I can prepare for it. It’s an experience powered by Microsoft 365 Copilot, which uses Work IQ to understand my work context. -Next with AI, it’s often easier just to say what you want and you can now use voice with Microsoft 365 Copilot because of its multi-modal support. You’ll use a long press on the Copilot key or Windows key + C if your device doesn’t have that, to activate voice control. And now I can interact with Copilot to help build a presentation that I’m working on. So for this slide I’ll ask, “Robin sent me a stat about incorporating organic design. I think it was in email, maybe Teams?” And it takes my voice command, it’s using Work IQ with Microsoft 365 Copilot to run intelligent searches, figuring out which Robin I mean while pulling in relevant context and shared information about the meeting from across my Microsoft 365 apps. - [Copilot] Robin mentioned that incorporating organic design has been shown to boost employee creativity by 15%. That’s a pretty cool stat! - Not bad. Can you turn that into a catchy statement on this slide here? - [Copilot] Absolutely. How about this? Creativity matters. Create the space for it. - Love it. I’ll need Amber to sign off on this. So when’s my next meeting with Amber? - [Copilot] Your next one-on-one with Amber is on Thursday at 10:30 in the morning. That should be a great time to review it together. - [Jeremy] Thanks, Copilot. - [Copilot] You got it. Happy to help. Let me know if there’s anything else you want to fine tune before that one on one. -This uses advanced speech‑to‑text and tightly integrates on‑device input with cloud AI, so it works on any connected Windows 11 device. Now let’s try something more challenging. Some AI tasks take longer than a quick prompt‑and‑response, and some need to run in parallel while you keep working. That’s where Agents on the Windows 11 taskbar can help. So I’m going to start by tapping into the new Windows Search box. Now, this uses new Windows shell integration, so that long running agents can be viewed similar to apps. So I just need to start with the @ symbol to pull up my agents Now I can find, open, monitor and work with my agents directly from the taskbar. So in this case, I’m going to choose the Researcher agent. I’ll ask Researcher to compare public sentiment with our design principles. I like the direction it’s thinking, so I’ll go ahead and confirm. And this agent works hard, often for 10 minutes or more to research and generate its content. And you can work on other things or with other agents while each performs their work. -As agents run, there are status indicators directly on the taskbar, similar to when you download large files, where you can track progress and see once it’s complete. So, your agents stay visible and easy to check on as you work, not buried in browser tabs. Now let’s return to our completed Researcher run. The notification tells me that Researcher is finished with this turn and in the taskbar, I can even see a green checkmark on the Researcher icon. When I zoom in, there’s a short summary. And I can tap in to review it. -Now, this actually took around eight or so minutes to process in real time. Everything here was grounded using Work IQ for information that was in my company. And you’ll see its answer is very well-informed and extremely comprehensive using our study for public sentiment vs. core design principles, it’s laying out its reasoning and all of its cited sources. Of course, Windows is also where you can go to find and open your files and now, your SharePoint and OneDrive cloud files will show up right inside the File Explorer. Using File Explorer Home, you can easily get to your recent files, your favorites and files shared with you. -Then the new Copilot control lets you Ask Microsoft 365 Copilot for file insights like summaries, context, or next steps for documents. So for this Design Principles doc here, I’ll ask Copilot to review it and tell me what percentage of employees prefer workspaces that incorporate sustainable materials. And in just a few seconds, based on information deeply nested within that document, it finds that over 70% say they do and even provides supporting context. So, you don’t have to open the file or leave your flow to find the right one, whether that’s local or in the cloud. And everything I’ve shown so far works on any Windows 11 device with a Microsoft 365 work or school account and access to Copilot. -Now let’s look at what’s unique to Copilot+ PCs, where on‑device AI and small language models deliver fast, private processing. So I’ll highlight a few of the capabilities that work on a Copilot + PC even if you don’t have Microsoft 365. First, the new Fluid Dictation works across all apps and uses on-device models for quicker, more natural voice typing as well. You can enable voice access in Settings, which on first run guides you through the experience and what it can do to interact with Windows. -So I’m going to show an experience working across two common text editors, Notepad and Word. You can start it using either the microphone icon in the taskbar, or by saying, “Voice access, wake up. Open Notepad.” It uses powerful AI running on your local device to automatically correct grammar, add punctuation, and, um, even remove filler words that you, uh, speak. Select all. Copy. Open Word. Paste. And that was just scratching the surface for what Voice access with Fluid Dictation can do. And here are some of the common commands that you can use to interact with Windows and your apps. -Second, to help you quickly find your files anywhere, improved Windows search uses semantic understanding across local files and Microsoft 365. You don’t need exact names, just describe what you remember. For example, this broad search here for project updates pulls up relevant files and folders of content using hybrid semantic search, and they might contain the word project or maybe synonyms, or contain related content in context of the files or even images within the files. -Next, Click to Do lets you interact with anything on your screen. You can take actions on content or ask Microsoft 365 Copilot a question about what’s on your screen without needing to switch context. So in this case, I’ll going to pull up this PDF file and you’ll see that it opens the file in the Edge browser. Now, if I scroll down, you can see that I have a stylized table on my screen, which by the way, could be text or an image. So I’ll hit the Windows Key + left mouse click to open Click to Do. And you can also use Windows key + Q. Now you’ll see that it’s recognizing all of the text in the screenshot. I can copy it as a CSV, Save or Share it. I’ll use Convert to table with Excel. And it instantly opens Excel and becomes a usable table and you can work directly with the data. -From here, if you also use Microsoft 365 at work or school with a Copilot+ PC, even more powerful capabilities light up. Writing Assistance with Microsoft 365 Copilot helps you quickly craft content with AI-powered rewriting and proofreading, and because it runs locally, it even works offline. This enables you to use generative AI from any app with text field input. So I’m going to go ahead and use our line-of-business app here for project planning. There’s a description and business justification field, and I’ll add a bit more detail here. -And this works everywhere, kind of like your clipboard, so when I select text, the Writing Assistance button appears. Now with it, I can choose options to rewrite it in different ways. In this case, I’ll choose professional. It rewrites my text entry and then gives me three options. So I’ll go ahead and choose the third option here, I like that one, so I’ll go ahead and replace my previous text with it. And that can be used on any line-of-business or other app without any code changes because it’s just built into Windows. -And finally, if you are a developer, new native support in the Model Context Protocol in Windows gives your agents a standardized way to connect with apps, tools, and files to automate tasks. You can use built-in agent connectors for File Explorer and Windows Settings, allowing your agents to manage local file operations and to modify defined device configurations. -Windows 11’s built-in AI moves the intelligence closer to you right in the flow of your work. To learn more, check out aka.ms/Windows11AI and keep watching Microsoft Mechanics for the latest updates and thanks for watching.Microsoft Excel Power User Updates | Agent Mode, Copilot Function & Formula AI
With Agent Mode, automate complex analysis, create pivot tables, and build interactive dashboards without manual setup. Streamline text analysis, formula generation, and complex calculations right inside Excel. Use the Copilot function to categorize feedback, score sentiment, or automate repetitive tasks, and leverage Formula AI to generate accurate formulas from plain language prompts. Jeremy Chapman, Microsoft 365 Director, shares how to work smarter and make faster, data-driven decisions in Microsoft Excel. No manual setup required. Auto-analyze your spreadsheets, generate KPIs, pivot tables, and charts. Check out Agent Mode in Microsoft Excel. Analyze text, categorize feedback, and score sentiment. Turn manual data tagging into instant AI-powered insights inside your spreadsheet. See how to use the =COPILOT() function. Save time and stay in flow. Generate formulas faster, understand what they do, and complete complex calculations with confidence. Take a look. QUICK LINKS: 00:00 — Excel and Microsoft 365 Copilot updates 01:24 — Agent Mode 03:55 — Copilot function 06:02 — Formula completion 07:13 — Formula AI 08:41 — Wrap up 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. Subscribe to our YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/MicrosoftMechanicsSeries Talk with other IT Pros, join us on the Microsoft Tech Community: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-mechanics-blog/bg-p/MicrosoftMechanicsBlog Watch or listen from anywhere, subscribe to our podcast: https://microsoftmechanics.libsyn.com/podcast Keep getting this insider knowledge, join us on social: Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MSFTMechanics Share knowledge on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/microsoft-mechanics/ Enjoy us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/msftmechanics/ Loosen up with us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@msftmechanics Video Transcript: -If you’re using Excel with Microsoft 365 at work or school, it just got better. Now within Excel, Microsoft 365 Copilot brings more powerful AI directly into your spreadsheets. First, Agent Mode brings advanced agentic AI reasoning to your open files to help you analyze, apply formulas, create visualizations, and more to reach your intended outcomes. Then the =COPILOT function is a new formula that brings AI directly into your cells. Next, Formula AI makes it easy to find and use the right formula with automatic formula completion as you start typing and even natural language formula creation so that you can just describe what you want to do without knowing the formula name, and Copilot suggests the right one. -So most of what I’ll show today does need a Microsoft 365 Copilot license. That said, if you don’t have a license, and if your work or school uses almost any version of Microsoft 365 or Office 365, you’ll find Copilot in the home ribbon and can start using Copilot Chat with Excel on the web or the updated desktop apps right now. Now these are designed so that you don’t need to leave Excel and use an AI website, or even worse, upload your work files into AI tools that might not be safe or might not be managed by your company. -So now let’s dig in deeper into the updates. So starting with Agent Mode, which brings agentic reasoning directly into your spreadsheets, it can use Excel table structures, formula syntax, dynamic arrays, PivotTables, charts, and more to create workbooks that can be updated, refreshed, and verified. Let me show you an example using Excel on the web. So here we’re running a global B2B bicycle business, and I would need to generate a financial report. I’ve already opened Agent Mode from Copilot in Excel. Now I’ll type, “Run a full analysis on this data. Find important insights for making business decisions and create charts to help visualize insights.” And Agent Mode begins reasoning through the task. And you can watch its reasoning logic as it works through all the different tasks. It’s planning workflow steps, workbook structure, creating PivotTables, building a dashboard, and working through all the pieces of the dashboard. -Now depending on the job that you give Agent Mode, it can take a few minutes to generate its response. This took a bit over three minutes in my case. When I move back to its output, you’ll see the completed reasoning steps taken in the right pane, and I can see that it’s created a new sheet called Insights Dashboard. So I’ll open that, and it looks pretty visual. And with the sheet open, I’ll go ahead and move back into the Agent Mode output on the right, and you’ll see that it’s found insights in the data. So it’s found headline KPIs for sales, profit, units, and margin. It’s found segment profitability and discount impact. It’s also looked at my customer feedback, and we’ll dig in deeper into that in a moment. And it provides a few recommendations of where to focus on for the highest profit. -So it looks like we might be granting too many discounts and that we have a few seasonal spikes as well. Then it explains how it produced everything. And moving over to the dashboard itself, you can see this is all live data with references to the source content. It’s created PivotTables that you can edit if you want to, and here’s another one. And below that there are PivotCharts showing all of its work, just like I asked for, and it’s fully interactive. So you just need to tell it what you want, and Copilot builds, then evaluates, and iterates until the outcome is generated and verified. And even though I stopped in my case after one prompt, of course, you can also continue your conversation with Copilot until it builds exactly what you want. -Next is the =COPILOT function. This is a brand-new formula that takes Copilot AI right into the individual cells of your spreadsheets. This is designed for text-based analysis, and let me show you. In this case, we’ve received written feedback about various replacement bike parts that we sell. In the past, you might read each one and then tag every comment manually with a sentiment score or a category. Let’s have Copilot do this. So using the =COPILOT with a prompt of, “Rate the sentiment of this feedback as negative or neutral or positive,” and then the corresponding cell, H2, I’ll hit enter. -And here I’m using a single prompt and cell for context in this case, but I could use more parts. And if I drag this formula down, Copilot rates each comment by sentiment, whether it’s positive, negative, or neutral, and it enters the results. And this isn’t just a one-time operation because it’s part of Excel’s calculation engine. As you can see, if I make this positive comment here negative, and I’ll add another negative word here, then commit the change, the result in the cell updates automatically. -Now, if I wanted to categorize these lines of feedback based on the feedback categories here in my spreadsheet, I can use multiple parts. So this time I’ll type =COPILOT, then, “Categorize this feedback from” with the feedback cell again, H2. In the second part, I’ll complete the thought and say, “with the best matching option only from these feedback categories,” then choose the cell range with L$2:L$7 as absolute row references. Then I’ll hit confirm. Here Copilot uses my two prompts and cross-references the context range of feedback categories to generate its output. And these all look really accurate. So you can use the =COPILOT function for common text-based analysis right inside your workbook, and because it’s an Excel function, it persists and can even be nested in other functions too. -And that’s just one formula, and there are hundreds of others in Excel where even the best power users don’t know every single one. And that’s where the new formula completion helps you choose the right formulas using the context around your data to form a recommendation. I’m in Excel on the web, and I’ll type = in a cell. Copilot analyzes the context, the headers, the nearby cells, tables, and suggests a formula. For example, if I’m calculating year-over-year growth, because the column name here is YoY%, Copilot automatically suggests = /the last year again, D7. And it even shows a preview of the result as a percentage and a natural language explanation of what the formula does. -Now this output looks really good to me, and from there, I can just drag this formula down to the rest of the cells that I want to fill in down to total assets in this case. And I’ve got the year-over-year changes as percentages everywhere. This is even great for complex formulas, dynamic arrays, and REGEX patterns. You just need to type the equal sign, and Copilot will help you figure out what to use. And if you tend to know the formulas that you do want to use, well, from Excel options, you can always opt out of formula completion and select for how long. -Now let’s get back to the basics where you might not know where to start or what formula to use. And for that, from a blank cell, you can just use formula generation with natural language to describe what you want. Copilot then uses its language understanding to help. In this case, I have another sheet with global inventory levels for my bikes and parts, and I want to find out the inventory levels for the Trailhawk and the Roadhawk bikes in Europe. All I need to do is type =. Then I see a free text field with “Generate a formula that…” But in my case, I’ll describe what I want, so I’ll say, “Calculate the total number of Trailhawk and Roadhawk bikes that are available in warehouses located in Europe,” and the model knows which cities are in that area of the globe. -Then it generates a formula using SumIfs with the columns I want in range, B for the Trailhawks and A for the cities, repeats the same for the Roadhawk in column D. Then for the A column criteria, it lists out Dublin, Berlin, London, Paris, and Madrid as cities in the same geographical area. In fact, if I select each of these cells manually, first for Dublin, then Berlin, then London, then Paris, and all the way on the bottom, the Madrid row with columns B and C, you’ll see the total is 845. And this is still a relatively simple formula, but it might not be that easy if you’re new to formulas. -Those are just a few updates for how Copilot helps make Excel more powerful, whether you’re a power user or just getting started. Try out today by clicking the Copilot button in the Excel ribbon and as you add formulas right in your spreadsheet cells. And be sure to subscribe to Microsoft Mechanics for the latest AI tech, and thanks for watching.Copilot now included with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook & OneNote | Microsoft 365 & Office 365
Summarize long email threads, generate bullet-point executive summaries, create charts, and update presentations — all without leaving your familiar apps. Copilot understands your context, remembers your preferences, and helps you reuse content seamlessly across Microsoft 365. IT admins stay in control while you boost productivity. Enterprise-grade protections, Microsoft Purview, and the Copilot Control System ensure your data stays secure. Jeremy Chapman, Microsoft 365 Director, shares how with premium features like intelligent data retrieval, meeting facilitation, and specialized agents, you can automate routine tasks, generate insights, and stay in the flow without leaving your apps. Create executive summaries instantly. Copilot Chat understands your Word document context and writes for you. Check it out. Turn raw data into clear visuals. Copilot Chat knows the columns, calculations, & design you need in Excel. See it in action. Build presentations fast. Bring summaries, charts, and visuals from other apps directly into PowerPoint slides with Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat. Watch here. QUICK LINKS: 00:00 — Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat within Microsoft 365 apps 00:45 — Copilot Chat in Outlook 01:29 — Copilot Chat in Word 02:15 — Copilot Chat in Excel 02:59 — Copilot Chat in Power Point 04:58 — Security and Admin Experience 05:38 — Premium experience 06:44 — Wrap up 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. Subscribe to our YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/MicrosoftMechanicsSeries Talk with other IT Pros, join us on the Microsoft Tech Community: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-mechanics-blog/bg-p/MicrosoftMechanicsBlog Watch or listen from anywhere, subscribe to our podcast: https://microsoftmechanics.libsyn.com/podcast Keep getting this insider knowledge, join us on social: Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MSFTMechanics Share knowledge on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/microsoft-mechanics/ Enjoy us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/msftmechanics/ Loosen up with us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@msftmechanics Video Transcript: -If you’re currently using Microsoft 365 or Office 365 at work or at school, now for the first time, you’ll be able to experience Copilot right within the context of your work inside of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and OneNote, all at no extra cost, and you don’t need a Copilot add-on license. Importantly, you can use it with OpenAI’s GPT-5 model, the same AI that powers ChatGPT, without copying, pasting, or uploading your files outside of your protected work apps. And today I’ll walk you through how you can leverage these in-app experiences along with the controls available for IT. -Everything I’ll show you today, by the way, works in both the desktop and web apps. I’m going to start with Copilot in Outlook. As you can see, I have a full inbox after being away for a few days. And now, instead of working through this long email thread to figure out what it’s all about and what I need to take action on, I can just ask Copilot, “Please draft a recap of this email thread for me to share it with my launch team.” And Copilot analyzes the open thread and it generates a reply with a clear summary of major updates since I’ve been away. And it looks like the heart rate detection feature has been enhanced and is launching ahead of schedule. As a result, the leadership meeting has been moved up. And I can see that my action item is to update our slides to reflect the new feature and the revised positioning ahead of my presentation. I’m going to start in Word to begin generating the updates that I’ll need for my presentation. -So here, I’ve got a technical specifications document open for ZavaCore Fiber, I need to add to it for our meeting. Instead of switching apps or uploading files, I just open up Copilot Chat on the right side pane and it understands the context of my open document. I can let Copilot know that I prefer generated content to be concise, and Copilot will take this into account as it generates content. Now I can ask Copilot, “Write an executive summary in a bulleted list,” and Copilot authors the summary. I just need to click on this copy icon to copy it, then I can paste it under the Executive Summary heading in my document, and now my technical spec is complete. -So that was Word, now let’s move on to Excel to create a data visualization that I’ll incorporate also into my presentation. So here I’ve got a spreadsheet that’s full of satisfaction and performance metrics for our new product. On Copilot Chat, I can ask, “Generate a bar chart showing the overall satisfaction scores across regions. Use different colors for each bar.” And I didn’t need to tell Copilot which columns to use or which ones to calculate the insights from in the spreadsheet, it knows what to do. And there’s my bar chart with satisfaction scores across North, South, East, West, and Central regions. It’s exactly what I asked for, without having to leave Excel. So now that I have what I need to update my presentation, I’m going to move over to Copilot Chat in PowerPoint. -This is my deck for ZavaCore Smart Fiber, and I want to make a few updates to it based on the email thread from before and what we just did in Word and Excel. And I want to go back to those Copilot chats, so this time in the Copilot pane, I’ll open up the ellipse menu. And from here, I can view all my recent Copilot chats. Well, I’m going to choose the one from a moment ago, “Please remember that I prefer generated content in Copilot Chat to be concise.” And down within that chat session, you can see I have my bullet list of executive summary. And now I’m going to copy that and put that in the New Features Overview. And I’ll keep going, I’ll return back to the previous chat, this time the one from Excel with a bar chart that was based on our open Excel file because I want to add that to my PowerPoint as well. Well, I’ll grab that chart and I’ll place it on the left side of the slide, and now it’s looking how I want it to. I’m going to move on to slide 5 because I want to generate a new image for the slide, so I’ll go back into Copilot and I’ll select New Chat. Now I’ll ask Copilot to, “Create a high-tech image of an ECG sensor.” And that takes a moment or so to generate, but there’s my new image. Once it’s finished, I can add that to my slide. -Now I want to make sure that my presentation includes answers to the questions that we think that our audience will have. We’ve prepared a few documents with that information recently. So from Copilot Chat, I’ll just start writing, “Suggest some Q&As for this presentation,” and I’ll reference the documents I want. To do that, I just need to type the forward slash, and that then shows me all my recent documents. I’m going to choose our Spec doc, and then I’ll send my prompt, and Copilot then generates a nice list of questions and answers, and I’m ready for my presentation. -And if you’re in IT and want to ensure that your company data stays protected with the policies and controls that you’ve already put in place, the good news is, is that Copilot Chat has enterprise-grade protections like the add-on Microsoft 365 Copilot license. You can manage everything that you just saw in the apps using the Copilot Control System, including enforceable data loss prevention and information protection policies from Microsoft Purview. And Copilot Chat is pinned by default, so it becomes discoverable throughout the different app experiences. And you can also view Copilot usage in the Microsoft 365 admin center, as well as deeper insights in the Copilot Dashboard. Being able to use Copilot directly from your apps as you work not only saves you time but also keeps you in your flow. And with the premium experience available with the Microsoft 365 Copilot license, your productivity gets even better, and you can use Copilot inside a broader set of Microsoft 365 apps. -So a few of the standout capabilities include intelligent work data retrieval, where it pulls from the files in your OneDrive, your shared documents, emails, meetings, conversations, and more automatically without you needing to reference them. In other words, it works with all the work data that you have permissions to access in the Microsoft Graph and reasons over it to generate responses. And second is meeting facilitation. So if you’re using Microsoft Teams, Microsoft 365 Copilot works during meetings to facilitate discussions or catch you up on what you might have missed, take detailed notes with action items, and more. And third is specialized agents, where you can create and use agents with your data in Microsoft 365 and get access to pre-built agents from Microsoft with advanced reasoning. -The new included experiences that I showed today are a great way for everyone to start using Copilot Chat directly in Microsoft 365 apps. Try it today by clicking the Copilot button in the app ribbon to get started. Subscribe to Microsoft Mechanics for the latest AI tech, and thanks so much for watching.New collaborative agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot
Watch how these collaborative agents partner with you in real time across your everyday apps. Knowledge Agent streamlines SharePoint by auto-tagging files, retiring outdated pages, and even drafting new content so your sites stay current and searchable. Facilitator is an agent in Microsoft Teams that keeps meetings on track — managing agendas, taking notes, assigning follow-ups, and capturing decisions automatically. Agents in Teams channels summarize conversations, generate status reports, and handle routine updates so projects move forward without missed details. Agents in Viva Engage communities draft accurate, data-driven responses to questions, connecting colleagues to the right information and reducing response times. Organize and tag your SharePoint content automatically. Turn your library into a smart knowledge hub. See how to streamline SharePoint with Knowledge Agent. Keep your team aligned. Generate summaries, compare features, & automate status reports with channel agents. Check out how to use agents in Microsoft Teams channels. Run meetings efficiently. Track agendas, take notes, assign follow-ups, and stay on time. See how Facilitator can improve your meetings. QUICK LINKS: 00:00 — Collaborative agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot 01:08 — Knowledge Agent in SharePoint 02:29 — Keep SharePoint site up-to-date 03:41 — Create pages and new posts in SharePoint 04:47 — Agents in Microsoft Teams channels 06:34 — Facilitator in Microsoft Teams meetings 07:58 — Agents in Viva Engage communities 09:12 — Wrap up Link References Find out more at https://aka.ms/HumanAgentTeams 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. Subscribe to our YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/MicrosoftMechanicsSeries Talk with other IT Pros, join us on the Microsoft Tech Community: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-mechanics-blog/bg-p/MicrosoftMechanicsBlog Watch or listen from anywhere, subscribe to our podcast: https://microsoftmechanics.libsyn.com/podcast Keep getting this insider knowledge, join us on social: Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MSFTMechanics Share knowledge on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/microsoft-mechanics/ Enjoy us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/msftmechanics/ Loosen up with us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@msftmechanics Video Transcript: -The latest agents for Microsoft 365 Copilot users can now act as virtual members of your team. Today, I’ll show you how new collaborative agents for Microsoft 365 Copilot can work alongside you in real time. Starting with the Knowledge Agent to help you manage your sites and organize your content in SharePoint. Then Facilitator in Microsoft Teams helps you run more effective meetings, working through your agenda and driving the right actions. Followed by the agents in Teams channels, which work with your team, answering questions and helping everyone stay on top of your projects, for example, generating regular status reports. -And, finally, the agents in communities which help shorten your response times with suggested and informed responses to scale your support in Viva Engage. And all of these agents are grounded in the context of your work: the meetings you’re invited to, the conversations you’re in, and the files that you have access to. And you can use these agents directly from your work-approved app. So you don’t need to move information to external AI tools, which puts your work data at risk. Let me show you how each of these agents work and how they can help you. I’m going to start in SharePoint because collaboration isn’t just about the meetings that you’re in or your work chats, it’s also about having the right information at the right time. -Now, this SharePoint document library is a bit disorganized. There are a lot of specs and decks and roadmaps all mixed together. And that’s where Knowledge Agent comes in. It can really turn your content into an active, self-organizing knowledge base. I’ll just pull up the agent and choose Organize This Library. And that takes a moment to process. And in these new columns that you see right here, it’s tagged the files with product, the matching department, and even the material type used to manufacture the products, as mentioned within each file. Now I have the contents in this library all tagged and almost how I want it, but I still need to organize the content for how our team works with it. So, for that, I can just ask Knowledge Agent to show the files for ZavaCoreFiber and then group them by department. And as it’s working, you’ll see that it groups everything as described. And this is the exact view that I want. This saves us all the time it takes then to add metadata to our files and keep our information sorted. And with everything as intended and our groupings in place, I’ll just save the changes and I’m done. -Next, if you’ve ever owned or worked in a long-running SharePoint site, they can become out-of-date quickly with old content or broken links. And guess what? Knowledge Agent helps there too. So I’ll open up Knowledge Agent, and this time I’ll choose Improve the Site. And it gives me a few suggestions right away, like retire inactive pages, find content gaps, and fix broken links. Now, these are all things that this site can use, to be honest. So I’ll go ahead and start with retiring inactive pages. Now, there are two different inactive pages, one from 2022 and one from 2018, that probably should be retired, and I can preview them right from this card. And since this one looks out-of-date and it’s due, I’ll go ahead and retire it. -Now let’s look for content gaps. And this is a great insight because people have searched for Zava Collab and related terms 35 times in the last year, but they didn’t find any relevant results. Let’s see if we can fix that. I’ll go ahead and click Suggestion, and Knowledge Agent recommends creating a dedicated Zava Collaboration page and even has recommended content ideas for it. And that’s another area where a Knowledge Agent can help you save time by creating pages and news posts in SharePoint. Let me show you that. This time from the floating menu, I’ll choose Create a Page. For the type, I’ll pick a news post. And as a template, I’ll select Create a Newsletter. Then I just need to define a few specific items to customize my news post. So I’ll specify the subject, ZavaCore Fiber, then I’ll go ahead and add a section for upcoming launch. And from there to reference the right knowledge needed to inform the news posts, I’ll go ahead and point to a presentation that I’ve been working on with the right details in it. -Now I can create this as a private draft. And, again, we can watch everything right now as it’s being created where it drafts out the content, even finds the right images, and applies the layout to the news post. Now after I go ahead and review everything, I just need to confirm and post the news. The Knowledge Agent turns your content into a living and learning knowledge partner that you can interact with in real time. But now let’s switch gears to the Teams channel that we use to converse with each other daily. -If you’ve ever been part of a busy or active Teams channel, it’s easy to lose track of decisions and deadlines, and that’s where agents and channels act as a project-knowledgeable teammate grounded in your channel’s content. So here I’m in our Teams CoreFiber-Launch channel. A member of the team is looking for a product feature comparison, and that’s a great idea. I’ll go ahead and head over to the threaded replies and call up our agent. I’ll just @ mention CoreFiber-Launch Agent. There we go. Now I’ll ask it to compare ZavaCore Fiber features to what’s in the market for smart clothing and produce a concise summary. And it generates the summary with all the details it found with grounding information from the web and from channel conversations. -And the agents can also work autonomously too. So, for example, if you want your agent to send a project status report using information from the team, you can set it up automatically to send updates. And all you need to do is go into the Agent Settings. And, in this case, we’ve already set up the agent to send daily status report updates as well as schedule meetings. And just to show you how that works, I’ll go ahead and edit the status report settings so that, starting on September 11th, it’ll start sending weekly status reports instead of daily. Just to give you an idea then of what these different status reports look like, I’ll head over to the Status Report channel, and you can see the components with the highlights and lowlights, the current status with details on progress towards our milestones, and more. -These agents in your Teams channels are like having teammates who remember everything and also take actions on your behalf. And while we’re in Teams, let’s move on to meetings and see what Facilitator can do. So this is an in-progress meeting that was just kicked off with recording and transcription enabled, and this is Serena’s view. So in Meeting Chat, like with other agents, you can @ mention Facilitator and pull it up. Now, in this meeting there are three agenda items that need to be discussed, and Facilitator can do that with a simple prompt to track meeting progress. -Now, instantly you’ll see the agenda appears right on top of the meeting stage, and Facilitator even sets timings for each agenda item in this 10-minute meeting. And it also offers to take notes and set a timer and also answer questions. In fact, Carole asked Facilitator to choose between New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Atlanta for a product launch based on city size and other factors. Facilitator then responds with suggestions based on the size and strengths of each city. As everyone in the meeting moves through the topics, Facilitator keeps the meeting on track and even finds action items like this one to outline a platform strategy that it can assign as a task in Planner. -Once the meeting’s finished, Facilitator generates the meeting notes as discussed and follow-up tasks. And this agent ensures that nothing falls through the cracks. Then for those broader, often company-wide level conversations happening in Viva Engage communities, agents there can also help quickly answer questions and even connect people to the resources they’re looking for. So here I’m in Viva Engage in our Product Sales Support community, and I can see that a sales team member has asked “What are the KPIs, or key performance indicators, and success metrics that we’re tracking for the ZavaCore Fiber launch?” -Let’s go ahead and look at the suggested draft response from the agent. Now, as you can see here as I scroll down, the agent’s constantly looking for unanswered questions and automatically generates and suggests informed responses. And here’s our question on KPIs and success metrics. And you can see that it’s retrieved the right information right from our launch docs and our SharePoint site from before and was able to draft an informed response. Now all I need to do is review it and approve it. And that takes a moment to add the response. And, once that’s complete, it even gets marked as verified with a blue check because I reviewed it as an expert. -These agents make community knowledge and expertise more accessible and save lots of time, whether you’re waiting for the response or authoring the response. The new agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot act as virtual teammates. They help you stay informed, organized, and efficient so you can focus on what matters. -To learn more about these and other agents, check out aka.ms/HumanAgentTeams. Subscribe to Microsoft Mechanics for the latest AI updates. And thanks so much for watching.Introducing Microsoft Purview Alert Triage Agents for Data Loss Prevention & Insider Risk Management
Surface the highest-risk alerts across your environment, no matter their default severity, and take action. Customize how your agents reason, teach them what matters to your organization, and continuously refine to reduce time-to-resolution. Talhah Mir, Microsoft Purview Principal GPM, shows how to triage, investigate, and contain potential data risks before they escalate. Focus on the most high-risk alerts in your queue. Save time by letting Alert Triage Agents for DLP and IRM surface what matters. Watch how it works. Stay in control. Tailor triage priorities with your own rules to focus on what really matters. See how to customize your alert triage agent using Security Copilot. View alert triage agent efficiency stats. Know what your agent is doing and how well it’s performing. Check out Microsoft Purview. QUICK LINKS: 00:00 — Agents in Microsoft Purview 00:58 — Alert Triage Agent for DLP 01:54 — Customize Agents 03:32 — View prioritized alerts 05:17 — Calibrate Agent Behavior with Feedback 06:38 — Track Agent Performance and Usage 07:34 — Wrap up Link References Check out https://aka.ms/PurviewTriageAgents 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. Subscribe to our YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/MicrosoftMechanicsSeries Talk with other IT Pros, join us on the Microsoft Tech Community: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-mechanics-blog/bg-p/MicrosoftMechanicsBlog Watch or listen from anywhere, subscribe to our podcast: https://microsoftmechanics.libsyn.com/podcast Keep getting this insider knowledge, join us on social: Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MSFTMechanics Share knowledge on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/microsoft-mechanics/ Enjoy us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/msftmechanics/ Loosen up with us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@msftmechanics Video Transcript: -Staying ahead of potential data security threats and knowing which alerts deserve your attention isn’t just challenging. It’s overwhelming. Every day, your organization generates an increasing and enormous volume of data interactions, and it’s hard to know which potential risks are slipping through the cracks. In fact, on average, for every 66 new alerts logged in a day, nearly a third are not investigated because of the time and effort involved. And this is exactly where automation and AI in Microsoft Purview can make a material difference. With an agent-managed alert queue that, just like an experienced tier 1 analyst, sifts through the noise to identify Data Loss Prevention and Insider Risk Management alerts that pose the greatest risks to your organization, letting you focus your time and efforts on the most critical risks to your data. -Today, I’ll show you how the agents in Microsoft Purview work, the reasoning they use the prioritize alerts, and how to get them running in your environment. I’ll start with Alert Triage Agent for DLP. I’m in the Alerts page for Data Loss Prevention. You’ll see that just for this small date range, I have a long list of 385 active alerts. Now, I could use what’s in the Severity column to sort and prioritize what to work on first, clicking each, analyzing the details, which policies were triggered, and then repeating that process until I’ve worked my way through the list over the course of my day. And even then, I wouldn’t necessarily have the full picture. To save time, I ended up deprioritizing low and medium severity alerts, which still could present risks that need to be investigated, but it doesn’t have to be this way. -Instead, if I select my Alert Triage Agent view, I can see it’s done the work to triage the most important alerts, regardless of severity, that require my attention. There’s a curated list of 17 alerts for me to focus in on. And if you’re wondering if you can trust this triage list of alerts to be the ones that really need the most attention, you remain in control because you’re able to teach Copilot what you want to prioritize when you set up your agent. Let me show you. I’m in the Agents view and I’ll select the DLP agent. And if this is your first time using the agent, you’ll need to review what it does and how it’s triggered. In fact, it lists what it needs permissions for as it reasons over each alert. This includes your DLP configuration, reading incoming activity details and corresponding content, and then storing your feedback to refine how it will triage DLP alerts. -Next, you can move on to deployment settings. Here, you can choose how the agent runs or triggered and select the alert timeframe. The default is last 30 days. From there, I’ll deploy the agent. You’ll see that it tells me the next step is to customize it before it begins triaging alerts. This takes a little while to provision, and once it’s ready, there’s just one more step. Back in Alerts, I need to customize the agent. Here, I can enter my own instructions as text to help the agent prioritize alerts based on what’s important to my organization. For example, I can focus it on specific labels or projects, which can be modified over time. -Next, I can select the individual policies that I want to focus the agent on. I’m going to select all of these in this case, then hit Save. Once I hit Review, it generates custom classifiers and rules specific to what I’ve asked the agent to look for. Then I just need to start the agent, and that’s the magic behind agent-prioritized queue that I showed you earlier. So now, once the agent is ready, instead of trying to find that needle in our haystack of 385 alerts, I can just hit the toggle button to view the prioritized alerts from the Alert Triage Agent. Notice I’m not losing any of the alert details from before. It’s just presented as a triaged and prioritized queue, starting with the top handful of alerts that need my immediate attention with less urgent and not categorized alerts available to view in other tabs. -I’ll focus on what needs attention and click into the top one to see what the agent found. The Agent summary tells me that there are 25 files and eight with verified policy matches. Data includes credit cards, bank account numbers shared using SharePoint. Below that, you’ll see the sensitivity risk for each shared file, the exfiltration risk related primarily to the files containing financial data, and the policy risk. And I could see in this case, the DLP policy was triggered, and the user was allowed to share without restrictions. In the Details tab, you’ll notice that the alert severity set to low based on the policy configuration, but the triage agent, much like a human analyst, can render a verdict taking the entire context into account. Clicking into view details, I can find more information, including the related assets, where I can see each of the corresponding names, trainable classifiers if defined, and sensitive information types. I’ll scroll back up and show you one more tab here. -In Overview, I can see the user associated with the alert. Turns out this is an important policy match to prioritize Labels on 18 highly sensitive files were downgraded and it was shared without proper restriction. The user was warned and chose to proceed. I can now work on containing the risk and improving related policy protections to prevent future incidents like this one. Let’s continue to work through our prioritized alert queue, and you can see I’m now left with six. I’ll click into the first one. It’s a policy match for business-critical files containing financial and legal information. This is credit card information and a legal agreement in the shared content. That said, this happens to be a close partner of our company that typically handles this type of information, so it’s not important. And to prevent this and future similar alerts from being flagged as needing my attention, I can calibrate the agent’s response based on what matters to me. Kind of like you would teach a junior member of your team. So, in this alert categorization, I’ll click Change to add more context about why I disagree with this categorization so that other recipients from that domain are deprioritized. -In the details pane, I’ll change it to less urgent and add another property to deprioritize these types of alerts. In this case, I’ll add the external recipient email address. And after I hit submit, this will be added to the agent’s instruction set to further refine its rationale for prioritization. In fact, here in our list of what needs attention, you’ll see that the alert is no longer on the list. That’s how easy it is to get the agent to work on your behalf. And once you’ve been using the agent at any time, you can view its progress. In the Agent Overview, I can see my deployed agents and trending activities. If I click into my Data Loss Prevention Agent, I can see details about its recent activities. In the Performance tab, I can also see the agent effectiveness trend over time, and below that, a detailed breakdown of units consumed per day. This way, you can reduce your time to resolution even while your team is spread thin. -Now, I focused on the DLP agent today, and similarly, our alert triage agent in Insider Risk Management works on your behalf to create a prioritized alert queue of data incidents by risky users in your organization that require your attention, including evaluating the user risk based on historical context, as well as analyzing the user’s activity over weeks or months to help evaluate their risk, whether they’re intentional or not. In many ways, Purview’s new Alert Triage Agents for DLP and IRM, powered by Security Copilot, reduce the time, effort, and expert resources needed to truly understand the context of your alerts. It works alongside you and the whole team to accelerate and simplify your investigations. To learn more, check out aka.ms/PurviewTriageAgents, subscribe to Microsoft Mechanics if you haven’t yet, and thank you for watching.New Microsoft 365 Copilot Tuning | Create fine-tuned models to write like you do
Fine-tuning adds new skills to foundational models, simulating experience in the tasks you teach the model to do. This complements Retrieval Augmented Generation, which in real-time uses search to find related information, then add that to your prompts for context. Fine-tuning helps ensure that responses meet your quality expectations for specific repeatable tasks, without needing to be prompting expert. It’s great for drafting complex legal agreements, writing technical documentation, authoring medical papers, and more — using detailed, often lengthy precedent files along with what you teach the model. Using Copilot Studio, anyone can create and deploy these fine-tuned models to use with agents without data science or coding expertise. There, you can teach models using data labeling, ground them in your organization’s content — while keeping the information in-place and maintaining data security and access policies. The information contained in the task-specific models that you create stay private to your team and organization. Task-specific models and related information are only accessible to the people and departments you specify — and information is not merged into shared large language models or used for model training. Jeremy Chapman, Director on the Microsoft 365 product team, shows how this simple, zero-code approach helps the agents you build write and reason like your experts — delivering high-quality, detailed responses. Keep information permissions as-is. Use your organization’s knowledge and sharing controls. See how Copilot Tuning works. Guide Copilot with labeled examples. Copilot learns to reason and write like you are your expert team. Check it out. Build Copilot agents powered by your fine-tuned models. Automate work with your tone, structure, and standards. Take a look at Copilot Chat. QUICK LINKS: 00:00 — Fine-tune Copilot 01:21 — Tailor Copilot for specialized tasks 05:12 — How it works 05:57 — Create a task-specific model 07:43 — Data labeling 08:59 — Build agents that use your fine-tuned model 11:42 — Wrap up Link References Check out https://aka.ms/FineTuningCopilot 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. Subscribe to our YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/MicrosoftMechanicsSeries Talk with other IT Pros, join us on the Microsoft Tech Community: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-mechanics-blog/bg-p/MicrosoftMechanicsBlog Watch or listen from anywhere, subscribe to our podcast: https://microsoftmechanics.libsyn.com/podcast Keep getting this insider knowledge, join us on social: Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MSFTMechanics Share knowledge on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/microsoft-mechanics/ Enjoy us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/msftmechanics/ Loosen up with us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@msftmechanics Video Transcript: -You can now teach or fine-tune your Microsoft 365 Copilot experience by creating your own task-specific fine-tune models that channel your expertise and experience to carry out specialized jobs and tasks accurately and on your behalf. In fact, from Copilot Studio, anyone can use this zero-code approach to teaching Copilot’s underlying model the skills from your organization to produce more usable, high-quality responses that can be as detailed as they need to be, even hundreds of pages long to get the job done. And the model remains exclusive to your organization and only the people and departments you specify. -If you compare this to the traditional way of doing this until now, this level of customization would require data science, machine learning, and coding skills. So this process is a lot simpler. And unlike existing approaches where, as a data scientist, you may be copying data into locations that may not be aware of your protections and access controls, this is enterprise-grade by design. You just focus on the outcome that you want to achieve. And because your data stays in place, your existing data access and protection policies are respected by default. Let me show you the power of this in action by comparing the results of an agent that’s calling a fine-tuned, task-specific model of Copilot versus one that’s just calling the original underlying Copilot model. So both agents are configured to author loan agreement documents. On the left is our agent using the task-specific model, on the right is our SharePoint-based agent using a general model. -Now, both agents are focused on the same exact underlying knowledge. It’s all in a SharePoint location, as you can see here with this precedent file set. And both user prompts are identical with example reference files and the client term sheets containing new information. In fact, this is a precedent file that I’ll use. It’s a long and detailed document with 14 pages and more than 5,000 words. The term sheet is quite a bit shorter as you can see here, but it’s still long and detailed with information about the loan amounts, all the details, and if I scroll all the way down to the bottom, you’ll see signatory information for both parties. -So let’s go back to our side-by-side view and run them. So, I’ll start with the general model agent on the right. And it starts to generate its response. And I’ll let this one respond for a moment until it completes. There we go. And now I’ll move over to the agent on the left. It immediately informs me that it’ll receive an email once it’s finished. Now, this is going to be a longer-form document, so we’ll fast forward in time to see each completed response. -So, starting with the general model, I’ve copied it into a Word document, and the output is solid. You’ll see that the two parties are correct, the loan structure, all the amounts are also correct from the term sheet, but it has a few tells. It’s missing a lot of specificity and nuance that a member of our legal team would typically include in all of the terms. It’s also very summarized and not how our firm would draft an agreement like this. When I scroll down to the bottom, the signatories and addresses are captured correctly and match the term sheet. That said, though, it’s just four pages long and has around 800 words, versus more than 5,000 words in our precedent document. So it kind of follows the 80–20 rule where a good portion of the response could maybe work with some edits, but it’s not reflecting how my firm thinks and how it writes when authoring legal documents like this one. -So let’s go ahead and look at the results of a fine-tuned, task-specific agent. So immediately, you can see this document is verbose. It’s 14 pages long with more than 5,300 words. The word count doesn’t always equate to quality, so let’s look at the document itself. Now, as I scroll down, you’ll see that this agent has been taught our firm-specific patterns and the clauses that we use in existing case files. It is structured and worded things just like the precedent document. It’s reasoning and writing with more precision, like an experienced member of our firm would. And while as with any other AI-generated document, I still need to check it for accuracy, it really captures that extra detail and polish to save us time and effort. So model fine-tuning is a powerful way to tailor state-of-the-art large language models that are used behind Copilot to your specific needs. -And as you saw, it also can significantly improve the handling of specialized tasks. So let me explain how fine-tuning works in this case. Unlike Retrieval Augmented Generation, it doesn’t rely on search and orchestration processes that run external to the large language model. The additional knowledge added as part of the fine-tuning process is a protected container of information that attaches the large language models training set to teach it effectively a new skill. Now, it’s never merged into the LLM or used for future model training, and is temporarily attached to the LLM when it’s needed. Again, the skill and knowledge that it contains is exclusive to you and the people or groups that you’ve shared it with, so it can’t be accessed without the right permissions. -Next, let me show you what it takes to create and fine-tune your own task-specific model. I’m in Microsoft Copilot Studio, which you can reach from your browser by navigating to copilotstudio.microsoft.com. I’m on the task-specific model page and I want to customize a model to generate partner agreements. So I’ll paste in a corresponding name. Then I’ll paste in a description. Then as the task type, I’ll select a customization recipe that reflects what I want it to do. And my options here include expert Q&A, document generation, and document summarization, with more task types coming over time. From there, I can provide additional instructions to tailor the fine-tuning recipe, like how the model should use original files, for example, to inform the structure, formatting, company-specific clauses, and other areas important to your model, like we saw before. -Next, I can define my own knowledge sources. Now, these can use information from SharePoint sites and folders, and soon, you’ll be able to add information external to Microsoft 365 using Microsoft Graph connectors. In this case, I’ll define a SharePoint source. Then browse the sites that I have access to. I’ll choose this folder inside the Agreements library. And from there, I can even drill into specific folders for the precise information that I want to use to teach the model, which I’ll do here with the Agreements folder. -For permissions, this process aligns to the enterprise-grade controls that you already have in your organization backed by your Microsoft Entra account. Now, the next step is to process the data you selected for training or what’s known as data labeling. So here, you’ll be presented with data labeling tasks in small, iterative batches. They’re kind of like questionnaires for you to complete, where the fine-tuning process will generate documents and request assessment of them for clarity, completeness, accuracy, and professionalism. This process requires subject matter expertise to open these documents and rate the quality of the generative output for each. I’m just going to show one question here, but you’d repeat this process for every batch. And once all batches are labeled, I can start model training. Now, this will take some time to process, so I’ll fast forward a little in time. -Now with everything finished, I can publish the model to my Microsoft 365 tenant. And it will be available to anyone we’ve shared it with, like our audit team from before, to build new agents. And the process I just showed is called supervised learning, where the model is trained on label data. And soon, you’ll also have the option to use reinforcement learning to enhance the agent’s reasoning capabilities. Now let me show you how to build an agent from Copilot Chat that can leverage our new task-specific model for partner agreement generation. So I’m going to select Create agent. And for the purpose, I have a new option here to build a task-specific agent. Next, I can choose from the existing task-specific models. So I’m going to choose the one that we just created for new partner agreements. There we go. And with any agent, I just need to give it a name. Now I’ll paste in a description for people on the team to know its purpose and what it can do. -And next, I can specify additional instructions as guidelines to provide more context to the agent, as I’m doing here to ensure the structure aligns with our organizational standards. Because this is a very specific agent to write partner agreements, I’ll just specify one starter prompt with details for referencing a precedent source document to start with and a term sheet to get specific new information from, kind of like we saw before. Now, the preview on the right looks good, and I can create the agent right from here. For sharing, permissions also need to align with whoever my task-specific model was shared with, which, as you’ll remember, again, was our audit team. In this case, for my own validation, I’ll select only you so that I can test it before sharing it out with other auditors on my team. -So let’s go ahead and test it out. So I’m going to use the starter prompt. Then I’ll replace the variable file names here. I’ll use the forward slash reference, starting with the precedent file. Now I’ll look for the term sheet file. There it is. From there I can submit my prompt. This is going to take a moment for the response. You can see the structure with sections based on our task-specific files used with the fine-tuning. It tells me that it’ll send me a Word document and email once it’s finished again. In fact, if I fast forward in time a little, I’ll move over to Outlook. And this is the file the agent sent me with links to the new agreement draft. So I’ll open it using Word in the browser. There’s my agreement. And you’ll see it follows exactly how we wrote the precedent agreement. As I scroll through the document, I can see all the structure and phrasing aligned with how we write these types of agreements. In fact, this Representations and Warranties section is word for word direct from our standard terms that our firm always incorporates. And that’s it. My agent is now backed with my task-specific, fine-tuned knowledge, and it’s ready to go and I’m ready to share it with my team. -So those are just a few examples of how fine-tuning in Microsoft 365 Copilot can give you on-demand expertise, and task-specific models respond more accurately using your specified voice and process so that you and your team can get more done. -To find out more, check out aka.ms/FineTuningCopilot, and keep watching Microsoft Mechanics for the latest tech updates, subscribe to our channel, and thanks for watching.Agent management updates in the Copilot Control System
Control who can find, use, and create agents, define permissions, approve or block agent deployments, and configure billing models including pay-as-you-go or prepaid options. Get detailed visibility into how agents are used, which users and groups are driving consumption, and how much they’re costing you. With Microsoft Purview integration, get visibility into sensitive data exposure, track compliance risks, and audit agent activity to stay secure and aligned with your organization’s data policies. Jeremy Chapman, Director of Microsoft 365, shares how to configure, deploy, monitor, and secure AI agents at scale. Define agent access by group or user. Customize permissions with Microsoft 365 admin controls. See how to use the Copilot Control System. Enable pay-as-you-go agent billing with message-based metering. No upfront commitment. Check out Copilot Chat, included with any Microsoft 365 or Office 365 work account. Gain full visibility and access control over AI agent interactions. Check out how agents are being used with detailed reporting in the Microsoft 365 admin center. QUICK LINKS: 00:00 — Copilot Control System 01:34 — Copilot Chat 02:21 — Manage agent use 03:23 — Agent deployment 04:09 — Visibility into how agents are used 05:10 — Copilot Dashboard 06:06 — DSPM for AI 06:47 — Microsoft Purview agent protections 07:32 — Wrap up Link References Check out https://aka.ms/CopilotAgentControls 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. Subscribe to our YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/MicrosoftMechanicsSeries Talk with other IT Pros, join us on the Microsoft Tech Community: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-mechanics-blog/bg-p/MicrosoftMechanicsBlog Watch or listen from anywhere, subscribe to our podcast: https://microsoftmechanics.libsyn.com/podcast Keep getting this insider knowledge, join us on social: Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MSFTMechanics Share knowledge on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/microsoft-mechanics/ Enjoy us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/msftmechanics/ Loosen up with us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@msftmechanics Video Transcript: -Agents are the evolution of generative AI, and if you’re in IT and looking to support this shift, we’ve built you new options as part of the Copilot Control System, like control over who can discover, use, and author agents, whole visibility into which agents are being used and if there’s risk with how they’re being used, and the ability to view potentially risky agent activities directly and search if sensitive or high-value information is shared with or processed by agents. Microsoft 365 Copilot is the only service of its kind to provide complete enterprise-ready controls across agent management, starting with agent discovery, access management, and user permissions. -From the Microsoft 365 Admin Center, navigating to Copilot takes you to the Copilot Control System Central Hub to configure Copilot settings and view insights into Copilot in how people are using it. As part of these updates to Copilot Control System, we’ve added new options for Overview, Agents & connectors, Prompts, Billing & usage, and Settings. First, from Settings and under Agents, you can configure exactly which groups or users will be able to find and access agents in Copilot Chat, as well as other agent-enabled Copilot apps. Importantly, if any of your managed users have a Microsoft 365 Copilot license and they’re scoped for this control, they can use and create retrieval-based agents using Microsoft Graph knowledge as part of that license. -That said, for the free Copilot Chat that’s included with any Microsoft 365 or Office 365 license, agents can still be used with consumption-based billing, where agent usage is metered with messages as the measure of time and effort taken by the agent to respond to user prompts and ultimately, how costs are calculated. You can now set up pay-as-you-go billing without a prepaid commitment right from the Microsoft 365 Admin Center where you can create and manage billing plans. Now, these billing plans use an Azure subscription and resource group as part of the configuration and billing process. Additionally, the prepaid message pack option as part of Microsoft 365 Copilot Studio license is also available. Now, once you grant the right permissions and you’ve configured what you need for people to start creating, finding, and using agents, at that point, you can now manage agent use right from the Microsoft 365 Admin Center. -Under Copilot controls, Agents & connectors is your primary hub for managing agents used with Microsoft 365 Copilot, including your agent inventory as a unified view of the agents that people build in Copilot Studio themselves, agents published to the Agent Store by your organization, or agents that you’ve approved from third parties. You can now see whether agents are managed, their availability, and in which apps they’re supported, and more. From each, you can also take actions like blocking or publishing the agent. More on that in a second. Or get more details, including users where you can manage access and see who is using each agent, then moving over to requested agents. These are agents that are submitted for approval from IT where you can take action to approve or block them. -For the shared and third-party agents that you manage from the Agent Store, as an administrator, you also have full control over agent deployment, where you can select the agents that you want to deploy, target users or groups who will have access to the agents. Here, for example, I’ll specify the users and groups that I want to include, and for agents that require special permissions to external knowledge via connector or API, you can authorize agent access using strong authentication and ensure that only the users and groups that you added in scope will be able to access that data. And from there, you can confirm and finish the deployment to make the agents available to users that you added in scope. -Next, as agent adoption grows, you have the visibility into how agents are being used. As a Microsoft 365 admin, you’ll find detailed reporting in the Microsoft 365 Admin Center, alongside other Copilot reports. Starting with the message consumption report, it provides you details on the costs associated with agent use in your organization. Here you can see message consumption trends for metered usage of Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat help you understand where and how messages and agents are being consumed. You’ll find top agent and user message consumption details to help you plan and manage resource allocation and make agent deployment decisions. -Then in the Agents report, you can see overall usage trends by license type, and below that, the types of agents people are using, like user and organization-created agents, as well as agents built by Microsoft and partners, along with a list of top agents in use and top users leveraging those agents. And for broader reporting that you can share with other stakeholders in your organization, you can use Copilot Analytics as part of Viva Insights, where you’ll find summaries for the number of agent sessions of enabled agents across your environment, how usage is trending over time, user satisfaction and resolution rates for agents at aggregate levels, and you can even see the top agents used and how many people are engaging with them. In fact, drilling into that report also shows you how each agent is trending month over month, the satisfaction per agent and resolution rate for each. Drilling in Further, you’ll find additional details for session outcomes, if they were abandoned, escalated, or resolved, estimates of agent-assisted hours to gauge ROI, and even a detailed breakdown of the most popular topics people are using agents for. -Next, let’s switch gears to your data security options for AI apps and agents as part of Microsoft Purview. In Data Security Posture Management, or DSPM, for AI, you’ll find details for each agent in use in your organization. Each shows protection status, high-level usage trends and accounts of protection and compliance policies that apply to each. Then drilling into any agent gives you even more detail about potentially risky activities used with that agent, unethical or inappropriate use flagged by communication compliance policy controls that you have in place, and the use of classified and labeled content as part of agent interactions and sessions. And that’s just scratching the surface for agent protections and controls in Microsoft Purview. -In fact, all agent activity is recorded in audit logs to help conduct investigations whenever needed, and these activities also power additional Microsoft Purview solutions like insider risk management, letting your security teams detect risky AI prompts as part of their investigations into risky users, communication compliance to aid investigation into non-compliant use and AI interactions such as a user trying to get information on sensitive information like an acquisition plan, and eDiscovery where interactions across your Copilot’s agents and AI apps can be collected and reviewed, help conduct investigations and respond to litigations. And those were your controls to set up services and deploy agents in Microsoft 365. Also, where you can find usage insights and your data protection controls specific to agents in Microsoft Purview. -To learn more, check out aka.ms/CopilotAgentControls and keep watching Microsoft Mechanics for the latest updates, and thanks so much for watching.Microsoft 365 Copilot Wave 2 Spring updates
Streamline your day with new, user-focused updates to Microsoft 365 Copilot. Jump into work faster with a redesigned layout that puts Chat, Search, and your agents front and center. New Copilot Search lets you yse natural language to find files, emails, and conversations — even if you don’t remember exact keywords — and get instant summaries and previews without switching apps. Create high-impact visuals, documents, and videos in seconds with the new Copilot Create experience, complete with support for brand templates. Tap into powerful agents like Researcher and Analyst to handle deep tasks or build your own with ease. And if you manage Copilot across your organization, you now have better tools to deploy, monitor, and secure AI use — all from a single view. Describe what you want. Don’t know the keywords to find your content in Microsoft 365? You don’t need to. See how the new Copilot Search works. On-demand expertise. Use agents like Researcher or Analyst to do the thinking for you. Start here. View AI agent activities in Microsoft Purview. Find data security policy matches and see if agents are being used with sensitive information or by risky users. Watch here. Watch our video here. QUICK LINKS: 00:00 — Microsoft 365 Copilot new capabilities 00:36 — Microsoft 365 Copilot app 01:49 — Copilot Search 03:09 — Specialized agents 04:06 — Create experience 06:07 — Copilot Notebooks 07:40 — Updates for IT admins 08:16 — Data security with AI apps & agents in Purview 08:51 — Reports 09:20 — Wrap up Link References Check out https://aka.ms/CopilotWave2Spring 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. Subscribe to our YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/MicrosoftMechanicsSeries Talk with other IT Pros, join us on the Microsoft Tech Community: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-mechanics-blog/bg-p/MicrosoftMechanicsBlog Watch or listen from anywhere, subscribe to our podcast: https://microsoftmechanics.libsyn.com/podcast Keep getting this insider knowledge, join us on social: Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MSFTMechanics Share knowledge on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/microsoft-mechanics/ Enjoy us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/msftmechanics/ Loosen up with us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@msftmechanics Video Transcript: -So, Microsoft 365 Copilot keeps getting better, and today I’ll show you how the Copilot experience is evolving to make everything easier with new AI-powered capabilities to help you get even more done, and if you’re an IT, I’ll show you new options for agent management, including updates in the Microsoft 365 Admin Center, new data security views and controls, and Microsoft Purview’s Data Security Posture Management for AI, as well as improved reporting and visibility into Copilot analytics from Viva Insights. So let’s start with updates to the Microsoft 365 Copilot app experience, which has evolved to make every interaction easier and more intuitive. Chat is the core of the experience and where you’ll find the app by default and there’s a new navigation moving what’s important to the left side of your screen where you’ll find links to Search, Chat, your Agents, new Notebooks, and Create experiences that I’ll show you in a moment. -Now moving to the center of the app, you’ll notice that there’s a more streamlined view with the prompt box taking center stage. Under that, you’ll find personalized suggestions for what to do next, including upcoming meetings. And as the author prompts, you can quickly pull up an agent right from here to bring in content sources you want like your files, interactions with people, your meetings, emails and more to generate what you want. And even without referencing your work directly, Copilot is connected to it and can find the matching information that you have access to. That’s because behind the scenes, Microsoft 365 Copilot uses advanced AI native vector-based search to find the most relevant content. And now outside of Copilot Chat, you can use this directly from the new Copilot Search experience. It brings together AI search and your work information across Microsoft Graph. -From here, you can easily get to your recommendations and quick access to what you’ve been working on. Then moving to the search bar, you’ll see that search now goes way beyond keyword search that you’re used to compared to Copilot Chat. This is optimized to find specific content items. Now, where you can ask in simple terms, for example, based on what you remember, to quickly find your files, your emails, chats, and meetings for Microsoft 365, and even information and other graph connected line of business systems like you’re seeing here with Jira. Now it knows like-concepts, synonyms, and contextual information around a topic, so you don’t need to know keywords or be precise with search terms. In fact, many of these results don’t contain words from the search, but they’re highly relevant. And based on the top items and the results, Copilot can summarize what search finds in line to save you time. And without having to open its sighted items in separate apps, Copilot will also help summarize and preview those files right from the Copilot app. -Next, we’ve made it easier to access specialized agents, which give you on-demand help to complete tasks that would normally require an expert. Now these include both Analyst to find insights in your data as well as Researcher for written reports, both first-of-their-kind reasoning agents for work. In fact, we dedicated an entire show on reasoning agents that you can check out at aka.ms/reasoningmechanics. And here in the navigation you’ll also find your pinned and recently used agents on top. And clicking into all agents takes you to the new agent store where you can find more agents that are built by Microsoft, also the broader ecosystem, and your company’s own custom agents. And of course, you can also create your own agents right from here by describing what you want your agent to do or configuring it directly with your instructions and knowledge sources. -Then beyond agents and AI-generated content from Copilot Chat, the new create experience lets everyone tap into powerful and personalized design skills where you can create images like the samples you’re seeing on the screen here, powered by the GPT 4o Model for image generation. And you can design a poster or flyer like these ones and they’re also great for cover pages to your reports. And speaking of that, from Create, you can write a stylized draft document using templates and right from here, you can also upload and edit your own images to make them stand out and select parts of images to remove distractions like this tree. Importantly, what sets the Create experience really apart is that you can use brand templates and even bring in your company’s brand kit, and these include your approved company logos, fonts, and colors. In fact, let me show you how this works by creating a new image. -So I’ll start by describing what I’m looking for. I’ll choose a picture of this new shoe from my local device to work from, and now I’ll choose my style that matches what I want to create. Here’s where my company brand comes in. I can choose the brand kit I want with the right color palette and icon. Now this will take a moment to generate and now I have an image that fits my brand and I can add to this same image. I’d like to see a little ground cover in the image. I’d like to ask for some moss and some rocks. Then I’ll give it a second to render a new image and it gets even better with new direct editing options like background removal, object transform, and enhancements. I’m going to choose the erase option, then select this rock and this plant on the right and hit erase. That’s better. Now, I just need to add a text element and I’ll paste in the shoe name and now it’s ready to go and I can download the image right from here. -And for your bigger projects and tasks, Copilot Notebooks is then another new capability. These help you bring together all of your relevant content for your task at hand, including Copilot Chats. And I’ll open this one for Copilot Craft and you’ll see that I can chat with Copilot about everything in here, and it’s filled with reference content and related chat history to keep interactions in scope to what’s here and even create an audio overview of this notebook. Now the last major update that I’ll show from the Microsoft 365 Copilot app experience is with personalization and memory. Where from Copilot settings, you can specify custom instructions and enable Copilot memory. -First, custom instructions let you add details about your interests, your preferences, the tone of what you expect from Copilot responses. Think of this information as something that will get appended to your initial prompts in future Copilot sessions to improve its output. Then, moving back to personalization settings, Copilot memory works in the same way to recall a handful of notable memorable items from previous conversations in real time. Again, this information sits outside of the large language model and is retrieved for future chat sessions. And you have full visibility and control over what is maintained in Copilot memory and can delete what you don’t want to personalize its responses. -Next, I’ll move on to updates for IT admins. We’re adding more controls to the Copilot Control System so that you have the tools that you need to manage, govern, and measure Copilot and now also agents across your organization. You can now manage the agents and agent deployment right from Microsoft 365’s admin center. Here you’ll see a list of agents in use and the ones you’ve blocked. Also, apps where the agents are supported and usage details. You can also deploy agents from here as well, scoping the right users and groups. -Next, we’re also adding more insights and controls for data security with AI apps and agents and Microsoft Purview. The new AI apps and agents page in Data Security Posture Management for AI gives you a single dashboard to view and create policies for your AI apps and agents, where you’ll find coverage for data protection and compliance policies that you already have in place, and clicking into any of these items, lets you discover more insights, including potentially risky interactions, inappropriate use, as well as sensitive information being shared. -And finally, for reports that you can share beyond your administrator and data security teams, using Copilot Analytics and Viva Insights, you can measure the usage and business impact of your agents. And direct from Viva Insights, the new Copilot Studio agents report can be shared with your team, and it provides a comprehensive view of agent use, session outcomes, and you can see how assisted actions are contributing to overall ROI. -So Microsoft 365 Copilot continues to evolve to help you get more done, along with enterprise grade IT controls to help keep your data protected. Now, to find out more, check out aka.ms/CopilotWave2Spring and keep checking back to Microsoft Mechanics for the latest updates. Thanks so much for watching.
