Discover the power of Copilot prompts | New eBook
Are you ready to revolutionize the way you work with Microsoft 365? I’m excited to share a new eBook I’ve been working on that is now available as a free download: “Discover the power of Copilot prompts.” This is a comprehensive guide filled with insights from numerous experts about their practical prompts to elevate productivity and streamline their workflows within the Microsoft 365 ecosystem.Copilot in Action: Building Next-Gen Bots with Microsoft Copilot Studio
At Microsoft Ignite we announced Microsoft Copilot Studio, a low-code comprehensive conversational AI solution that unlocks new Copilot capabilities. Join us at Microsoft Ignite to learn about this new tool and how to use it to build intelligent bots.Create and share Copilot agents in SharePoint in a few clicks
Go behind the scenes to learn more about Copilot agents in SharePoint, powered by your content. What could be better? Copilot agents are built in Copilot Studio via our new, built-in lightweight agent builder experience in SharePoint. CJ and Karuana discuss the broader vision of Copilot agents and show you how to put this new capability to work within your SharePoint sites in Microsoft 365 - including IT management details and licensing insights. Check out the new Microsoft 365 Copilot agents in SharePoint adoption hub: https://aka.ms/SharePoint/agents. In addition, review the recent, related blog, "Microsoft 365 Copilot Wave 2: AI Innovations in SharePoint and OneDrive" by Adam Harmetz and Jason Moore. And review this short explainer video, "Copilot agents in SharePoint" taken from the "Microsoft 365 Copilot: Wave 2" event with Satya Nadella and Jared Spataro event broadcast - watch now:
The New Era of Copilot: From Assistant to AI Agent Platform
Microsoft 365 Copilot is shifting from a simple AI assistant into a full agent platform that can understand context, take actions, and be governed at scale. This new direction changes how enterprises design, deploy, and monitor AI in daily work. The headline: Copilot is no longer just “answering prompts”; it is orchestrating tasks across email, documents, meetings, and business systems, with controls and analytics that IT and AI leaders have been asking for. 1. GPT‑5 Chat Inside Copilot Agents One of the most important updates is the move to GPT‑5 Chat for agents created with Copilot’s Agent Builder and Copilot Studio. Key implications: Higher-quality answers: Better reasoning, fewer hallucinations, and more fluent responses in complex business scenarios. More reliable instructions: Agents follow multi-step instructions more consistently, which is critical for workflows like HR onboarding or IT helpdesk. No extra configuration: Where available, tenants automatically benefit from the new model when their agents respond to prompts. For innovators, this means your existing Copilot agents can suddenly handle richer conversations and more nuanced tasks without you rewriting them. 2. Microsoft Agent 365: A Control Plane for AI Agents Another big change is the introduction of Microsoft Agent 365, a unified control plane for enterprise AI agents. What this brings: Centralized governance: One place to manage policies, access, and behaviours for all your agents across the organization. Monitoring and analytics: Visibility into which agents are used, how they perform, and where to improve. Real actions with connectors: Agents can schedule meetings, generate documents, send emails, and update CRM records with full compliance and audit trails. This is crucial if your organization wants to go from “a few pilots” to hundreds of agents safely and consistently. 3. Stronger Governance: Agent ID, Security, and Compliance To support this growth, Microsoft has added new governance and security capabilities. Highlights include: Microsoft Entra Agent ID: A dedicated identity layer for agents so IT can see which agent did what, when, and under which policy. Real-time protection: Integration with security tools for threat detection and protection as agents access resources and perform actions. Enhanced content governance: Features that help prevent oversharing and protect sensitive data in SharePoint and other repositories. For AI and Copilot leaders, this makes it easier to say “yes” to more AI use cases without sacrificing risk management. 4. Smarter Copilot Chat and Conversation History On the user side, Copilot Chat is becoming more context-aware and persistent. Recent improvements include: Better models in Copilot Chat: Higher quality and faster performance for everyday chat across Microsoft 365. Conversation history: Copilot can now use your past chats to provide better follow-up answers and let you pick up where you left off. Scoped content sources: Users can explicitly limit Copilot responses to selected sources (like a specific site or set of files), improving precision and transparency. This makes Copilot feel less like “a new chat every time” and more like an ongoing AI partner that remembers context responsibly. 5. New Agent Experiences in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams Across core apps, Copilot is gaining new “agent-like” behaviours that go beyond simple prompts. Examples: Agent Mode in Word and Excel: Copilot can act like a mini-assistant inside your document or workbook, guided by higher-level goals such as “clean this dataset and prepare a summary” or “improve this proposal for executives.” Meeting planning and summaries in Outlook and Teams: Copilot can help plan meetings, summarize email threads, and recap live or recorded meetings with clearer action items. PowerPoint “Explain” and speaker support: New features help explain complex slides, add speaker notes, and translate content. For innovators, these capabilities are building blocks for domain-specific solutions—like sales decks that update themselves or financial models that explain their own assumptions. 6. What This Means for Generative AI and Copilot Innovators For your Generative AI and Copilot Innovators community, this new wave of Copilot updates opens several strategic opportunities. You can: Design agent-first solutions: Move from “prompt libraries” to full AI agents that can take actions, respect policies, and be measured. Partner deeply with IT: Use new governance and identity controls to align AI innovation with security and compliance. Build reusable patterns: Create templates for HR agents, sales agents, support agents, and analytics agents that others in your org can reuse and adapt. Educate on responsible scaling: Use these updates as a framework for training colleagues on safe, effective deployment of AI at scale. A practical scenario: imagine a “Project Delivery Agent” that reads project documents, updates tasks, drafts status reports, checks risk registers, and prepares meeting agendas—governed centrally, monitored via dashboards, and powered by GPT‑5 Chat. 7. How to Start Exploring These Updates To make the most of these new capabilities: Identify one or two high-value processes (like employee onboarding or customer proposal creation) and prototype an agent around them. Work with IT to configure governance, identities, and data access correctly from day one. Capture lessons learned—prompt patterns, guardrails, and adoption tips—and share them with your community so others can accelerate. These updates transform Copilot from “a powerful assistant” into a foundation for building a whole ecosystem of governed, action-taking AI agents inside your organization.New Surface Laptop 5G for Business, Copilot+ PC
Stay securely connected with rearchitected 5G design — including six smart-switching antennas, eSIM and Wi-Fi 7 — without relying on hotspots. As the first Surface Laptop to feature 5G, it enables enterprise-ready AI features for deeper insights, productivity boosts, and powerful local inferencing wherever work happens. Stay connected anywhere. The first Surface laptop with built-in 5G — supporting NanoSIM, eSIM, smart signal switching, and international roaming. See it here. High-performance AI experiences. Surface Laptop 5G is powered by Intel Core Ultra processors with AI Boost. Watch here. No IT setup required. Surface Laptop 5G can arrive business-ready with zero-touch deployment and managed 5G policies. Check it out. QUICK LINKS: 00:00 — Surface Laptop 5G for Business 00:28 — Built-in 5G 01:30 — Hardware 02:06 — Intel® Core™ Ultra 02:41 — Built-in open-source AI models 03:20 — Management controls for IT 03:52 — Enterprise-Grade Security 04:16 — Wrap up Link References Check out https://surface.com/business 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: -Surface Laptop 5G for Business with Intel Core Ultra Series 2 processors brings together intelligent connectivity, ultra-fast performance, and premium design. It’s built for AI as a Copilot+ PC to deliver new, connected, on-device, and hybrid experiences, all while keeping your business data protected with enterprise-grade security. -Now, not all 5G laptops are created equal. Surface Laptop 5G supports both physical Nano and eSIM for flexibility to connect from anywhere. In fact, we’ve rearchitected Surface Laptop to optimize connectivity, while still maintaining the sleek and lightweight design. It’s been engineered from the ground up for optimal signal strength with a strategically-placed six-antenna array, along with a newly developed custom composite palm rest. This material and antenna placement helps ensure superior signal transparency so it’s not blocked by your desk or your legs. The signal dynamically switches between antennas based on how you interact with the device to ensure the strongest possible connection. -For example, whether you’re typing or using the touch pad, the 5G signal is routed to the least obstructed antennas. And as you move between spaces or locations during your day, you don’t need to worry about staying connected. There’s no need to connect to hotspots or untrusted networks because it’s designed to seamlessly transition between 5G and known Wi-Fi networks, and includes support for Wi-Fi 7. -Now, continuing our hardware tour, on the right side, you’ll see a Surface Connect port. This is positioned next to the removable NanoSIM tray. Then on the left side of the device, there are two USB-C Thunderbolt ports, a USB-A and a 3.5mm headphone port. Moving up the device, Surface Laptop 5G comes with a signature 3:2 aspect ratio, 13.8" PixelSense touch display. The screen is anti-reflective, and not only does it come with Dolby Vision IQ support, but it has an impressive dynamic refresh rate of up to 120Hz. -Next, let’s move on to what powers the Surface Laptop 5G for Business. This is the first Surface Copilot+ PC to support Intel with 5G and it comes with a choice of Intel Core Ultra 5 and 7 processors. It supports up to 32GB of memory on package and has integrated Intel Arc Graphics. The Intel AI Boost Neural Processing Unit, or NPU, is capable of running up to 48 TOPS without compromising battery life. And the device comes with up to one terabyte of M.2 Gen 4 SSD storage. All of this makes it optimized to run connected Copilot experiences, like powerful reasoning agents capable of generating deep insights with your work data, as well as the on-device foundational models from Windows AI Foundry. This includes 40 plus local and ready-to-use open source models like Phi Silica for text generation, built-in OCR for text recognition in images, super resolution to upscale images and video, image segmentation for background removal, and more. Your productivity experiences and factor-enhanced with AI, including improved Windows search, which combines keyword and vector-based search for more relevant results. -Next, let’s look at the enterprise-grade management controls for IT. Here, Microsoft Intune can be used to provision 5G connectivity with your network policies from the first time Surface Laptop connects to the internet, which helps ensure that only known and trusted networks can be connected to. Together with Windows Autopilot deployment, Surface Laptop 5G can be shipped directly to your workforce with your defined security policies and apps so that they’re business-ready before connecting to your managed resources. Surface Laptop 5G meets the Secured-core PC standard with a Microsoft Pluton security processor. Additionally, authentication with Windows Hello facial recognition benefits from enhanced sign-in security using virtualization. This is all part of Microsoft’s end-to-end, chip-to-cloud security that helps keep your information, devices, and users safe wherever they work from. -So that was a quick tour of how the new Surface Laptop 5G for Business was thoughtfully engineered to bring together intelligent connectivity, ultra-fast performance, and premium design. Check out surface.com/business for availability and more information. Thanks for watching.This National Small Business Week, make sure everyone in your company understands AI
Whether you are running a startup or an already thriving small business, harnessing AI-driven solutions will help you discover new opportunities, streamline operations, and make data-driven decisions with confidence. Understanding and exploring the possibilities of AI is essential for small businesses and key to unlocking growth, driving innovation, and maintaining a competitive edge. The first step is understanding the potential of AI for your business. Microsoft has developed several online resources to help. In recognition of National Small Business Week, we have curated a list of those resources that may be helpful for small business professionals who want to get started with AI. Establish an AI foundation Start your AI journey by visiting the Microsoft WorkLab and examining a rich collection of content that addresses the real-world scenarios of how AI is impacting work today. New articles are regularly added that will help you understand not just AI’s high-level capabilities, but also the nuances of AI and how to directly apply AI to your day-to-day work. Key resources include: Up-to-date market research on all the ways that AI is impacting work, like our latest, the AI Data Drop. This study provides insights into how employees feel about AI and how long it takes most employees to build effective AI habits. Regular podcasts with business leaders, like our recent discussion with Bryan Hancock, McKinsey’s Global Talent Leader, on the different ways that managers can unlock AI’s potential for their teams. In-depth guides that detail how AI can help the different parts of your business, such as How Sellers Can Use AI to Better Engage with Customers and How Marketers Can Use AI to Unlock Breakthrough Creativity. Build your AI skills When you're ready to build a deeper AI skill, you explore the Microsoft AI Learning Hub. You’ll find a variety of tools to help you go from understanding AI to preparing for it. You can learn the mechanics of using the technology and even how to build it into your own apps and services. Start with the learning journey for Business Users, which is foundational for getting an underlying understanding of AI, and then move into a more detailed guidance on how to use and implement its capabilities. If you’re an IT professional, look at the learning journey for IT Professionals, which provides a thorough grounding on the particulars of AI adoption, deployment, and small business concerns, like data classification and regulatory considerations. To define your own path, get skilling recommendations based on your job responsibilities and objectives. No matter where you want to go, you can use the AI learning assessment to define a customized learning journey to get you there. Put AI to work To put your AI skills into practice or if you’re already using Copilot for Microsoft 365, visit the Microsoft Copilot Lab. This site provides easy, visual introductions into what Copilot is and how it helps you do more no matter which Microsoft 365 app you are using. These tools are designed for professionals that need a fast, tactical grounding so they can benefit from AI every day. One example is the prompt writing guide, which explains how to write effective prompts so Copilot can deliver exactly what you need. This toolkit teaches the art and science of prompting. It walks through a series of easy initial prompting exercises like writing an AI-powered email or creating an image, so you’ll understand how to edit a prompt to tailored it to your scenario. Microsoft Learn has a series of freely available, advanced courses to help you gain a deeper understanding of Copilot, how it works with the apps in Microsoft 365 and best practices for everyday use. Get started National Small Business Week may be an annual event, but you can build your AI skills year-round. Join the Microsoft SMB Tech Community to network with other professionals using Copilot. You can come here anytime to ask questions, get help, keep up with the latest AI news specific to small and medium-sized businesses and find out about upcoming online or local events.Unlock the Power of Microsoft Copilot Studio: Build Your Personalized AI Copilot
Unlock the power of AI by creating your own Copilot! Join Raiyan Bin Sarwar, a third-year CSE student at BUP, as he guides you through a step-by-step process to build, customize, and optimize your very own AI assistant. Whether for personal projects or professional tasks, learn how to harness the potential of Microsoft Copilot Studio and make your workflows smarter and more efficient
