Create agents fast with Agent Builder in Copilot
Describe what you want in one prompt, and Copilot Agent Builder generates the name, instructions, skills, and knowledge setup for you — grounded only in the SharePoint sites, files, and Copilot Connectors you choose. Teach your agent a Skill to handle recurring work, like drafting weekly status emails from your own template, then test it in Preview before you publish. Share it with people or groups and set exact permissions, track real usage in the new Monitor tab, and push your best agents into your org’s Agent Store catalog. Ned Friend, Group Product Manager for Copilot Agent Builder shares how to turn an agent into a tool your whole team can run, measure, and trust. One prompt. A fully configured agent. Agent Builder in Copilot auto-generates the name, instructions, skills, and knowledge grounding from your description. See how it works. No code. Just a prompt and a template. Agent Builder in Copilot turns that into a Skill your agent runs to generate standardized outputs, like status emails or reports, on demand. Check it out. Pin your agent to trusted sources only. Add SharePoint files, Outlook mail, Teams meetings, or connect business systems, so that it only uses information you give it, nothing else. See how it works. 👥 Who it’s for: Team leads and managers who want trusted, repeatable answers for their team, plus IT admins and Microsoft 365 power users building specialist Copilot agents without code. ⏱️ Chapters: 0:00 Build specialist agents inside Copilot 0:34 Ground agents in trusted org knowledge 1:31 Create a new hire onboarding agent 2:15 Natural-language agent creation 2:41 Ground answers in SharePoint knowledge 4:13 Skills for repeatable tasks 4:53 Precise knowledge grounding 6:37 Preview and test before publishing 7:03 Share your agent with set permissions 7:39 See the new hire’s agent view 8:22 Usage monitoring 8:41 Publish agents to your org catalog Copilot Agent Builder lets you create a specialist agent by describing what you want it to do in plain language. Agent Builder interprets that prompt and automatically generates the agent’s name, description, instructions, skills, knowledge sources, and suggested prompts, which you can review and edit directly. Ground every answer in the exact knowledge you choose: SharePoint and OneDrive files, Outlook email and calendar, Microsoft Teams chats and meetings, or external business systems connected through Copilot Connectors. Turn on web search only when you want the agent to research beyond your organization, like competitor or customer research. Add Skills to teach the agent repeatable, multi-step work — in this video, a weekly status update email built from a real template, matching its tone, sections, and formatting automatically. Preview and test the agent before publishing, then share it with people or groups and set whether they can use it or edit it. Once your agent is live, the Monitor tab tracks total sessions, daily active users, average messages per session, average duration, and which knowledge sources get used most. For agents with strong adoption, publish them to the Built by your org section of the Agent Store for wider use across your organization. Try Copilot Agent Builder for yourself — it’s included with Copilot. Subscribe to Microsoft Mechanics for more videos like this. Unfamiliar with Microsoft Mechanics? Microsoft’s Official Video Series for IT — Subscribe https://www.youtube.com/c/MicrosoftMechanicsSeries — Microsoft Tech Community: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-mechanics-blog/bg-p/MicrosoftMechanicsBlog — Podcast: https://microsoftmechanics.libsyn.com/podcast Join us on social: — https://twitter.com/MSFTMechanics — https://www.linkedin.com/company/microsoft-mechanics/ — https://www.instagram.com/msftmechanics/ — https://www.tiktok.com/@msftmechanics Video Transcript: -You’re probably used to working with Copilot across Microsoft 365 for everyday tasks, but did you know that you can create your own specialist agents in minutes to provide informed, authoritative answers and produce consistent, standardized content for specific business scenarios? Think about the work you do every day. Maybe it’s reviewing content for compliance, creating customer or internal-focused communications, or answering work-related policy questions. While Copilot can help with these tasks using broadly available information, Agent Builder, on the other hand, which is included in Copilot, lets you build and use agents with a specific purpose, grounded in trusted organizational knowledge. Think of it as the difference between hiring a general contractor to remodel your home and bringing in a licensed electrician to design an electrical plan to rewire the house. -Both skill sets are valuable, but the specialist brings focused expertise, follows established standards, and is trusted for a specific type of work. Similarly, a specialist agent can be created to serve a specific purpose and configured to provide custom expert answers by only using the information sources you choose to ground them with. Specialist agents can generate standardized deliverables based on specific skills that follow your organizational guidelines, and creating one is as simple as describing what you want it to do and letting Agent Builder build it for you. -So let’s make this real. As a manager, instead of repeatedly walking new hires through team processes, resources, and responsibilities, I can create a new hire onboarding agent that provides trusted answers and consistent deliverables. It helps new employees get productive faster and deliver work aligned with our organization’s guidelines from day one. Here I’m in Copilot. I have a growing team with lots of new members, and agents are the best way to make team knowledge accessible. Before you build anything, it’s a good idea to check out the Agent Store for the agents you can already choose from, including ones shared with you by people on your team. And if nothing fits the bill, you can easily create your own custom agents from scratch. -So let’s start building. I’ll scroll back up and select create agent, and I’m taken to the Agent Builder experience, where I just need to describe what I want our agent to do. I’ll type, “You are a new staff onboarding agent to help answer questions about business processes, how to perform common tasks, and provide answers to product or service questions. Answer using information in these locations and files.” I want to give the agent access to the specific knowledge to inform its responses. I can either hit the plus sign or use a forward slash to reference content for this agent to use as it answers questions. So I’ll use the forward slash and use this SharePoint site where we already store official documents and files. -Now I’ll use the plus sign to add more content, such as files, meetings, chats, and more. This time I’ll choose a specific process document. Now the site and file will be the only information used for the agent’s responses. And when I hit send, this will take a moment to run, but what’s impressive is Agent Builder interprets my intent and it automatically generates an agent name, description, and detailed instructions for how the agent should behave. It also added skills, knowledge, and suggested prompts that I’ll cover in a minute. I can review everything and make edits directly here if I want to. -So right now, the agent can answer questions in chat with defined and approved expert knowledge. I want to go further. I want our agent to be able to author standardized weekly status emails. Skills are perfect for that, or any time that I want an agent to complete a repeatable task consistently following defined steps. I just need to describe the skill using natural language. Under its instructions, you can see skills. Based on our initial prompt, it’s generated a new staff onboarding skill automatically. I can also create or add my own skills to extend what the agent can do. -Here, I’ll write another prompt to create a weekly status update email skill based on generated responses and use this email as a template. And again, I’ll add a forward slash with the name of the file. This will teach the agent how to author the update using the right tone, altitude, sections, and formatting. And behind the scenes, it’s doing all the coding and configurations for me. And when it’s done, it will appear under the Skills section here. -As another option, if you’re already using skills from other places, you can also upload those files here. So my initial prompt updated the knowledge and now I’ll configure that further to make my agent even more of a specialist. Knowledge is the heart of an agent. Here you can see the sources that I specified in my prompt earlier. The quality of the agent depends on the quality of the knowledge you provide. If I wanted to, I could add additional sources, such as cloud files from SharePoint or OneDrive, the user’s Outlook email and calendar, as well as Microsoft Teams chats, channels, and recorded meetings. -I also have the option to connect to specific business systems using Copilot connectors. These could be enterprise intranet sites, SaaS apps like ticketing systems that we’re connected to, and more. This way, the agent will be able to find relevant information exactly where it’s stored. Optionally, I can select web search for when it makes sense for the agent to look up information on the internet, for example, things like competitor and customer research. In this case, I won’t do that because I only want the agent to use internal knowledge. -Additionally, I could manually add attachments from my local device if they are not already in the cloud. So I did all of that manually, but I could also ask the chat experience on the left to do more or click suggest improvements to trigger that, and the same applies to instructions. This last section contains suggested prompts that were generated automatically based on my initial prompt. These help new users learn how to use the agent and give existing users a shortcut to repeat the most common prompts for the agent. These are also editable. I want my users to build on these first three suggestions as well as use their own questions, so I’ll delete the rest. -At this point, in just a few minutes, I’ve defined and scoped my agent experience using the knowledge available to my team, and I can test it out before finalizing or sharing it. Clicking into the preview tab shows me what the agent will look like once it’s published. I’ll test it using a prompt. “What do I need to do to schedule my upcoming vacation time?” And it responds with the standard process. This preview shows how it will appear for people using the agent. If you don’t like how it responds or how it looks, like the icon, description, or the suggested prompts, you can just go back to the configure tab and make changes. -Now that our agent is tested and ready, I can create it and share it with my team. To do that, I just need to hit create. And in the background, that is going to register it as a private agent for my own personal use when I’m using Copilot Chat. Then, to share this agent with others in my organization, I can select share, and it’s just like sharing a file. I just need to add people or group names and I can control whether the people I share with can simply use the agent or also make edits to the agent. -From there, I just need to confirm and our agent is shared over email and in the Agent Store. With the agent shared, let me show you what a new hire would see. Here I’m signed in as that new hire, Katri, where I got an email with a link to the agent we just shared, so I’ll open it. I can see the suggested prompts that we added previously. In this case, I’ll ask it, “Summarize my previous week using my meetings and emails to help build a status report.” It reasons over the knowledge sources and reference email we added earlier and generates a standardized response with accomplishments, meetings attended, risks, and issues under review, as well as next steps and more. Once my agent has been in production for a while, I can see how much people are using it to know that it’s working as expected. -The new monitor tab in Agent Builder gives you visibility into how your agents are being used, including total sessions, daily active users, average messages per session, and average duration. And you can see how people are engaging over time and the knowledge sources used in conversations. For agents that get significant usage, you might want to publish it into the built by your org section of the Agent Store. That’s as easy as opening the agent menu and clicking submit to your org catalog. Here you can specify additional information like the terms of use and customize your developer name to be something more official. With that, it will go to my admin to approve and then get discovered and used by my organization for even more impact. -With Agent Builder in Copilot, it’s easy to create your own specialist agents in minutes that provide informed, authoritative answers and produce consistent, standardized content for specific business scenarios. It’s included with Copilot, so try it for yourself today, and subscribe to Microsoft Mechanics if you haven’t already. Thank you for watching.Oversharing Control at Enterprise Scale | Updates for Microsoft 365 Copilot in Microsoft Purview
Minimize risks that come with oversharing and potential data loss. Use Microsoft Purview and its new Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) for AI insights, along with new Data Loss Prevention policies for Microsoft 365 Copilot, and SharePoint Advanced Management, which is now included with Microsoft 365 Copilot. Automate site access reviews at scale and add controls to restrict access to sites if they contain highly sensitive information. Erica Toelle, Microsoft Purview Senior PM, shows how to control data visibility, automate site access reviews, and fine-tune permissions with Pilot, Deploy, Optimize phases. Protect your data from unwanted exposure. Find and secure high-risk SharePoint sites with Microsoft Purview’s oversharing report. Start here. Secure Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption at scale. Check out the Pilot-Deploy-Optimize approach, to align AI use with your organization’s data governance. Watch here. Boost security, compliance, and governance. Scoped DLP policies enable Microsoft 365 Copilot to respect data labels. Take a look. Watch our video here. QUICK LINKS: 00:00 — Minimize risk of oversharing 01:24 — Oversharing scenarios 04:03 — How oversharing can occur 05:38 — Restrict discovery & limit access 06:36 — Scope sites 07:15 — Pilot phase 08:16 — Deploy phase 09:17 — Site access reviews 10:00 — Optimize phase 10:54 — Wrap up Link References Check out https://aka.ms/DeployM365Copilot Watch our show on the basics of oversharing at https://aka.ms/SMBoversharing 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: -Are you looking to deploy Microsoft 365 Copilot at scale, but concerned that your information is overshared? Ultimately, you want to ensure that your users and teams can only get to the data required to do their jobs and nothing more. For example, while using Microsoft 365 Copilot and interacting with work data, you don’t want information surfaced that users should not have permissions to view. So, where do you even start to solve for this? You might have hundreds or thousands of SharePoint sites to assess and right-size information access. Additionally, knowing where your sensitive or high value information resides and making sure that the policies you set to protect information continuously and avoid returning to an oversharing state, can come with challenges. -The good news is there are a number of updated tools and resources available to help you get a handle on all this. In the next few minutes, I’ll unpack the approach you can take to help you minimize the risks that come with oversharing and potential data loss using Microsoft Purview and its new Data Security Posture Management for AI insights, along with new Data Loss Prevention policies for Microsoft 365 Copilot and more. And SharePoint Advance Management, which is now included with Microsoft 365 Copilot. This helps you automate site access reviews at scale and adds controls to restrict access to sites even if they contain highly sensitive information. First, let’s look at how information oversharing can inadvertently occur just as it would with everyday search when using Microsoft 365 Copilot. -I’ll explain how it works. When you submit a prompt before presenting that to a large language model, the prompt is interpreted by Copilot and using a process called Retrieval Augmented Generation it then finds and retrieves grounding information that you are allowed to access in places like SharePoint, OneDrive, Microsoft Teams, your email and calendar, and optionally the internet, as well as other connected data sources. The retrieved information is appended to your prompt as additional context. Then that larger prompt is presented to the large language model. With that added grounding information, the response is generated then formatted for the app that you’re using. For this to work well, that information retrieval step relies on accurate search. And what’s important here is as you use Copilot it can only retrieve information that you explicitly have access to and nothing else. This is how search works in Microsoft 365 and SharePoint. The controls you put in place to achieve just enough access will reduce data security risk, whether you intend to use Microsoft 365 Copilot or not. -So, let me show you a few examples you may have experienced where content is overshared. I’ll start in Business Chat. I’m logged in is Adele Vance from the sales team. Her customers are pressuring her for information about new products that haven’t been internally or externally announced. She submits a prompt for 2025 product plans and the response returns a few clearly sensitive documents that she shouldn’t have access to, and the links in the response and in the citations take Adele right to those files. -Now, I’m going to switch perspectives to someone on the product planning team building the confidential plan stored in a private SharePoint site. I’m working on the 2025 product plan on a small team. This is the same doc that Adele just found in Business Chat, and if you look at the top of the document right now, there was one other person who I expect in the document. Then suddenly a few more people appear to have the document open and I don’t know who these people are and they shouldn’t be here. So, this file is definitely overshared. -Now, I’m going to switch back to Adele’s perspective as beyond the product planning doc. The response also describes a new project with the code name Thunderbolt. So, I’ll choose the Copilot recommended prompt to provide more details about Project Thunderbolt, and we can see a couple of recent documents with information that I as Adele should not have access to as a member of the sales team. In fact, if I open the file, I can get right to the detailed specifications and pricing information. -Now, let’s dig into the potential reasons why this is happening, and then I’ll cover how you discover and correct these conditions at enterprise scale. First, privacy settings for SharePoint sites can be set to public or private. These settings are most commonly configured as sites are created. Often sites are set to public, which means anyone in your organization can find content contained within those sites, and by extension, so can Microsoft 365 Copilot. -Next, is setting the default sharing option to everyone in an organization. One common misperception here is just by creating the link, you’re enabling access to that file, folder, or site automatically. That’s not how these links work though. Once a sharing link is redeemed or clicked on by the recipient, that person will have access to and be able to search for the shared content. There are, however, sharing approaches, which auto-redeem sharing links, such as pasting the link into an email and sending that to lots of people. In that case, those recipients have access to the content and will be able to search for it immediately. -Related to this is granting permissions to the everyone except external users group, as you define membership for your SharePoint sites. This group gives everyone in your organization access and the ability to search for that information too. And you’ll also want to look into permissions granted to other large and inclusive groups, which are often maintained using dynamic group membership. And if you’re using Data Loss Prevention, information protection, or other classification controls from Microsoft Purview, labeled content can also trigger sharing restrictions. -So, let’s move on to addressing these common issues and the controls you will use in Microsoft 365, Microsoft Purview, and SharePoint Advance Management. At a high level, there are two primary ways to implement protections. The first approach is to restrict content discovery so that information doesn’t appear in search. Restricting discovery still allows users to access content they’ve previously accessed as well as the content shared with them. The downsides are that content people should not have access to is still accessible, and importantly, Copilot cannot work with restricted content even if it’s core to a person’s job. So, we recommend restricting content discovery as a short-term solution. -The second approach is to limit information access by tightening permissions on sites, folders, and individual files. This option has stronger protections against data loss and users can still request access, if they need it to do their jobs. Meaning only people who need access have access. We recommend limiting access as an ongoing best practice. Then to scope the sites that you want to allow and protect, we provide a few options to help you know where to start. First, you can use the SharePoint Active sites list where you can sort by activity to discover which SharePoint sites should be universally accessible for all employees in your organization. Then as part of the new Data Security Posture Management for AI reporting in Microsoft Purview, the oversharing report lets you easily find the sites with higher risk containing the most sensitive information that you want to protect. The sites you define to allow access and limit access will be used in later steps. Now, let’s move on to the steps for repairing your data from Microsoft 365 Copilot. We’ve mapped best practices and tools for Copilot adoption across Pilot, Deploy, and Optimize phases. -First, in the Pilot phase, we recommend organization-wide controls to easily restrict discovery when using Copilot. This means taking your list of universally accessible sites previously mentioned, then using a capability called Restricted SharePoint search, where you can create and allow list of up to 100 sites, then allow just those sites to be used with search in Copilot. Then in parallel in Microsoft Purview, we’ll configure ways to get visibility into Copilot usage patterns where you can enable audit mode using Data Loss Prevention policies to detect sharing of labeled or unlabeled sensitive content. And likewise, you’ll enable analysis of Copilot interactions as a part of communication compliance. Again, these approaches do not impact information access only discoverability via Copilot and search. -Now, let’s move on to the broader Deploy phase where you will enable Copilot for more users. Here you’ll use the list of identified sites from Microsoft Purview’s oversharing report to identify sites with the most sensitive information. Controls in Microsoft Purview provide proactive information protection with sensitivity labels for your files, emails, meetings, groups, and sites. For each item, you can use more targeted controls to right-size site access by assigning permissions to specific users and groups. And when applied, these controls on the backend will move public sites to private and control access to defined site members based on the permissions you set. Next, you can enable new Data Loss Prevention from Microsoft 365 Copilot policies to exclude specific labels from Copilot prompts and responses. And you can change your DLP policies from the audit mode that you set during the Pilot phase to start blocking unnecessary sharing of labeled content where you’ll now turn on the policies in order to enforce them. -Then, two options from SharePoint Advance Management are to use restricted access control to limit access to individual sites. That way only members in defined security groups will have access, and to limit site access by operationalizing site owner access reviews. Then as an additional fine-tuning option, you can target restricted content discovery on individual sites, like you see here with our leadership site to prevent Copilot from using their content as you continue to work through access management controls. And as part of the Deploy phase, you’ll disable restricted SharePoint search once you have the right controls in place. Together, these options will impact both access permissions, as well as discovery via Copilot and search. -Next, the final Optimize phase is about setting your organization up for the long term. This includes permissioning, information classifications, and data lifecycle management. Here you’ll continually monitor your data security risks using oversharing reports. Then implement auto-labeling and classification strategies using Microsoft Purview, and ensure that as new sites are created, site owners and automated provisioning respect access management principles. These processes help ensure that your organization doesn’t drift back into an oversharing state to keep your data protected and ongoing permissions in check. Now, if we switch back to our initial user examples in Business Chat with our controls in place, if we try the same prompts as before, you’ll see that Adele can no longer access sensitive information, even if she knows exactly what to look for in her prompts. The data is now protected and access has been right-sized for everyone in the organization. -So, those are the steps and tools to prepare your information from Microsoft 365 Copilot at enterprise scale, and help ensure that your data is protected and that everyone has just enough access to do their jobs. To learn more, check out aka.ms/DeployM365Copilot. Also, watch our recent show on the basics of oversharing at aka.ms/SMBoversharing for more tips to rightsize permissions for SharePoint site owners. Keep watching Microsoft Mechanics for the latest updates and thanks for watching.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.Build autonomous agents in Copilot Studio | Your MCPs, your models & multi-agent
Use triggers to launch processes from signals like approval emails, connect to the right data with Model Context Protocol (MCP) for faster, more accurate responses, and coordinate multiple agents to handle everything from task assignments to inventory planning. Choose AI models that fit each job, prompt agents to generate detailed documents, and test their reasoning in real time. Jeremy Chapman, Director of Microsoft 365, shows how to transform repetitive work into scalable, intelligent systems. Automate your planning. Skip manual steps by letting your agent instantly build launch plans and assign tasks when projects kick off. Get started with Copilot Studio. Your API is not an MCP. Help your agents find the right info faster so they respond with more accuracy and context. See how MCP simplifies data access. Select the best AI model for the job at hand. Choose from options like your favorite GPT or specialized options from Azure AI Foundry. Check out model selection in Microsoft Copilot Studio. QUICK LINKS: 00:00 — Build an agent with Microsoft Copilot Studio 00:41 — Automate project planning 01:22 — How agents work 02:47 — Define tools and triggers 03:58 — Model Context Protocol (MCP) 05:44 — Use prompt tools to auto-create key docs 06:22 — Choose the right model 07:13 — Test your agent 08:08 — Wrap up Link References To get started building your own agents go to https://copilotstudio.microsoft.com Check out our lab at https://aka.ms/MCSMCPLab 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: -Building AI agents to automate the repetitive and complex things you do every day without using any code just got better. You can now more efficiently connect agents to information using the new AI-optimized MCP standard. Select the specific AI model you want and even easily have your agent work together with other agents. -In fact, today I’ll show you how to build an agent with Microsoft Copilot Studio in just a few minutes. In this case, I’ve chosen an often complex but common task, project planning, that I want to automate. So here our project has just been given the green light to move forward after initial ideation and stakeholder approval. Now let me show you my running agent and how it can automate parts of the launch planning process. First, my agent works autonomously to reason over and determine if this email is an approval email. Once identified, this email becomes a trigger for the planning process to start. Here you can see it’s actually created a new team with a virtual assistant that highlights the key phases and milestones. -Under the covers, the agent has referred to the knowledge we’ve assigned to it and used Microsoft Planner to create and to assign tasks to people for each phase. If you’ve never automated something like this, it might seem kind of complex, but it’s pretty simple. Let me show you how this agent works. So I’m in Copilot Studio, and to speed things up a little bit, let me reverse-engineer what’s behind it. This agent overview page shows all the components of the agent in a single view. At the top, there’s a description of the agent with its primary components. Then on the right, there’s a test pane that I can use to test the agent at any stage as I build it out. -To build a launch plan, I have written instructions to describe exactly what I need the agent to do, and this is more or less how I would describe it to any member of the team. So here I’ve instructed it to monitor the inbox for that launch email like we saw before, then generate a plan, including the tasks with each task owner and the deadlines defined. Notify those task owners and stakeholders about their tasks and deadlines so that they aren’t surprised. Make sure that all of this is maintained and synced in Microsoft Planner, and my favorite part, coordinate with other agents. In this case, I’ve asked our Zava Launch Planning agent to work with our Zava Inventory Planning agent. -Then under that, I’ve defined quite a few important knowledge sources. So you can see competitor analysis here from a web source, product documentation, and a best practices repo from SharePoint, even two individual reference files, a Word document for marketing collateral, and also A PDF with our Launch Process Library with details on team member specialization and task timeframes. So at this stage we’ve kind of laid out all the expectations for how the agent should operate and the knowledge resources that it should refer to, but I still need to define the tools and the triggers to perform and activate the process automation. -I’ll start in Tools, where I can get more specific with exactly the kind of actions I want the agent to take, like sending emails, creating and assigning tasks, and looking up supplier and component data for inventory. Below that in Triggers is an important configuration because this is actually what makes our agent autonomous. Remember, it sprung into action only once it identified that there was an approval email. And in Agents, you can see that the Zava Inventory Planning agent is also defined here. This agent actually reviews relevant inventory status and will give my agent accurate estimates to generate the product launch plan. Back up in Tools, let me show you the options there for adding a new tool. You can see that I can search, and there are suggestions as well as options for defining connectors to bring in data. And I can also add a flow to run steps in a process using Power Automate. -There’s a new option for Model Context Protocol, or MCP, as well. I’m going to pause here for a second in case you’re new to Model Context Protocol, or maybe you just think it’s a new name for APIs. Your API is not an MCP. That’s because MCP is designed to structure data specifically for AI models so that they can understand and use information sources more easily. Unlike traditional APIs, which are packed with extra details for both read and write operations so that software developers have the control over the output of their apps, MCPs, on the other hand, are task-focused and are built uniquely to enable and guide AI’s actions, giving it the context and instructions it needs to make quick decisions on what to do next. -The MCP primarily supports read operations to look up and also retrieve information, where the MCP points to specific resources like files, database records or images, each packaged with metadata to describe the resource and how it should be used to perform the task. This helps AI to quickly find and also make sense of the most relevant information in order to generate and format its response back. This means, using MCP, your AI agents are generally more efficient and accurate than they would be using other options. In fact, your IT team has an incentive to build them to minimize operational costs. And if you’re in IT and want to get an MCP server running, check out our lab at aka.ms/MCSMCPLab. -Now let’s get back to our specific agent in Copilot Studio. By selecting MCP, I can see a list of the MCP servers that my IT team has made available to me. In this case, if I click into Tools, you’ll see the Supplier SKU and Component Data we saw before is actually an MCP server, and it’s enabled and ready to go. So until now, I’ve shown you how we created our project plan, but we also need a go-to-market document describing how we’ll launch, promote, and sell it. So let’s add that to the agent. So back in the Overview tab, I’ll add another tool. Hitting New tool will show me all the options. Here you’ll see another one for Prompt, which lets you analyze and transform text, documents, images, and data using AI with a prompt. So I’ll go ahead and choose that. -Now I’ll add a prompt with instructions for creating a go-to-market strategy document. As with prompting, the more detailed the prompt, the better the generated response will be. And that’s all it takes. Of course, the generated response can also depend on the AI model that you choose, and for most things, the default model will work just fine. I can alternatively choose from the models I have available to me, or I can even head over to Azure AI Foundry to browse over thousands of models. This is great, especially if you have specialized tasks that need specialized skills. So, for example, if I wanted one for forecasting, I can narrow down the list here by choosing my preferred deployment option. I’ll pick serverless. Under inference task, I’ll pick the forecasting category, and it finds a match that I could use maybe later for a sales forecasting agent after our launch. For now, back in Copilot Studio, I’ll keep GPT-4o mini as a good general-purpose model. So now I’ll save my prompt, which takes just a second, then just confirm by adding it to my agent. And that’s it. -And now with everything configured and added, I can test it out to see if it works. So I’ll type in my prompt, “Test the launch planner agent based on the last approval email received in my inbox,” and then submit that. And you can see its thought process here over on the left. That way you can make sure it’s doing what you want it to do. In the middle of the screen is our MCP server data with raw records it discovered and used. And that same information is shown on the right in our response. -Now with the document ready to go, let’s take a look at it in Word. So here’s our go-to-market document. As I scroll down, you can see that the document is pretty thorough. It’s got all the right details and all the right insights. It’s even used our standard go-to-market strategy templates for consistency. And you’ll notice also on the top that because it’s fully integrated with our Microsoft Purview policies for our company, it’s even applied the right label and protections. So between the automated generation of our launch plan and GTM doc, something that might’ve taken weeks before, now just takes a few minutes, and, again, I didn’t need to use any code. -So to get started building your own agents, just head over to copilotstudio.microsoft.com. Keep watching Microsoft Mechanics for the latest AI tech, and thanks for watching.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.
