QUICK LINKS:

00:00 — Microsoft 365 Copilot Wave Two
00:45 — How Copilot is evolving
01:32 — BizChat and Copilot Pages
02:58 — Copilot in Excel
04:41 — Copilot using Python in Excel
06:05 — Compare and contrast documents
07:18 — Create Copilot agents from BizChat
08:44 — Create Copilot agents from SharePoint
10:12 — .copilot files
10:44 — Enterprise-grade data protection
13:54 — Wrap up

Link References

Check out new Copilot experiences at https://aka.ms/CopilotWave2

Access advanced enterprise data protections at http://microsoft.com/copilot

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Video Transcript:

– Microsoft 365 Copilot is headed into wave two of its evolution, and today, we’ll look at key updates with Business Chat and the new Copilot Pages to unlock intelligent collaboration experiences, and Copilot in Microsoft 365 apps with advances from data analysis in Excel to AI-driven file comparisons in OneDrive and more, as well as new Copilot agents that anyone can create to help you automate business processes, and if you’re in IT, we’ll show you improved integrations with our security and compliance stack and to walk us through all the updates, including what it means for Microsoft 365 admins, I’m joined again by Mary Pasch from the Copilot platform team. Welcome.

– Yeah. Thank you so much for having me back.

– Thanks for joining us today. So, Microsoft 365 Copilot has been broadly available almost a year, and it powers AI experiences really that interact with your work data and it’s deeply integrated in the apps that you use every day. So, Mary, how’s the experience evolving?

– So we’ve learned a lot about Copilot in the first year, and our real focus has been on finding the best ways we can apply Copilot to help you personally with the things that you do every day, as well as at an all-up organization level, where we’re making it easier for you to collaborate and create Copilot agents with your own specific knowledge and actions.

– And, again, this is all possible because Microsoft 365 Copilot, it’s seamlessly integrated with your work data, making it very relevant and also a custom experience. Now, you also mentioned before collaboration as part of how we’re improving the experience as well.

– Yeah, so one of the most powerful Microsoft 365 Copilot experiences, Business Chat, is a central hub, bringing together your work data and Microsoft 365 apps, and now we’re introducing Copilot Pages as a dynamic and persistent canvas in BizChat designed for fluid multi-party AI collaboration. Let me give you an overview of the experience. As you’re seeing here, BizChat lets you use natural language to quickly find and parse information across apps, meaning your email, calendar, the meetings you’re a part of in Microsoft Teams, as well as files you have access to in SharePoint and OneDrive. If you’ve used BizChat to work through projects, ideation, or solve problems, you can start to compile a lot of useful insights and information that can really serve as a perfect starting point to kickstart team collaboration, and that’s where the new Copilot Pages experience comes in. You can now create a page right from BizChat, capture all your progress, then share it with your team. The page is a rich canvas that you can edit, format, and add to so you can make sure it looks the way you want and has all the context to work efficiently, and you’re able to see others on your team on the page as they start contributing. The team can even collaborate together with Copilot to iterate on generated content, to refine it, and add even more insights to streamline your work.

– This is really a great way to capture and persist AI generated content, then add to it and also share it to facilitate collaboration, and Pages is a completely new Copilot experience. Now, you also mentioned the engineering team’s focus really on finding the best scenarios for Copilot to assist everyone in their day-to-day work.

– Right, we’ve honed in on a number of work scenarios where we know that Copilot can make a difference and where your feedback has been instrumental. In Excel, for example, if you’ve ever been asked to find important data points with complex data sitting across several sheets in the file, unless you’re an Excel expert, you might not know the best function to use or how to correlate the data. Now, you can just ask Copilot in Excel to do that for you with a descriptive prompt. So I’ll ask to Copilot, “add a column with total revenue and refer to the Prices worksheet,” and it uses my prompt along with the data in Excel to generate a formula. In this case, using an X look-up against columns and cells on both sheets, and I can even preview the column before I add it, and that looks right, so I’ll insert it, and now I have a total revenue column with data calculated across sheets.

– And I really like that not only are we able to interact with Excel there using everyday language, but it also kind of educates you on what it’s doing. It kind of gives you its rationale that you can see before you commit that change.

– Right, we want the Copilot experience to help you improve your Excel skills in addition to making it easier than ever to interact with the data and save you time in finding insights you can use. For example, using my new column, I can ask, “How is revenue by category so far in 2024?” And I can see that it’s taking this spreadsheet with more than 4,000 rows of transactions and summing revenue by category, and now it’s presenting that back to me as a bar chart.

– And by the way, even if you knew kind of exactly the formula to write there to get those results, achieving what you just did here would’ve taken a lot longer. So what if I am a more sophisticated user of Excel? Can this help me as well?

– Well, whether you’re a casual Excel user or an expert, you can go pretty deep into the data. We recently added Python-based analytics to Excel, and I want to show you an early look at how it’s integrated with Copilot. Let’s try this. In Copilot, I’ll select the suggested prompt for advanced analytics, and you can see that it’s using Python to derive deeper analysis results where it’ll create a new sheet, write and insert Python formulas, and answer using multiple messages. So I’ll go ahead and kick off the process. It then starts running a multi-step process to analyze, in this case, three years of sales data, showing its progress and the processes that it’s taking along the way. It creates a new analysis sheet in Excel. It shows a preview of what it’s reasoning over, creates a plan to analyze the data, and executes the plan using Python, then generates detailed analytics and visualizations as a time-based chart of revenue by category. From here, I can keep going and ask Copilot to forecast revenue for the next two years, and repeating the same pattern we just saw, Copilot generates a fast and detailed analysis of historic and forecasted revenue ranges with this visualization.

– And this is great, especially for those of us who don’t have Python expertise but really want to do more advanced data exploration.

– And that’s the point. We’ve designed Copilot to help remove the barriers for getting work done and to help you save time. Now, there are a lot of wave two updates to pick from from across Microsoft 365 apps, more than we have time for today, so I’ll keep highlighting my favorites. Let me show you another time-saver for analysis, this time for text and in OneDrive. Think about how many times you’ve worked with people who duplicate a document to make edits because they don’t want to mess up the original copy, and then that forces you to have to manually review both versions side by side and hunt for the differences to incorporate in the original file. Well, Copilot can now help you compare and contrast between those files to see exactly where the changes were made. From OneDrive, all I have to do is select the two files, and they can even be different types, like the Word Doc and PDF file that I have selected here. Then, from the Copilot dropdown, I’ll just click Compare Files, and this just takes a few seconds as it compares the two files, and as it works, it’s literally pointing out individual differences between both files in a fraction of the time.

– And those side-by-side comparisons are something I do a lot, so this is going to come in handy. So, like you said though, we’re just showing a few examples and a few highlights of the new Copilot experiences, and there are a lot more across Microsoft 365 apps, and you can check those out right now at aka.ms/CopilotWave2. Why don’t we switch gears though to one of my favorite topics, automation and extensibility, and we actually covered this back in May. So what are some of the updates there?

– Right, so in past shows, we showed you how to build your own Copilot agents, and they follow your instructions and prioritize the knowledge that you specifically define, and soon, anyone will be able to create one in seconds from BizChat and SharePoint. I’ll start with the experience from BizChat. Here, from the Copilot menu on the right, I’ll create a Copilot agent, which opens the agent builder. Now, I just need to describe what I want the agent to do. In my case, a field service agent to assist with onsite repair visits to provide instruction based on product knowledge. It asks me where it can find the information needed and I’ll just paste in our team’s SharePoint site address. Optionally, you can configure it further with additional knowledge, including approved data sources outside of Microsoft 365, like what you’re seeing here, based on what your IT team has approved. Then you can finish off by applying your own branding to your Copilot, and now that’s looking better, and then just create it, and with that, your Copilot agent will be available from Business Chat and in the mobile app to provide tailored assistance based on the knowledge and instructions that you’ve specified. Let’s test this out with a prompt about a documented error code that can be found in the knowledge sources that we’ve added, and after I submit the prompt, it finds the right documents and generates the answer I was looking for. That said, most of us also use SharePoint, and there’s an even simpler way to create Copilot agents that work with your files in just a few clicks. I’m on our team’s SharePoint site in the documents folder. You can see from everything in this folder that I have a lot of business product maintenance files. Wouldn’t it be great if I could create a Copilot agent primarily focused on these files in this folder to generate content and responses based just on them? And it turns out I can. I just need to select the information I want to scope, and this works from any site, library, or folder. I’ll select everything in this location to save time. Then I’ll create a Copilot agent, and in just a few seconds, I can start using it right away or share it with others in the team. I’ll copy the link. Then I just head over to Microsoft Teams and share the link in a conversation, and our Copilot agent is added to the conversation like another team member. Now, others on my team can at mention the agent to chat with it just like you would with any other teammate, like this question about problems with cable installation, and it responds with an informed answer focused on the knowledge and information in the SharePoint site that I selected in that first step. Of course, both of these examples respect individual user permissions in how they access the underlying information to generate their responses.

– Right, that took literally about two clicks from your document library to get the Copilot agent up and running, and by the way, these can also be edited like we saw with instructions and starter prompts from the BizChat experience and even more things. So creating these Copilot agents also saves what’s called a .Copilot file for each file that you can find in your SharePoint document library.

– Yes, and those files contain all the configurations for the Copilot agent. You can open these up to look at the schema for what was created and you’ll see the starter prompts, agent name, description that was added, and instructions, and below that are the selected grounding data sources. In fact, these Copilot files can use the same labeling and policy protections as other files stored in SharePoint and OneDrive too.

– And kind of related to that, you know, we also recently announced that there are more ways to experience Copilot with enterprise-grade data protections.

– Yes, we did indeed. Of course, Microsoft 365 has always had enterprise data protection capabilities as part of its deep integration with Microsoft Purview, and now even the free version of Microsoft Copilot for anyone with a Microsoft Entra account also benefits from the same advanced enterprise protections. You can access it from microsoft.com/copilot or as a pinned app in Microsoft 365 when you’re signed in with your work account. With it pinned, you’ll also have access from the Microsoft 365 mobile app, front and center in the lower app tray, and you can use Microsoft Copilot with the foundational model’s open-world training together with grounding from the web so that it’s always up to date. That said, with the free experience, unlike the premium Microsoft 365 Copilot experience that can communicate with Microsoft Graph to access your work data and generate a response, Microsoft Copilot can only use the model’s open-world training and optionally the internet in order to generate a response, and unlike many generative AI tools out there, your prompts and any data that you paste in them and responses remain separate from the LLMs and are not used to train the models. In fact, data follows our broader data handling commitments, including support for GDPR, our data protection addendum, and more. This way, everyone with Microsoft 365 and Office 365 will have access to Microsoft Copilot, and from an IT perspective, you can trust that your data is protected.

– And that’s super important because a lot of people, they’re bringing in their own unsanctioned shadow IT apps for generative AI where there’s often no visibility when people start pasting in sensitive information into their prompts, and kind of while we’re on the topic of IT, what are some of the updates for all the Microsoft 365 admins watching?

– Yes, for all of our admins out there, you continue to have full control over how Copilot services are enabled and visibility into how they’re being used. Let me show you a few of the updates. First, in the Copilot page in the Microsoft 365 admin center, you’ll find new controls to pin the free version of Microsoft Copilot, again, signed in with Microsoft Entra accounts, to the navigation bar in Microsoft 365 web, desktop, and mobile apps, as well as Microsoft Teams and Outlook, and for Microsoft Purview, as I mentioned, the same types of policies, rules, and searches will apply to both Microsoft 365 Copilot as well as the free Microsoft Copilot experience. Not only does it apply to communication compliance, which flags inappropriate communications, it also applies to your e-discovery content searches and cases because all Copilot information is logged and discoverable similar to email and exchange, as well as audit searches or look-ups using the data explorer that you perform now, and, of course, data retention policies can apply to this information too. So you’ve got the protection and control options to deliver Copilot experiences to anyone in your organization, and as I mentioned, everything I’ve shown today is just a few of the highlights for Microsoft 365 Copilot Wave Two, and there’s a lot more to come.

– Thanks so much for joining us today, Mary. Always great to have you on to share the latest Copilot updates, and by the way, to find out more and see all the recent Microsoft 365 Copilot announcements and what’s new across all the apps, check out aka.ms/CopilotWave2. Be sure to keep watching Microsoft Mechanics for all the latest AI updates and thanks for joining us today.