Copilot Pages are a Useful Way to Capture and Refine AI-Generated Text

Copilot pages featured in Microsoft’s Copilot Wave 2 announcements on September 16, 2024. With marketing’s normal ability to construct impenetrable text, Microsoft says: “Copilot Pages is a dynamic, persistent canvas in Copilot chat designed for multiplayer AI collaboration.” Parsing that sentence took me a while, but I think it means that a Copilot page is a Loop component generated from the results of a Copilot chat that can be shared with other users.

If your organization already uses both Copilot for Microsoft 365 and Loop (either the standalone app or components in Teams and Outlook), the ability to save the results generated by Copilot is very useful. Or as Microsoft puts it, a Copilot page takes: ”ephemeral AI-generated content and makes it durable.”

Using Copilot Pages

Figure 1 shows an example where I asked Copilot for a short summary about how to use compliance searches to purge mailbox items. After Copilot responded to the prompt, clicking the Edit in Pages button opens the Loop component to the right with the text generated by Copilot loaded and ready for editing. As you can see, I’ve used a comment to highlight an error in the text.

Figure 1: Editing a Copilot page containing AI-generated text

The page shown in Figure 1 has the Internal sensitivity label. This is the highest-priority sensitivity label assigned to the documents Copilot found and used in its response. The user can assign a different sensitivity label if appropriate. The shield with padlock used to indicate the presence of a sensitivity label doesn’t include the color configured for the label. That’s a pity because the traffic light scheme to indicate the relative sensitivity levels of labels is often used to give a visual clue to users.

After making whatever updates are required, the page can be shared with other people or copied and inserted into a Teams chat or channel conversation, Outlook message, or into the Loop app. The page behaves just like any other Loop component.

Currently, Copilot Pages are only available for user accounts with Copilot for Microsoft 365 licenses. Microsoft says in their Copilot Pages for IT admins post that “soon users with access to Microsoft … will also be able to create pages.”

Managing Pages

Editing and sharing Copilot Pages are all very well, but administrators want to know about where the data is stored and how it is managed. Insight into these and other questions comes from the admins post (notable for featuring the word “Copilot” no less than 64 times). Here we discover several key facts.

Copilot Pages are stored in SharePoint Embedded containers, just like the containers used for Loop app workspaces. The containers are visible through the SharePoint admin center (Figure 2). All the containers are called “Pages,” and although the owner’s name is visible as a property of the container, it would be useful if Microsoft included the owner’s name in the container name.

Microsoft publishes a page describing governance and compliance capabilities for Loop. The page hasn’t been updated for Copilot Pages, and the assumption is that the containers created for pages will function much like those for Loop workspaces with the caveat that “governance and compliance processes apply the same way they would to a user’s OneDrive.”

Microsoft also says that content of Copilot Pages is “lifetime-managed with the user account and is deleted when the user account is deleted from the organization. There is a default timeline where it is first soft deleted (can be recovered by an IT Admin) and then purged.” There’s also a statement about an “Admin workflow to enable access to these containers before deletion so that valuable content can be copied to new locations.”

Even if Microsoft still must deliver some features (and APIs to access Copilot Pages), the comments noted above appear to match the existing capabilities available when removing a Microsoft 365 account. Dealing with personal information can be challenging, especially when OneDrive holds so many kinds of information. Handling Copilot Pages now joins the list of things to take care of when preserving information belonging to people who leave an organization.

Using Pages as a Copilot Notebook

Like any new Microsoft 365 feature, it will take a little time for organizations and users to figure out if Copilot Pages will become part of the work landscape. Having a way to capture the output from Copilot is useful, and I think I will use these pages to record that output rather than the starting point for collaboration. But everyone’s different and it will be interesting to see how this capability evolves over time.

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