Microsoft 365 Copilot Upgrades Deepen Productivity, Industry App Integrations

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New Microsoft 365 Copilot features rolled out in July include tighter integration with productivity applications, expanded AI model options, and new connectors to a range of industry-specific applications.

In the analysis below, I highlight a handful of the most noteworthy enhancements from an exhaustive set of new features that the company recently outlined.

Users are now able to create documents, spreadsheets, and presentations without leaving their Copilot app; they do so by adding Word, Excel, or PowerPoint agents directly into a Copilot prompt and @mentioning the agent they need to invoke, which then gets added to the chat.

The July updates to Microsoft 365 Copilot include a series of enhancements that extend the company’s commitment to make a range of AI models and choices available to users.  When combined with Work IQ, Copilot uses this model flexibility to ground work it performs in files, meetings, chats, and business data to ensure it delivers results that are relevant to the user’s work.

The first newly supported model is OpenAI’s GPT-5.6, which conducts enhanced reasoning for multi-step tasks such as deep analysis within Excel. It can also be used to create end-to-end deliverables in Copilot Cowork. Second, Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 5 is now available; it’s designed for agentic, multi-step work, helping with tasks including drafting documents, analyzing spreadsheets, and creating presentations. A third newly available model is Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5, which supports longer duration, complex work in Copilot Cowork. Anthropic touts Fable 5’s ability to plan, execute, and check work across multi-stage tasks.

Users can now customize Cowork with skills and plugins to connect it to other systems efficiently. In the customize tab of Cowork, users can add a skill through a guided ‘create new’ flow or by dragging and dropping an existing skill. This means less manual setup plus easy sharing; users can share any skill or plugin with specific individuals across the organization.

New Copilot connectors bring industry-specific knowledge and data from third-party systems into users’ work while adhering to existing security, compliance, and permission controls. Connectors enable users to search for and act on data from business applications their organizations already use. Newly available connectors span a wide range of industries including financial services, professional services, industrial and manufacturing, software and technology, healthcare and life sciences, and retail and consumer goods.

There are new mobile features as well. Push notifications from the Microsoft 365 Copilot mobile app help users quickly catch up on their work from their iOS and Android devices, reducing the need to manually check across Outlook, Teams, and other Microsoft 365 apps. Users will receive notifications — such as ‘Items waiting for you’ — delivered to their mobile devices. When users open a notification, they are taken to the Copilot mobile app, where the prompt’s response already appears on screen.