Microsoft Delivers Sweeping Set of Agents, Copilots Embedded in Core Apps

Welcome to the Cloud Wars Minute — your daily cloud news and commentary show. Each episode provides insights and perspectives around the “reimagination machine” that is the cloud.

In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I analyze Monday’s Copilot product announcements from Microsoft.

Highlights

00:05 — Monday’s product introduction was billed as Microsoft Copilot 365: Wave 2. That’s fairly modest positioning for a sweeping set of products that included new agent — and agent building — technology, a “canvas” that promotes collaboration across organizational units and individuals, and copilot functionality embedded deeply across the company’s productivity apps. The announcement’s importance was highlighted by the presence of CEO Satya Nadella.

01:12 — The agents that Microsoft announced range from those that can manage simple prompt and response functions, to those that can offload repetitive tasks from people, to fully autonomous agents. The agents, which you can @mention in a discussion thread for real-time answers, respect your Microsoft 365 and Sharepoint security permissions.

02:33 — Other key developments:

• Copilot Pages. Described as a dynamic, persistent canvas for “multiplayer AI collaboration” – turning an organization’s content into a rich database of information and insights.
• Copilot in Excel. Consider a business request to determine the product category driving the most revenue. An Excel workbook with all corporate data going back 3 years can be helpful in this analysis, though quite unwieldy. Copilot knows which data to reference and uses that insight to create a plan to run and execute the numbers.

• Copilot in Excel with Python. Let’s say a revenue forecasting exercise involves ranking customers based on the upsell opportunity they represent. Copilot prioritizes the most helpful metrics and provides a preview of the data.
• Copilot in Outlook. Analyzes your emails and your org structure to identify priority senders and recipients, and sorts messages in priority order, even suggesting actions in response. There’s mobile Outlook functionality as well.

05:47 — Nadella summed up these new and enhanced products succinctly when he said: “Copilot is becoming this new enterprise orchestration layer; yesterday’s bespoke interactions with siloed business applications will just simply become copilot agents.”