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Streamline your day with new, user-focused updates to Microsoft 365 Copilot. Jump into work faster with a redesigned layout that puts Chat, Search, and your agents front and center. New Copilot Search lets you yse natural language to find files, emails, and conversations — even if you don’t remember exact keywords — and get instant summaries and previews without switching apps.

Create high-impact visuals, documents, and videos in seconds with the new Copilot Create experience, complete with support for brand templates. Tap into powerful agents like Researcher and Analyst to handle deep tasks or build your own with ease. And if you manage Copilot across your organization, you now have better tools to deploy, monitor, and secure AI use — all from a single view.

Describe what you want.

Don’t know the keywords to find your content in Microsoft 365? You don’t need to. See how the new Copilot Search works.

On-demand expertise.

Use agents like Researcher or Analyst to do the thinking for you. Start here.

View AI agent activities in Microsoft Purview.

Find data security policy matches and see if agents are being used with sensitive information or by risky users. Watch here.

Watch our video here.

QUICK LINKS:

00:00 — Microsoft 365 Copilot new capabilities

00:36 — Microsoft 365 Copilot app

01:49 — Copilot Search

03:09 — Specialized agents

04:06 — Create experience

06:07 — Copilot Notebooks

07:40 — Updates for IT admins

08:16 — Data security with AI apps & agents in Purview

08:51 — Reports

09:20 — Wrap up

Link References

Check out https://aka.ms/CopilotWave2Spring

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Video Transcript:

-So, Microsoft 365 Copilot keeps getting better, and today I’ll show you how the Copilot experience is evolving to make everything easier with new AI-powered capabilities to help you get even more done, and if you’re an IT, I’ll show you new options for agent management, including updates in the Microsoft 365 Admin Center, new data security views and controls, and Microsoft Purview’s Data Security Posture Management for AI, as well as improved reporting and visibility into Copilot analytics from Viva Insights. So let’s start with updates to the Microsoft 365 Copilot app experience, which has evolved to make every interaction easier and more intuitive. Chat is the core of the experience and where you’ll find the app by default and there’s a new navigation moving what’s important to the left side of your screen where you’ll find links to Search, Chat, your Agents, new Notebooks, and Create experiences that I’ll show you in a moment.

-Now moving to the center of the app, you’ll notice that there’s a more streamlined view with the prompt box taking center stage. Under that, you’ll find personalized suggestions for what to do next, including upcoming meetings. And as the author prompts, you can quickly pull up an agent right from here to bring in content sources you want like your files, interactions with people, your meetings, emails and more to generate what you want. And even without referencing your work directly, Copilot is connected to it and can find the matching information that you have access to. That’s because behind the scenes, Microsoft 365 Copilot uses advanced AI native vector-based search to find the most relevant content. And now outside of Copilot Chat, you can use this directly from the new Copilot Search experience. It brings together AI search and your work information across Microsoft Graph.

-From here, you can easily get to your recommendations and quick access to what you’ve been working on. Then moving to the search bar, you’ll see that search now goes way beyond keyword search that you’re used to compared to Copilot Chat. This is optimized to find specific content items. Now, where you can ask in simple terms, for example, based on what you remember, to quickly find your files, your emails, chats, and meetings for Microsoft 365, and even information and other graph connected line of business systems like you’re seeing here with Jira. Now it knows like-concepts, synonyms, and contextual information around a topic, so you don’t need to know keywords or be precise with search terms. In fact, many of these results don’t contain words from the search, but they’re highly relevant. And based on the top items and the results, Copilot can summarize what search finds in line to save you time. And without having to open its sighted items in separate apps, Copilot will also help summarize and preview those files right from the Copilot app.

-Next, we’ve made it easier to access specialized agents, which give you on-demand help to complete tasks that would normally require an expert. Now these include both Analyst to find insights in your data as well as Researcher for written reports, both first-of-their-kind reasoning agents for work. In fact, we dedicated an entire show on reasoning agents that you can check out at aka.ms/reasoningmechanics. And here in the navigation you’ll also find your pinned and recently used agents on top. And clicking into all agents takes you to the new agent store where you can find more agents that are built by Microsoft, also the broader ecosystem, and your company’s own custom agents. And of course, you can also create your own agents right from here by describing what you want your agent to do or configuring it directly with your instructions and knowledge sources.

-Then beyond agents and AI-generated content from Copilot Chat, the new create experience lets everyone tap into powerful and personalized design skills where you can create images like the samples you’re seeing on the screen here, powered by the GPT 4o Model for image generation. And you can design a poster or flyer like these ones and they’re also great for cover pages to your reports. And speaking of that, from Create, you can write a stylized draft document using templates and right from here, you can also upload and edit your own images to make them stand out and select parts of images to remove distractions like this tree. Importantly, what sets the Create experience really apart is that you can use brand templates and even bring in your company’s brand kit, and these include your approved company logos, fonts, and colors. In fact, let me show you how this works by creating a new image.

-So I’ll start by describing what I’m looking for. I’ll choose a picture of this new shoe from my local device to work from, and now I’ll choose my style that matches what I want to create. Here’s where my company brand comes in. I can choose the brand kit I want with the right color palette and icon. Now this will take a moment to generate and now I have an image that fits my brand and I can add to this same image. I’d like to see a little ground cover in the image. I’d like to ask for some moss and some rocks. Then I’ll give it a second to render a new image and it gets even better with new direct editing options like background removal, object transform, and enhancements. I’m going to choose the erase option, then select this rock and this plant on the right and hit erase. That’s better. Now, I just need to add a text element and I’ll paste in the shoe name and now it’s ready to go and I can download the image right from here.

-And for your bigger projects and tasks, Copilot Notebooks is then another new capability. These help you bring together all of your relevant content for your task at hand, including Copilot Chats. And I’ll open this one for Copilot Craft and you’ll see that I can chat with Copilot about everything in here, and it’s filled with reference content and related chat history to keep interactions in scope to what’s here and even create an audio overview of this notebook. Now the last major update that I’ll show from the Microsoft 365 Copilot app experience is with personalization and memory. Where from Copilot settings, you can specify custom instructions and enable Copilot memory.

-First, custom instructions let you add details about your interests, your preferences, the tone of what you expect from Copilot responses. Think of this information as something that will get appended to your initial prompts in future Copilot sessions to improve its output. Then, moving back to personalization settings, Copilot memory works in the same way to recall a handful of notable memorable items from previous conversations in real time. Again, this information sits outside of the large language model and is retrieved for future chat sessions. And you have full visibility and control over what is maintained in Copilot memory and can delete what you don’t want to personalize its responses.

-Next, I’ll move on to updates for IT admins. We’re adding more controls to the Copilot Control System so that you have the tools that you need to manage, govern, and measure Copilot and now also agents across your organization. You can now manage the agents and agent deployment right from Microsoft 365’s admin center. Here you’ll see a list of agents in use and the ones you’ve blocked. Also, apps where the agents are supported and usage details. You can also deploy agents from here as well, scoping the right users and groups.

-Next, we’re also adding more insights and controls for data security with AI apps and agents and Microsoft Purview. The new AI apps and agents page in Data Security Posture Management for AI gives you a single dashboard to view and create policies for your AI apps and agents, where you’ll find coverage for data protection and compliance policies that you already have in place, and clicking into any of these items, lets you discover more insights, including potentially risky interactions, inappropriate use, as well as sensitive information being shared.

-And finally, for reports that you can share beyond your administrator and data security teams, using Copilot Analytics and Viva Insights, you can measure the usage and business impact of your agents. And direct from Viva Insights, the new Copilot Studio agents report can be shared with your team, and it provides a comprehensive view of agent use, session outcomes, and you can see how assisted actions are contributing to overall ROI.

-So Microsoft 365 Copilot continues to evolve to help you get more done, along with enterprise grade IT controls to help keep your data protected. Now, to find out more, check out aka.ms/CopilotWave2Spring and keep checking back to Microsoft Mechanics for the latest updates. Thanks so much for watching.