Microsoft brings automated ‘agents’ to M365 Copilot

Microsoft has introduced a new tool in Microsoft 365 Copilot to automate repetitive tasks, part of a drive to make the generative AI (genAI) assistant more useful to users.

Copilot Actions, announced at Microsoft’s Ignite conference Tuesday, features a simple trigger-and-action interface that Microsoft hopes will make the workflow automations accessible to a wide range of workers. 

The company offered up a few examples for Copilot Actions in a blog post. It can be set to create an automatic summary of important action points at the end of the workday, gather inputs from a team for a weekly newsletter, or summarize recent interactions with a client ahead of a meeting. The feature is now in private preview.

[ Related: Microsoft Ignite 2024 news and insights ]

A Gartner survey of digital workers indicated that 51% have customized and built their own workflows, apps and automations, “so the demand is certainly there for business users (aka citizen developers) to build their own AI agents,” said Jason Wong, vice president analyst at Gartner.

Microsoft’s low-code and no-code tools, including Power Apps and Power Automate, have already “paved the way for Copilot Studio for citizen development,” Wong said. “However, Copilot Studio is still an immature product, and organizations have only started to upskill their employees to understand how to build generative AI powered apps or agents.”

Other new features announced at Ignite include an update to Copilot Pages, the recently-launched document editor tool connected to M365 Copilot. Microsoft will add “rich artifacts” to Copilot Pages, which lets users share a wider variety of information generated in Copilot, such as blocks of code or flow charts, and share them to a Pages document. 

Copilot Pages is due to be generally available in early 2025, Microsoft said.

Copilot in Teams will soon be able to analyze visual content shared on-screen during a video call, and users can ask the assistant for a quick summary of files shared in Teams Chat. Both features will be in public preview early next year.

There’s also an “interpreter” function coming to Teams that Microsoft claims will translate meeting participants’ speech in real-time during a video call. Available in public preview in early 2025, Microsoft said it will also be possible simulate a user’s voice in the translated audio.

The feature, currently in private preview, is one of several examples of AI agents coming to M365 Copilot and M365 apps. Microsoft also announced AI “agents” for M365 Copilot — including the general availability of the previously announced agent builder functionality in SharePoint; the latter essentially lets users created a tailored chatbot to respond to queries related to a specific set of files stored in the content management application. To help manage and secure data accessed by M365 Copilot, Microsoft will make the SharePoint Advanced Management add-on (which previously cost $3 per user a month) available at no extra cost starting early next year. 

There’s an Employee Self-Service Agent for BizChat —  the chat interface for M365 Copilot –— whereemployees can ask HR and IT-related questions, such as requesting a new laptop. The agent, now in a private preview, can be customized in Microsoft’s Copilot Studio app.   

There’s an agent to automate project management processes in Microsoft’s Planner app (in public preview now), with plans in place to open up access to third-party agents from the likes of ServiceNow in the coming months.

Microsoft has struggled to convince Microsoft 365 customers that it’s worth investing in its various genAI tools, many of which launched last year. The latest updates provide an opportunity to show the business value of the genAI assistant, which costs $30 per user each month.  

While Microsoft’s “Wave 2” of M365 Copilot features announced in September can be viewed as an attempt to win over undecided buyers, Wong said the new agentic capabilities announced at Ignite are “really more for their current M365 Copilot customers to extend the business value of generative AI beyond individual productivity to show greater ROI.

“Copilot customers [don’t] just want content creation and summarization,” he said. “They want Copilot to replace manual work, impact team workflows and drive process improvements.”