Kurt Shintaku's Blog

At Microsoft Ignite 2024, we are accelerating our mission to equip every employee with Copilot as a personal assistant and to revolutionize business processes with agents developed in Copilot Studio. We owe our success to our customers – with their feedback loop on AI at work, we’ve dramatically improved Copilot performance and shipped hundreds of new features.

We are adding value to Copilot to tackle work’s biggest pain points and help every employee scale their impact. These announcements build on our wave 2 momentum, including the new autonomous agent capabilities we announced in October.

Here’s a synopsis of many of the major announcements:

• Business Chat
  • M365 Copilot Actions automate repetitive tasks with new customizable prompt templates. (Private preview)
  • Update to Wave 2 announcements: rich artifacts in Copilot Pages in BizChat. (GA early 2025)
• Microsoft 365 Apps
  • Update to Wave 2 announcements: schedule 1:1s and focus time and draft agenda capability with Copilot in Outlook (GA December), Excel with Python (GA US Win32), presentation translation and Narrative Builder grounded in a file in PowerPoint (GA Q1 2025), Copilot support for screen shared content in Teams meetings, quick file summaries in chat, translated intelligent meeting recap (Public preview, coming) and more.
• Agents in Microsoft 365 
  • Agents in SharePoint tap into your document knowledge base to answer questions, gain insights, and act in real time. (GA) New promo allows non-Microsoft 365 Copilot users to experience agents in SharePoint through June 30. 
  • Employee self-service agent in Business Chat answers questions and actions common workplace HR/IT policy-related tasks. (Private preview)
  • Other out-of-box agents include Interpreter for real-time interpretation in Teams meetings (Public preview, early 2025), Facilitator for note-taking and summarization in Teams meetings and chat, and Project Manager handles everything from plan creation to executing tasks in Planner. Microsoft 365 Copilot license required to experience these agents. Additional licensing information is TBD. (Public preview)
• Adoption & Measurement
  • Viva Insights will be included in the M365 Copilot SKU in addition to the new Business Impact Report to analyze usage related to business KPIs. To bridge the gap until GA, leverage Viva Insights promo offer for customers with 50+ paid M365 Copilot licenses. (Public preview)
• Security, Privacy and Compliance
  • Copilot Control System offers IT capabilities for data protection and management controls as well as Copilot Analytics for adoption and business value reporting.
  • SharePoint Advanced Management now included in M365 Copilot to control content oversharing
  • Copilot in M365, Teams, and SharePoint admin centers, automates IT tasks and provides insights to improve tenant management. (Private preview)