Earlier this week, Microsoft announced and released Wave 2 of their ever popular Microsoft Copilot, their AI assistant built off the back of Chat GPT.
Microsoft claims that Copilot has the fastest adoption rate of any of their Microsoft 365 suite, and that, at one company they surveyed, Copilot users saved 92 minutes per week on average when using the AI tool. They also claim that, since general release, Copilot has doubled its speed in terms of responses, and that response satisfaction has tripled.
It is changing every day, both as users get to know it and as it starts to adapt to things like writing style, common prompts etc.
With wave 2, Microsoft has released a host of new features and uses; some are small tweaks, some are game-changing new tools. Take a look below for what to expect from Microsoft Copilot Wave 2.
As features get added, we’ll be dropping short demos on how you can use Copilot – click below to take a look (and feel free to bookmark, as we update that page regularly!)
Copilot In Web
The version of Copilot that exists in the web has been granted some big new features – the biggest? BizChat
Accessible right now at this web page to those with a Copilot licence (and coming soon to the free version of Copilot), you’ll find what Microsoft dubs “The UI for AI“.
BizChat is an interface that allows you to talk to Copilot as you already have been, but now with access to your company’s files and data, turning your organisation’s data into “a rich database of information and insight” and allowing you to collaborate with Copilot like never before. You’ll see a toggle at the top of the page, toggling between “Work” and “Web” – switching it to work mode gives you the features of BizChat.
This is then taken even further with the other big feature – Pages.
‘Pages’ is a digital canvas allowing you to collaborate with other members of your organisation, without leaving your Copilot chat. You can talk to Copilot and drop it’s responses onto the collaborative page, where everyone with access to the page will be able to see them. Users of Microsoft Loop may find the interface familiar, as it’s a similar concept to a Loop page, with the added benefit of Copilot.
Copilot In Teams
Copilot within Teams hasn’t received any major feature drops. Instead, Microsoft has chosen to make small improvements to the functions that already exist – namely, when asking Copilot to summarise a recorded meeting, Copilot will analyse the meeting chat as well as the transcript, leading to better and more comprehensive summaries.
You can also now ask Copilot to find any unanswered questions or actions from the meeting, so that its ability to read the meeting chat gets put to good use.
Copilot In Outlook
The biggest new feature for Outlook is the ability for Copilot to now prioritise your inbox. With just one prompt, Copilot analyses your inbox based not only on the content of the emails you’ve received, but also on your role within the organisation, including who you report to and the email threads you’re actively respondent in.
Coming soon in a future update, you’ll be able to teach Copilot what topics, keywords, and contacts that are important to you and you’re role, and Copilot will be able to prioritise emails that fit your criteria.
Some smaller updates to Copilot’s functionality in Outlook, specifically the mobile version, include the ability to suggest and choose what tone you want a reply to be generated in, making replying to emails with Copilot even easier and more convenient.
Also, Copilot will suggest multiple different responses in some cases, and you can choose whichever you feel most appropriate and edit from there (or ask Copilot to tweak certain parts, if you’re so inclined).
Copilot In OneDrive
Similarly to Teams, OneDrive hasn’t received much in the way of feature drops – but the one it has received could come in handy for its messier users!
Copilot can now compare files, meaning that finding the latest file version that’s hidden in a random folder with a random date is now much easier. Copilot will compare two files and tell you what the differences in content are – going one step further than just comparing the files’ metadata to determine which is the latest version.
Copilot In Excel
The big news is that Copilot in Excel is now generally available! Previously, Copilot for Excel was only in public preview, and (in our experience) wasn’t as reliable as the rest of the Microsoft 365 suite, but now the full version is out for everyone with a Copilot licence to use. Another big change is that, unlike in the preview, you can now ask Copilot to analyse data that hasn’t been formatted into a table, lifting one of the biggest restrictions from previous versions.
What has now entered preview, however, and isn’t available generally, is Copilot’s ability to generate Python code and insert it into your Excel sheets.
Now, anyone can work with Copilot to conduct advanced analysis like forecasting, risk analysis, machine learning, and visualizing complex data, all without knowing Python (or so Microsoft claims).
As previously mentioned, this feature is in preview, so may not be fully reliable just yet, and likely won’t be available to most users. Copilot in Excel with Python will become generally available in a future update, likely with Copilot’s wave 3 release.
Copilot In Word
The big new thing in Copilot for Word is the ability for Copilot to reference emails and meetings when generating content – instead of just other files within your organisation’s SharePoint. Beyond this, Microsoft have simply made general improvements to the existing capabilities of Copilot.
Copilot In PowerPoint
Copilot within PowerPoint has one big new feature – The Narrative Editor.
Now, when asking Copilot to generate a presentation based on a specific topic, question, or file, Copilot will open the Narrative Editor, which gives you a quick heads up on what the presentation is going to look like. Copilot presents you with a list of slide titles, with bullet points under each title giving you an idea of what the content of the slide will feature. From here, you can rearrange the slide order and ask Copilot to insert new slides, or rewrite ones you’re not happy about.
Aside from the Narrative Editor, Microsoft have made improvements to the actual content that Copilot generates for your slides, giving you better speaker notes, and more reliably inserting animations and slide transitions. You can also ask Copilot to insert images that it has generated itself, as opposed to just ones from the web.
And Finally, Copilot Agents.
This is Microsoft’s big new feature for Copilot, which they say will give you the ability to scale your team like never before.
Copilot agents are specific instances of Copilot that you can create to carry a specific business process. They can range in capability from simple prompt-and-response agents, to agents that replace repetitive tasks, to more advanced, fully autonomous agents, depending on how you build them.
Microsoft ensures that these agents will be as secure as Copilot itself, adhering to your organisation’s specific security policies, and operating within, and only within your Microsoft 365 tenant.
You can create your own Copilot Agents using Microsoft’s agent builder, or you can make use of some pre-built agents that Microsoft has released with this update, such as the Visual Creator Agent, which assists in creating AI generated images.
The agent builder sits in SharePoint and in BizChat on the web. Copilot agents in BizChat will be releasing to users gradually in the coming weeks, and Copilot agents in SharePoint will enter preview in early October.
