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At its Ignite event in Chicago, Microsoft introduced new M365 features, including Copilot Actions and M365 agents. Copilot is a personal assistant that empowers employees and transforms business processes via agents in Copilot Studio. These announcements expand on the autonomous agent capabilities revealed last month.
Per their blog, nearly 70% of Fortune 500 companies use Microsoft 365 Copilot. In terms of impact – Copilot saves Dow millions in shipping, helps 70% of Bank of Queensland users save 2.5 – 5 hours weekly, improves Eaton’s documentation by 83%, and supports Accenture’s large-scale rollout to 100,000 employees.
New Features to Empower Employees
Copilot Actions use AI to automate everyday tasks. This feature is currently in private preview.
“With these actions, you can use CoPilot to reduce the amount of time you spend on repetitive every day tasks that you do…Actions are a very simple yet powerful way for you to scale what you do. So whatever was the thing that you had to do multi step, you just create one of these actions, and it just does it for you,” said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in his keynote address.
Upgrades also include faster responses, triple satisfaction rates, and hundreds of new features tackling workplace challenges.
Copilot Pages offers a dynamic collaboration canvas, enabling teams to create and share interactive artifacts like flow charts and code blocks (general availability in early 2025). Copilot in Teams can understand and summarise visual content from presentations and shared files, as well as file contents shared in chat, without needing to open them (public preview coming in early 2025). Copilot in PowerPoint will translate entire presentations into 40 languages while preserving slide design (generally available in 2025). Copilot in Outlook streamlines scheduling, helping users find focus time or arrange one-on-one meetings, and drafts meeting agendas (availability starting end of November 2024). Additionally, Themes by Copilot in Outlook, introduced earlier in November 2024, allows users to create customisable, dynamic email themes (now generally available).
Agents in Microsoft 365
In addition, Microsoft 365 Copilot introduces agents like SharePoint for knowledge access, Teams Interpreter for real-time translations, and Employee Self-Service for HR tasks. Facilitator and Project Manager automate planning, while partners like ServiceNow and S&P Global expand Copilot’s capabilities by enhancing efficiency.
“The best way to think about these, are as just teammates. For specific role, with very specific permissions. For example, our project manager agent will help automate all of the key steps in a project management workflow. Create a new plan from scratch. It will help oversee what is happening across the project, task assignments, content creation, etc,” added Nadella.
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