Copilot Wave 2 boosts productivity with AI across your Microsoft 365 apps

By James On Sep 16, 2024

Microsoft added Copilot, its generative AI chatbot, to Microsoft 365 back in March of last year, but is now launching what it calls “Wave 2” of its AI-powered productivity enhancements by completely overhauling the way you work with Copilot and adding a number of additional AI features to the Microsoft 365 apps.

In this new way of working, you can open the Copilot chat interface, now called Business Chat, and from there combine all the knowledge that Microsoft 365 has about you and your organization with the knowledge that can be found on the web. You do this by creating collaborative documents called Pages.

For example, you can start by asking Copilot a question about something on the web. Once Copilot finds what you’re looking for, click the “Edit in Pages” button. Copilot’s answer will be moved to a new Copilot page (a pop-up document window with all the information you’re interested in). You can then expand the window further, share it, and collaborate on it with all your teammates.

Business chat with a document open in Copilot Pages. (Image credit: Microsoft)

Pages (not to be confused with the Apple app of the same name) documents are very similar to Word documents. You can go back to Business Chat and perform further searches for information, and then bring that new data into your Pages document. There’s a simple switch at the top of the Business Chat window that lets you toggle between Web or Work. Switch to Work, and Copilot can tap into the knowledge in all of your work documents; so you can ask Copilot to say something like, “Create a report similar to the one we created for Eric last month, but with new data,” and it will compile it for you.

Story Builder in Microsoft PowerPoint. — The New Story Builder in PowerPoint (Image credit: Microsoft)

PowerPoint Story Builder

A new story builder has been added to PowerPoint to help you create a story for your next presentation. It lets you create a whole stack of slides from a prompt using Copilot, complete with transitions and speaker notes. Type your prompt into the answer to the “Create a presentation about” prompt and watch it work its magic. You’ll get a draft outline, which you can reorder, edit, and add new sections to. When you’re happy, click “Generate Slides” and Copilot will produce your entire presentation, pulling images from your company library or generating images as needed using DALL-E 3.

Microsoft Excel with data analysis in Python. — Microsoft Excel Shows Data Analysis Using Python (Image credit: Microsoft)

Copilot in Excel with Python

Now you can combine the power of Python with Copilot and Excel to do some serious math. You can make predictions in Excel, perform risk analysis, and visualize complex data using natural language prompts in Copilot, all without writing a single line of code.

Copilot in Outlook, Word, Teams and Drive

The ability to intelligently summarize your inbox is coming to Outlook with a new feature called Prioritize my inbox. This produces a neat summary of what’s in your inbox, so you don’t have to wade through useless previews of the beginning of emails or long text piles. Word gets new suggested prompts to help you get started on documents. Copilot in OneDrive lets you use it to reason across your Drive, allowing it to understand, summarize, and compare up to five different files. Finally, Copilot in Teams can now analyze the group chat in all the replies it gives you.

Co-pilot agents

A brand new feature to look out for is Copilot Agents. These are AI assistants designed to automate business processes. You can create an agent from any site, library, or folder, and it can use Copilot’s reasoning power on those files. You can even add your agents to your department’s Teams chat and @mention them too, and they’ll respond just like a human team member. You can talk to agents just like you would a trusted colleague, and your data never leaves the Microsoft 365 trust boundary.

When will you get it?

For Microsoft 365 Copilot customers, the new Business Chat and Pages features are rolling out now, though Microsoft notes that Pages will be “generally available later this month.” In the coming weeks, Microsoft will roll out Pages to the more than 400 million people who have access to the free version of Copilot when signed in with a Microsoft Entra account. You can start using Business Chat today at Microsoft365.com/Copilot.

The other new features in the Microsoft 365 apps will appear in public previews later this month.