At Microsoft’s annual Ignite conference, several exciting innovations were unveiled. These include Business Chat (BizChat), the new user interface for AI, enhancements in Copilot for personal productivity, and Copilot agents designed to optimise business processes.
Jared Spataro, Chief Marketing Officer, AI at Work, Microsoft
This is a major improvement over the country’s 2022 score of zero per cent, but compares poorly to the EU average of 79 per cent.
The report’s recommendations included the collecting of more data, and more categories of data, and making more data available to citizens.
Microsoft 365 Copilot is becoming a daily habit for people around the world—already, nearly 70% of Fortune 500 companies are using it. Dow anticipates that Copilot will save it millions of dollars on Domestic shipping operations in the first year; at Bank of Queensland Group, 70% of users are saving two and a half to five hours per week; Eaton is speeding up internal documentation processes by 83%; and Accenture is going big, rolling out Copilot to 100,000 employees.
At Microsoft Ignite 2024, Microsoft accelerated their ambition to empower every employee with Copilot as a personal assistant and to transform every business process with agents built in Microsoft Copilot Studio.
Announcements included:
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- Copilot Actions in Microsoft 365 Copilot to help you automate everyday repetitive tasks.
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- New agents in Microsoft 365 to unlock SharePoint knowledge, provide real-time language interpretation in Microsoft Teams meetings, and automate employee self-service.
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- The Copilot Control System to help IT professionals confidently manage Copilot and agents securely.
These announcements build on our wave 2 momentum, including the new autonomous agent capabilities that Microsoft announced in October 2024.
Empower every employee with Microsoft 365 Copilot
Thanks to customers, Microsoft have the world’s best feedback loop on AI at work. Microsoft have dramatically improved Copilot performance—responses are two times faster on average and response satisfaction is nearly three times higher1—and shipped hundreds of new features. And are adding new value to Copilot to tackle work’s biggest pain points and help every employee scale their impact—from automating repetitive tasks to managing your calendar.
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- New Copilot Actions automate everyday tasks with simple, fill-in-the-blank prompts that you can set and forget. For example, you can automatically receive a summary of your most important action items at the end of each workday, create an action to gather inputs from your team for a weekly newsletter you send each Thursday, or automate customer meeting prep with a recurring action that summarises your last few interactions ahead of your next sync. In private preview.
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- Microsoft is adding new value to Copilot Pages—a dynamic, persistent canvas designed for multiplayer AI collaboration—with rich artifacts. Now, you can prompt Copilot to create everything from interactive flow charts to blocks of code—drawing from data across Microsoft Graph—then share them in durable Pages your team can build upon. Generally available in early 2025.
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- With Teams, rich dialogue happens across the conversation, as well as chat and onscreen presentations. Now, Copilot in Teams can understand, recap, and answer questions based on visual content shared onscreen—from PowerPoint to the web—in addition to the transcript and chat. You can also ask Copilot for a quick summary of a file shared in a chat to get all its main points without having to open the file. Public preview coming in early 2025.
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- Now, with a single prompt, Copilot in PowerPoint can translate entire presentations into one of 40 languages, while maintaining the overall design of each slide. It’s like having a skilled translator working right alongside you. Generally available in 2025.
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- Copilot in Outlook can now help you schedule focus time or one-on-ones with a colleague—looking across both your calendars to find the best time—and draft a meeting agenda. Generally available by the end of November.
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- And to make work more fun, earlier in November 2024 Microsoft announced Themes by Copilot in Outlook so you can create a unique theme that speaks to you—it could even change with the weather. Generally available.
Transforming every business process with agents
Copilot is where you interact with agents, and Copilot Studio is where you can easily create, manage, and connect agents to Copilot. Microsoft is introducing agents in Microsoft 365 designed to help scale individual impact and transform business processes. These new agents complement the autonomous agents that we announced in October 2024 for sales, service, finance, and supply chain professionals—and Microsoft is just getting started. They’ll create many more agents in the coming year that will give customers the competitive advantage they need to future-proof their organisation.
Organisations rely on SharePoint, creating more than two million sites and uploading more than two billion files daily. Microsoft is announcing that every SharePoint site now has an agent, so every employee can quickly tap into this massive knowledge base. You can use agents in SharePoint to quickly pull project details from a workback schedule, summarise a recent product memo, or find a document in seconds. For example, salespeople can instantly find the latest product specs, pricing documents, or client proposals, enabling them to respond to customer queries faster and more accurately, without having to search through multiple files. You can ask the agents questions about data across your files, and even create and share custom agents scoped to specific content with a single click. Generally available.
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- Imagine being able to sound just like you in a different language. The Interpreter agent in Teams provides real-time speech-to-speech interpretation during meetings, and you can opt to have it simulate your speaking voice for a more personal and engaging experience. Public preview coming in early 2025.
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- The Employee Self-Service Agent in Business Chat quickly answers common policy questions and makes it easy to complete key tasks, starting with HR and IT. It can help employees understand their benefits, for instance, or request a new laptop. And it can be customised in Copilot Studio to meet the unique needs of your organisation. In private preview.
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- Other agents include Facilitator, which takes real-time notes in Teams meetings and chats, and Project Manager, which automates plan creation and even completes tasks in Microsoft Planner. In public preview.
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- In the coming months, Microsoft partners like ServiceNow, Workday, and Cohere—along with dozens more—will add their agents to Copilot, bringing their unique, mission-critical knowledge to organisations across HR, finance, and sales right in the flow of work. S&P Global, CB Insights, and more are introducing new connectors, enabling Copilot to reference more types of business data.
Equipping IT to lead AI transformation
Chief information officers and IT professionals are at the epicenter of AI transformation. To empower every IT team to lead at scale, we’re introducing the Copilot Control System—designed for IT to confidently adopt and accelerate the business value of Copilot and agents.
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- Data protection enables intelligent grounding on enterprise data while respecting your organisation’s controls. To give IT even more control, we’re announcing that SharePoint Advanced Management will be included at no additional charge for Copilot customers to accelerate adoption and address oversharing with built-in content governance reports and controls. Generally available in early 2025.
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- Management controls allow IT to govern access and usage of Copilot and agents—including controls over which users can use Copilot and agents—along with visibility into agent status and lifecycle. And we’re announcing that Copilot in Microsoft 365 admin centers will be available to all Copilot customers to automate time-consuming IT tasks, provide personalised insights to improve tenant management, and answer admin questions. In private preview; generally available early 2025.
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- Measurement and reporting allow IT and business leaders to track adoption patterns and return on investment from the use of Copilot and agents. Microsoft is announcing that Microsoft Viva Insights will be included in Copilot at no additional charge as part of the new Copilot Analytics. Copilot Analytics provides out-of-the-box experiences to measure Copilot adoption and business impact, customisable reporting for deeper analysis, and the new Copilot Business Impact Report for analysing Copilot usage against business key performance indicators across sales, finance, marketing, and more. The Copilot Business Impact Report is in public preview; Copilot Analytics generally available in early 2025.
Enabling every employee to be secure and productive with Windows
In today’s digital landscape, protecting your organisation’s data from emerging threats and ensuring system integrity is paramount. Microsoft is pushing the boundaries to continue making Windows the most secure and performant platform for you and your organisation.
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- Microsoft is introducing the Windows Resiliency Initiative, which includes Quick Machine Recovery—a new solution to help customers recover from unexpected disruptions, giving admins the ability to execute targeted fixes from Windows Update on PCs even if they’re unable to boot. Coming to Windows Insider Program in early 2025.
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- Microsoft is also excited to announce Windows 365 Link, the first Cloud PC device purpose-built by Microsoft to connect directly to Windows 365 in seconds. Windows 365 Link enables desk-based users to work securely on a familiar Windows desktop in the Microsoft Cloud with responsive, high-fidelity experiences. In public preview now; generally available for $349 in select markets starting April 2025.
Microsoft 365 Copilot
Save time, amplify productivity, and drive business forward faster.
To empower every employee with Copilot as a personal assistant and transform every business process with agents built in Copilot Studio, start using Copilot today. Visit Microsoft365.com/copilot or download the Microsoft 365 app on your mobile device.
The above text was reproduced from the blog published on Microsoft 365 on November 19th, 2024.
Sources:
1 Blind, side-by-side human intelligence tasks conducted on behalf of Microsoft in July and August 2024, each with 9 participants (judges) to compare user satisfaction with query responses of Microsoft Copilot and a competitor. Copilot won 16% of the comparisons in July and 46% in August.
2 Pricing is accurate as of November 2024.
FAQs
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- What is Microsoft 365 Copilot and how does it benefit businesses? Microsoft 365 Copilot is an AI-powered assistant designed to enhance productivity by automating repetitive tasks, managing calendars, and providing contextual insights. It helps businesses save time and improve efficiency.
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- How does Copilot in Microsoft Teams enhance meeting productivity? Copilot in Teams can understand, recap, and answer questions based on visual content shared onscreen, as well as provide quick summaries of shared files, making meetings more efficient and productive.
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- How can businesses get started with Microsoft 365 Copilot? Businesses can get started with Microsoft 365 Copilot by exploring its features in applications like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams, and leveraging the Copilot Control System for secure and efficient management.
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- How does Copilot in PowerPoint assist with presentations? Copilot in PowerPoint can translate entire presentations into one of 40 languages while maintaining the slide design, making it easier to create multilingual presentations.
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- What new features were announced for Microsoft 365 Copilot at Ignite 2024? At Ignite 2024, Microsoft announced Copilot Actions for automating tasks, new agents for SharePoint knowledge, real-time language interpretation in Teams, and the Copilot Control System for IT management.
