Microsoft brings AI agents to Outlook, Teams, and PowerPoint

Microsoft plans to roll out a slew of new features for its business-facing 365 Copilot products starting early next year, the company announced during its Microsoft Ignite 2024 event on Tuesday.

365 Copilot, which was rebranded from just Copilot in September, enables businesses to incorporate Microsoft Copilot generative AI into its Microsoft 365 family of apps (as well as in Teams) for a $30/employee/month subscription.

“We’re accelerating our ambition to empower every employee with Copilot as a personal assistant and to transform every business process with agents built in Copilot Studio,” Jared Spataro, CMO of AI at Work, wrote in Tuesday’s announcement post. “We’re 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.”

To start, the company is currently experimenting with new “Copilot Actions” that will enable users to automate tasks, such as setting the next day’s action items, summarizing client meetings, or pinging co-workers for input on a project, using “simple, fill-in-the-blank prompts.” This feature is currently in private preview. The company is also revamping its Copilot Pages (Microsoft’s version of Canvas or Artifacts) so that users can prompt the chatbot to generate content, drawn from Microsoft Graph, and then share it with others in the company on persistent and updatable Pages. Expect to see that feature roll out to users in early 2025.

AI agents in Outlook, Teams, and more

Teams will be getting smarter as well. In a public preview coming in early 2025, Copilot will be able to “understand, recap, and answer questions” based on visual content shared onscreen in the chat. In fact, many of the 365 apps will gain added AI capabilities in the coming months. Copilot in Outlook will be able to scour both your calendar and your coworker’s to automatically figure out what meeting time works best for both of you. That feature arrives at the end of this November. In PowerPoint, Copilot will be able to translate entire slide decks into one of 40 languages, without changing the overall design of each slide. There’s no hard release date on that feature beyond that it arrives in 2025.

Microsoft has also announced that it is drastically expanding its use of AI agents “to help scale individual impact and transform business process,” Spataro wrote. The company released a series of similar autonomous agents last month aimed at sales, service, finance, and supply chain applications, and plans to augment those offerings in the new year, which “will give customers the competitive advantage they need to future-proof their organization.”

For example, Microsoft plans to release an Interpreter agent for Teams as a public preview in early 2025. It will allow users to audibly translate what they’re saying in real time into a different language without changing the sound of their voice. Other agents will automatically take meeting notes and help manage projects in Microsoft Planner. The Employee Self-Service Agent, which is currently in private preview, answers new hires’ common questions and helps them navigate HR and IT tasks.

Microsoft

The company is also debuting new hardware in the new year. On Tuesday, Microsoft announced the forthcoming release of Windows 365 Link, “the first Cloud PC device purpose-built by Microsoft to connect directly to Windows 365 in seconds.”

It will act essentially as an access point where users can access a virtual Windows desktop in the Microsoft Cloud, rather than running everything locally. The Link is currently in public preview and is expected to retail for $349 when it hits select markets in April 2025.