Microsoft Copilot's Wave 2 is here. Everything you need to know

Since its launch, Microsoft Copilot has proved a worthy ChatGPT competitor, even occasionally lapping OpenAI's offering. However, as ChatGPT continued to advance, Copilot lagged -- until now. 

On Monday, Microsoft held a live-streamed event titled "Microsoft 365 Copilot: Wave 2," during which it unveiled all of the upgrades coming to its artificial intelligence (AI) assistant, both for enterprise and personal consumers. 

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The upgrades were impressive, including further integration with Microsoft 365 applications and collaborative ways to use AI as a team, group, or family. To see all of the announcements, keep reading below. 

Copilot Pages

If you sign into Copilot with your work or organization's account, you will likely notice a tab option to switch from Work to Web. The Work tab is what Microsoft refers to as BizChat, a workflow within Copilot that can pull answers from your work data in the Microsoft 365 applications. BizChat has now been upgraded with a new Pages feature. 

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With Pages, you can take the insights Copilot found for you -- which are rooted in your business data -- edit them, add them to a Page, and share them with your team to collaborate. Pages are much like any other editable document and can be accessed by a shareable and editable link. 

This feature emphasizes multiplayer AI, a trend seen in other AI companies' recent offerings, such as You.com's collaborative AI assistants and Salesforce's Agentforce, a suite of autonomous and collaborative AI agents. 

Pages will begin rolling out to Microsoft 365 Copilot customers today and will be available to free Microsoft Copilot users who are signed in with their Microsoft Entra account in the coming weeks. 

Copilot in the Microsoft 365 apps 

One of Microsoft Copilot's biggest advantages is its ability to help users within the Microsoft 365 apps, which have become a steady cornerstone of many people's workflows. With Wave 2, Microsoft is using customer feedback to further its Copilot assistance in the applications and improve user accessibility. 

For starters, Copilot in Excel is generally available for all users and provides support for formulas, data visualization, conditional formatting, and more. 

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Furthermore, Microsoft announced Copilot in Excel with Python in public preview, which allows users to work with Python in Excel using only natural language. This means users can leverage Python in Excel to conduct advanced analysis, such as forecasting and risk analysis, without entering any code. 

Microsoft also made Narrative Builder in PowerPoint generally available. This feature builds you the first draft of your presentation in minutes -- just type in a topic, and the Builder will produce an outline. 

Copilot in Teams can now synthesize both the contents of an actual meeting and what was sent in the chat to create a summary of the entire meeting. For example, if a user asks Copilot what they missed in the meeting, the response will also include content from the chat. This feature will be generally available next month. 

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Copilot in Outlook couldn't be left behind: It now has a "Prioritize my inbox" feature that, as the name implies, analyzes your inbox and flags the most important emails while providing a summary of it and the reason it was prioritized. Microsoft shares that users will even "soon" be able to instruct Copilot on the topics or keywords it should look for to mark as high priority. 

These features are unavailable now, but Microsoft says they will be in public preview starting in late 2024.  

Since users often pull on external resources when writing in Microsoft Word, Microsoft is introducing a new feature later this month that allows users to quickly reference web and work data, including emails, PDFs, PowerPoints, and more. Copilot in Word also got a new "on-canvas start experience, " allowing users to collaborate with Copilot inline as they work on sections of their document. Both these Word features are now generally available. 

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Lastly, Microsoft unveiled Copilot in OneDrive, allowing users to quickly leverage the assistant to find files in their OneDrive repository, get summaries, and even compare files. Copilot in OneDrive is rolling out to users starting today and will be generally available this month.  

Copilot agents 

Microsoft introduced Copilot agents, AI assistants that can carry out specific tasks with as little or as much human intervention as a user may need. For example, Microsoft shares that some agents can perform fully autonomously while others are more simple "prompt-and-response" agents. 

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Users can build Copilot agents using the new agent builder, an experience powered by Copilot Studio that allows users to build an agent in BizChat or Sharepoint. These agents can then be summoned in the 365 applications like any other teammate, using the "@" to call on it. 

Copilot agents and the agent builder in BizChat are generally available starting today and will be rolled out to all customers in the coming weeks. However, Copilot agents and agent builder in SharePoint will enter public preview in early October, according to Microsoft. 

Bonus: Confirmation of LLM in Copilot 

In May, OpenAI unveiled GPT-4o, its most advanced model with GPT-4-level intelligence and multimodal capabilities. It then infused ChatGPT with this model for both free and paid ChatGPT users to enjoy. Since then, there has been much speculation on whether Copilot would follow suit, upgrading its AI chatbot to the latest version. 

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In the event blog post on Monday, Microsoft confirmed that Copilot uses GPT-4o, which, according to Microsoft, has dramatically improved performance with responses that are more than two times faster on average. 

Furthermore, Microsoft said it would continue to bring the latest models to Copilot, including OpenAI's o1, which was introduced last week and has the most advanced reasoning of OpenAI models thus far.