Saturday, September 21, 2024

Microsoft 365 Copilot Wave 2 Announcement

Big announcements were made this week on what is being termed as Microsoft 365 Copilot Wave 2.  There are three major capabilities with this release:

  1. Copilot Pages
  2. Copilot Microsoft 365 Apps
  3. Copilot Agents

1) Copilot Pages

Copilot Pages are a new immersive and collaborative experience that begins with you engaging with Copilot to obtain information.  From there, an interactive experience starts that allows you to take information you obtain from Copilot, extract it, share and then collaborate with that data in real-time with your colleagues.  It allows quickly transition information you obtain from Copilot to create persistent work products.

If you are wondering what a Copilot Page is, it is essentially an integrated experience with Loop.  Loop files are created and stored for the user.  Loop files are managed just like any other Office file stored in SharePoint Online.  The Copilot Page is stored in a new user owned SharePoint Embedded container designated for user.  Copilot Pages can be managed from an enterprise perspective just like any other piece of content in SharePoint Online.

2) Copilot Microsoft 365 Apps

There are new experiences being delivered with Copilot with each of the Microsoft 365 Apps.

Copilot in Excel: Provides new capabilities to assist users with formatting and analyzing data in spreadsheets.  Copilot knows how to reason over the data and assist with tasks with formatting and preparing data to make decisions.  Applying formulas, formatting, are just pieces of this.  You now can ask Copilot questions about the data.  Copilot can make recommendations on visual formats for the best chart to represent the data you have in Excel.  If you need to do some advanced analysis, you can leverage Copilot to generate Python code in your spreadsheet to create complex operations such as building visualizations, data refinement, machine learning and predictive analytics.  There are also new capabilities where Copilot can reason over data in a spreadsheet and generate summarized natural language responses about the data that can be used in other business products you are creating.

Copilot in PowerPoint: There are new Copilot features that assist with the creation of slides and content.  Narrative Builder is a new feature where Copilot assists you with creating an outline and then generates slides based on that outline.  You have the ability to tell Copilot the type of information you and to bring into the presentation, it will query your corporate data and then pull the data into the outline for you to review.  There is also a new feature called Brand Manager that will bring in your corporate brand and apply it to the presentation.

Copilot in Teams: There is a new feature that brings together the meeting transcript with chat data provide a complete picture of what was discussed in the meeting.

Copilot in Outlook: There is new capability that will assist you with Prioritizing your inbox.  Copilot will quickly review the messages that matter, and generate a summary of each email including why it was prioritized.

Copilot in Word: Today, Copilot already assists the user with bringing in and referencing data from the web and files you have access to.  This is going to be expanded to other locations such as your email and meetings.

Copilot in OneDrive: With Copilot, you now do not have to remember where that content was stored, especially if you have amassed a large volume of content of the years.  All this information is accessible to Copilot.

3) Copilot Agents

This is an extremely exciting new capability.  Agents are basically AI assistants that are designed to automate and execute business processes.  They can be very simple in nature that automate simple tasks or be more complex to replace repetitive tasks.  To create an agent there is a new agent builder tool that is built to be simple for an information worker.  An agent can be created based on a defined set of data, and then users can interact with that agent to obtain data.  More advanced agents can operate autonomously and independently execute and perform planned activities.

There is a new lightweight Copilot Studio tool that assists users with the creation of an Agent.  You have the ability to tell Copilot Studio, in natural language, what you like it to be.  You can identify knowledge sources and data across the enterprise to be leveraged by the Agent.  From there the Agent and be deployed to the enterprise.

References


Posted by Jason Apergis at 9:36 AM
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