Microsoft has unveiled a new suite of capabilities for its AI-driven productivity tool, Copilot, at the Microsoft Build 2024 conference. These advancements aim to enhance business efficiency and collaboration, offering companies new ways to manage their operations and projects.
One of the standout features introduced is Team Copilot, which elevates the solution from a personal assistant to an integral team member. This feature is designed to enhance collaboration and project management within organisations.
Team Copilot can now facilitate meetings by managing agendas and taking notes that participants can coauthor. It also helps streamline group collaborations by surfacing critical information, tracking action items, and addressing unresolved issues.Additionally, it acts as a project manager by creating and assigning tasks, tracking deadlines, and prompting team members for their input when required. These capabilities will be available in preview later in 2024 for customers holding a Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 licence.
Another significant feature is the introduction of Agents within Microsoft Copilot Studio, which allows businesses to create custom copilots to automate various business processes. These custom copilots can operate independently, executing long-running processes, reasoning over actions and user inputs, leveraging memory for context, learning from user feedback, and managing exception requests. For instance, an order taker copilot can handle the whole order fulfillment process - from taking and processing the order to making intelligent recommendations for out-of-stock items and shipping them to the customer.
These new agent capabilities are currently available for customers in an Early Access Programme. Microsoft anticipates learning and refining these features alongside its customers before broader availability later in 2024. Copilot Studio aims to provide an optimal approach for building and managing custom copilots, whether through natural language, pre-built templates, or topic definitions.
Copilot Studio is also introducing Copilot connectors, aimed at simplifying how developers connect various business and collaboration data to their copilots. The connectors include more than 1,400 Microsoft Power Platform connectors, Microsoft Graph connectors, and Power Query connectors, with future integrations planned with Microsoft Fabric. This functionality allows copilots to utilise diverse data sources, including public websites, Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft OneDrive, Microsoft Dataverse tables, Microsoft Fabric OneLake, and Microsoft Graph, as well as leading third-party applications.
Developers will also be able to publish their copilots as Copilot extensions. These extensions will further expand the range of actions that Microsoft Copilot can execute, customise grounding knowledge with relevant business data, and facilitate hand-offs to other copilots. IT teams will soon manage available Copilot connectors, ensuring developers use a curated and trusted catalogue.
Overall, these advancements in Copilot reflect Microsoft's commitment to enhancing productivity and efficiency across businesses. By offering tools that streamline collaboration, automate processes, and integrate various data sources, the company states it aims to provide organisations with the resources they need to drive significant business results.
