Microsoft hosted a 30-minute event on LinkedIn today, detailing what it calls the "second wave" of Microsoft 365 Copilot. The company announced a range of new Copilot-powered features for apps such as Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook, as well as a completely new feature called Copilot Pages. The aim is to bring more value to the $30 enterprise tier for Copilot, which many companies have been hesitant to pay since it was launched last year.

The new Copilot Pages feature draws from the web and work files

The first new feature discussed at the Microsoft event was Copilot Pages. This feature is essentially a collaborative canvas tool like Notion or Apple's Freeform but heavily powered by AI. Users work on a split screen where the left side is a chat with Copilot, and the right is a shared Page that colleagues can access and edit in real-time. In the demonstration, VP for AI at Work Jared Spataro shows how users can draw on past documents, files, and meetings to guide Copilot's responses.

For example, he asks Copilot to create a bulleted list of customer requirements discussed in a previous recorded meeting. Copilot can also pull information from the web to add to the Page, including citations, so its work can be fact-checked. The idea is to save the time and energy it would take to conduct web searches and search through files and meeting transcripts to put together all of this information manually. As for the quality of Copilot's output, Microsoft says it has upgraded to ChatGPT-4o and there has been a three-fold improvement in response satisfaction.

Copilot has also been added to Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook

Copilot has also been added to Excel, allowing users to perform more advanced analytics through natural language prompts, including analytics with Python. Whatever you ask Copilot to do, its response will first be posted to the chat, and then you can choose to add it to the spreadsheet if you're satisfied with the result.

The new Narrative builder in PowerPoint is the same kind of feature. It allows you to create a plan and generate slides using Copilot, with it drawing on your work files and media libraries to populate the slides. It takes care of everything from images to content, animations, slide transitions, and speaker notes.

In Microsoft Teams, Copilot now keeps track of both the meeting transcript and what's happening in the chat so it can provide a better overview of everything that happens. In the demonstration, it combs through both to pick out questions that haven't been answered yet. Other features include the "Prioritize my inbox" feature for Microsoft Outlook that pushes emails from certain people or covering certain topics to the top of your inbox.

Copilot agents lets you create specialized programs

The last announcement was Copilot agents. This feature allows you to build a Copilot program or "agent" that will perform a specific task for you. You describe what you want the agent to do and where you want it to get its information from. For example, you can make an agent from a collection of files to act like an expert on the contents. Once it's created, you can use natural language to ask questions about everything the files contain.

As always, the features available to you depend on your subscription tier. To get access to everything, Microsoft wants businesses to pay $30 per month per employee — a price that has made companies hesitant until now. However, Microsoft paired today's feature announcements with another announcement: a contract with Vodafone for 68,000 Copilot licenses.

That's a cost of just over two million dollars a month. After testing the AI suite, Vodafone said they saved an average of three hours a week per person. There's no doubt that Microsoft hopes this big contract will help them land more contracts in the future, but the new features will need to prove useful to make that happen.

Since all the announced features center around saving time, it means employees really need to be able to trust Copilot's output. If you find mistakes and have to spend too long fact-checking, it will quickly become pointless. We'll keep you updated on the reception to this new wave of Copilot features in the coming weeks.