Microsoft unveils new features to empower every employee with Copilot AI

As businesses worldwide increasingly adopt artificial intelligence (AI), Microsoft has announced new features designed to empower every employee with its Copilot AI as a personal assistant and revolutionize business processes through custom agents built in its Copilot Studio.

The new Copilot Actions will automate routine tasks using simple, fill-in-the-blank prompts, allowing users to set them and forget them. Microsoft claims to have significantly improved Copilot’s performance, with responses now twice as fast on average and user satisfaction nearly three times higher, alongside the addition of hundreds of new features.

At the *Microsoft Ignite 2024* event, Jared Spataro, Chief Marketing Officer of AI at Work, highlighted that new agents in Microsoft 365 would provide capabilities such as unlocking SharePoint knowledge, real-time language translation during Microsoft Teams meetings, and automating employee self-service tasks. Additionally, the *Copilot Control System* will allow IT professionals to securely manage Copilot and its agents.

Microsoft also introduced the *Windows Resiliency Initiative*, which includes Quick Machine Recovery, enabling targeted fixes for PCs that cannot boot.

The company is enhancing *Copilot Pages*, a dynamic, persistent platform for AI collaboration, by adding rich artifacts, which will be available in early 2025. Users will be able to prompt Copilot to create interactive flowcharts, blocks of code, and other content, leveraging data from Microsoft Graph, and share it in Pages for team collaboration.

In *Microsoft Teams*, Copilot can now understand and respond to questions about visual content shared on screen, such as PowerPoint presentations or web pages, in addition to text-based chat and transcripts. In *PowerPoint*, Copilot can translate entire presentations into one of 40 languages while preserving the design of each slide. Copilot in *Outlook* will also assist with scheduling focus time or one-on-one meetings by finding optimal times in users’ calendars and drafting meeting agendas. These features are expected to be generally available by the end of November.

Microsoft also revealed that nearly 70% of Fortune 500 companies are already using Microsoft 365 Copilot.