Microsoft 365 Copilot

Microsoft 365 Copilot is Microsoft's AI assistant built natively into Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, OneNote, and Loop, plus the standalone Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat experience. Following the Wave 3 announcement March 9 2026 and general availability April 22 2026, what Microsoft initially called "Agent Mode" became the default Copilot experience -- not a separate mode. Copilot now plans and executes multi-step tasks autonomously across Office apps, with users reviewing each step. In Word: agentic drafting that generates full documents from a prompt while asking clarifying questions about tone, structure, and audience; pulls context from related files, emails, and meetings; applies formatting and style guidelines. In Excel: multi-step data analysis where Copilot plans and executes building formulas, generating charts, creating new sheets, and showing reasoning steps; multi-step edits work on local workbooks (Windows and Mac). In PowerPoint: full deck generation with brand-compliant themes, animations, and speaker notes; understands organizational layouts, object styles, and brand kits. In Outlook: thread analysis with automatic meeting scheduling, agenda drafting, response generation, and inbox organization. Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat is the cross-app entry point and is included free with eligible Microsoft 365 subscriptions; full Copilot agentic features require the $30/user/month add-on (SMB promotional pricing $18/user/month through June 2026). The new Microsoft 365 E7 Frontier Suite (GA May 1 2026, $99/user/month) bundles Copilot, Agent 365, Microsoft Entra Suite, and M365 E5 -- a 13% discount vs buying separately. Wave 3 introduced multi-model intelligence: Anthropic's Claude (Sonnet 4.6, Opus 4.6) is now available in mainline Copilot Chat alongside OpenAI's GPT-5.2 and GPT-5.4 Thinking, with Copilot automatically routing tasks to the best model. Work IQ -- Microsoft's context layer drawing on emails, files, meetings, Teams, and SharePoint -- grounds outputs in the user's actual work patterns and relationships. Security: enforces existing M365 permissions and sensitivity labels, saves files to OneDrive/SharePoint with tenant controls, all actions logged in M365 audit log, customer content not used to train foundation models. Best fit: enterprises already standardized on Microsoft 365 that want unified AI across email, documents, spreadsheets, slides, and meetings; organizations needing one procurement track instead of separate AI vendors per app; teams in regulated industries (finance, legal, healthcare) requiring full audit trails and governance. Not appropriate for organizations outside the Microsoft 365 ecosystem, teams wanting standalone in-app AI without committing to Microsoft 365 platform, or users needing capabilities that explicitly exceed what Copilot offers (Anthropic's Claude for Excel offers cell-level citations Microsoft Copilot does not match; Gamma offers stronger pure-design slide generation than PowerPoint Copilot). Not affiliated.