Microsoft Unveils Major AI Upgrades to Copilot and Outlook at Build 2025

Your Outlook inbox is about to get several Copilot AI upgrades for free - here's what's new

Microsoft 365 Copilot gets a makeover at Build 2025. Here's everything coming your way. As expected, Microsoft Build, the company's annual developer conference, featured artificial intelligence at center stage. The company's AI companion, Microsoft Copilot, received several upgrades, including ones that make the Microsoft 365 suite of apps much easier to use. Also: Microsoft's new AI skills are coming to Copilot+ PCs - including some for all Windows 11 users Reading, organizing, and answering emails are tedious and time-consuming tasks that are crucial to everyone's daily workflows, regardless of your industry or occupation. To help, Microsoft has added new Copilot features for Outlook mail and calendar that are now generally available to users. According to Microsoft, Outlook is helping people find what they need quicker by generating summaries of search results and attached files within emails. This feature not only speeds up the inbox navigation process but also enhances your security as the summaries give you a glimpse of what's in the files before you open them. Users will also now receive summaries with relevant context and tasks related to the meeting topic before a meeting. Instead of scrambling to find the relevant materials yourself, Copilot can present them for you so that you are better prepared. Copilot Pages, the feature that allows users to turn a Copilot response into an editable and shareable page, received several new features to make it easier to access, all of which are generally available this month. To start, Copilot Pages will be available on mobile. Users will be able to create or edit a page and then revisit it on mobile or the web later. Also: 8 ways I use Microsoft's Copilot Vision AI to save time on my phone and PC Users will also be able to transform Pages into a Word document with one click for settings that require traditional files. The Microsoft 365 Copilot app makes it easier to search and filter a list of pages through the Pages module. Lastly, Chat and Pages will feature interactive charts and code blocks as output options. In April, the tech giant announced its Microsoft 365 Copilot Wave 2 Spring release, which included a Create feature that allows users to access OpenAI's model GPT-4o to generate AI images that follow company-approved brand guidelines, a Microsoft 365 Copilot app, and a Copilot Notebooks feature that allows you to add different aspects of your workflow, such as Word documents and PowerPoint presentations, to a notebook. These features are now moving to general availability. The Researcher and Analyst agents, which can conduct higher-level research and data analysis by leveraging existing OpenAI models, are rolling out this month to customers worldwide via the Frontier program. Microsoft Teams has long offered GitHub apps for developers to facilitate collaboration when sharing code. The GitHub app for Teams has now been upgraded to be faster, more intuitive, and with added features. It is generally available now. There were a lot more GitHub announcements, including its very own agent, which you can access here.

Microsoft Wants to Solve Everyone's Problems With AI, But Can Copilot Get the Job Done?

SEATTLE -- Microsoft is now focused on "building the open, agentic web at scale," CEO Satya Nadella said in an opening keynote at the Build conference this week, an ambitious vision of giving users a stable of Copilot agents who do things for them, from handling customer service calls to checking company policies. Developers will be tasked with creating individual agents and secure experiences that work together. It's a new approach that means lots of new tools for developers, Build's target market. Nadella announced all sorts of software for developing AI applications, including enhancements to Microsoft's Azure AI Foundry and Copilot Studio developer tools, as well as Visual Studio and GitHub. I was particularly glad to see a focus on open-source and industry-standard protocols; the tech won't reach its full potential without them. According to Nadella, we're in "the middle innings of another platform shift," equivalent to 1991 when Win32 developer tools were rolling out, or 1996, when a variety of companies built new development tools designed for the internet. M365 Copilot Gains Researcher and Analyst Agents As more of a corporate user and manager, I was very interested in the changes to Microsoft 365 Copilot -- which Nadella described as the biggest update since Teams launched. Just how big? Nadella said that the overhaul turns Copilot into "the UI for AI." Copilot now provides five distinct capabilities. It starts with the Chat interface common to AI assistants. Then it adds Search, which can look through your personal documents and anything else you have access to, either in Microsoft applications or connected third-party apps. Notebook lets you gather results from Chat or Search and organize them, then allows you to share the results in the company's Pages collaboration view. Create lets you generate images and now does things such as turn PowerPoint presentations into videos. Now Copilot is adding Agents; the first two are Researcher, which uses deep reasoning to search your documents and the web to create a research report, and Analyst, which can look through lots of source information, including spreadsheets, to do things like find specific data or compare results. For now, these agents are only available to organizations in Microsoft's Frontier program (typically larger enterprises), but the plan is to roll these out more broadly and eventually allow for other software companies and individual organizations to create their own agents. To make all this work, Microsoft is setting up an Agent Store, where organizations will be able to publish and get new agents, and making big improvements to the Copilot Studio where individuals or organizations can build simple agents. There will be support for multi-agent orchestration, so agents can invoke other agents and they can work together. For example, you may have an agent for onboarding a new hire, which in turn would call on specific agents from HR, finance, or IT to ensure all the appropriate forms are filled out for each department. Another new feature is Copilot Tuning, which lets organizations fine-tune models based on their own data. Nadella said the agent concept is already gaining traction, with over 1 million agents created in the past year. Together, the setup provides "expertise at your fingertips," Nadella said. Sound familiar? It's a play on a phrase Bill Gates used decades ago: "information at your fingertips." AI Foundry Adds Grok, Multi-Agent Orchestration Nadella announced new versions of Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code, and said the latter will be released as open source. However, the GitHub Copilot Coding Agent seems to be the most important reveal. Instead of acting as a "pair programmer" that checks your work, the agent can now take on specific development tasks, acting more like a "peer programmer." "All the apps will have to evolve to become these full, stateful applications that are multimodal and multi-agent," Nadella said, as opposed to an app that just uses an application programming interface (API) or a chatbot to call a single model, return an answer, and move on to the next AI Foundry already has 70,000 organizations using it, and Microsoft is now processing five times the number of tokens than it did a year ago. In one portion of the presentation, which included video talks with OpenAI's Sam Altman and xAI's Elon Musk, Nadella pointed out the huge number of models -- 1,900 -- that AI Foundry now supports. For OpenAI, Nadella said, Microsoft has added 15 new models this year; support for the Sora video tool is expected next week. Meanwhile, it is also announcing a new model router for Azure AI Foundry. When it comes to xAi, Microsoft is now supporting the latest Grok 3.5 models. In addition, Nadella said, the platform supports models from Mistral, Meta's Llama, Black Forest Labs, and DeepSeek. Developers can also choose one of the 11,000 models on Hugging Face. Much of the effort here seems to be focused on ways to improve agents' interactions with other agents and services. This includes Foundry Agent Services, which can be used to orchestrate multi-agent workflows. It's also supporting the Model Context Protocol (MCP), first introduced by Anthropic, which is rapidly becoming a standard for governing agents' access to external data, and for Agent2Agent, a protocol first introduced by Google for connecting the agents. Other changes include making it easier to switch among models, conduct better searches, and take a model from AI foundry and use it within Copilot Studio. Building Local AI Applications on Windows Nadella also talked a lot about building AI applications that run "on the edge," or on local PCs. To that end, he introduced Foundry Local, a way of running models on Windows or macOS machines. For instance, the company announced Windows AI Foundry, an enhanced version of Windows Runtime, for developers creating applications that run on the Windows client. This includes the Windows Copilot and Windows ML runtime environments, as well as a LoRA (Low-Rank Adaption) feature for fine-tuning Microsoft's Phi Silica model, available for preview on Snapdragon-based Copilot+ PCs and coming to AMD and Intel systems later. It also includes support for semantic search (i.e., search by meaning, including image search) and lexical search (i.e., search by exact words), as well as RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation), so developers can base the results on a specific set of data, such as customer support documents or company policies. Nadella also announced native support for MCP within Windows itself, meaning that agents can query things like the file system or system settings. Opening the Web and Other Sources to AI Agents Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott laid out a quick vision for the tools needed to build an agentic web and talked a bit about what's missing from the AI ecosystem, including a better way of handling memory. Microsoft "wants to solve everyone's problems," Scott said. One big caveat, though: "For this vision of really powerful agents to come into existence, they have to do some things they can't do right now." Open standards such as MCP and Agent2Agent, are crucial. Scott introduced NLWeb, an interesting concept designed to make it easy for websites to provide a conversational interface for users or agents, using the model of their choice and their own data. This tool, which Microsoft says builds on MCP, is similar to the role HTML plays on the web today. Later, Nadella said that while the web democratized the creation of intelligence, NLWeb "democratizes the aggregation of this intelligence" by letting agents gather data from all sorts of sources. I agree that the concept of openness -- whether in MCP, A2A, or NLWeb -- is likely to be very important to how AI tools develop in the near future. Data and Infrastructure Improvements Nadella announced a number of additions to Microsoft's data products, including SQL Server 2025, which integrates Cosmos DB and Azure Databricks directly into Foundry, GenAI-powered reasoning in PostgreSQL, and a new Digital Twin Builder. I was particularly interested in Copilot for PowerBI, which should let you "chat" with your data, letting you do things like ask, "How do sales in Chicago look this quarter compared to last year?" There was relatively little infrastructure discussion during the keynote, but Nadella reiterated Microsoft's aim "to offer the lowest-cost, highest-scale infrastructure." (In other words, deliver the most tokens per watt per dollar.) He said that there are multiple S-curves driving prices down now, including classic Moore's Law reductions in computing costs plus system-software and model optimization. Nadella did say Microsoft is rolling out Nvidia GB200 systems at scale, with much higher throughput, and showed a video conversation with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang that focused on scaling. In passing, Nadella noted that Microsoft is installing huge amounts of optical fiber for a very fast backbone between data centers, as well as its own Maia and Cobalt chips. (Teams and Defender are already running on Cobalt, he said, and many third parties are looking at it as well.) Nadella concluded with an introduction of Microsoft Discovery, an agent platform for science. A demo showed a researcher using the tool to find a chemical with properties they needed and run simulations on it. According to Nadella, researchers created this chemical, tested it, and it works. All in all, there were an almost unbelievable number of AI-related product announcements (more than could fit into the keynote) and some very engaging demos. Still, there's a big difference between a great demo and a set of applications that are ready for production use at massive scale. That will require some of the less flashy tools for things like observability, security, and governance.

Outlook's new features might finally make it worth switching to

Summary Microsoft Build 2025 is underway, and Copilot is taking center stage. Copilot can now summarize emails, search results, and attachments, and even help you prepare for meetings. Both Copilot features in Outlook are fully released and not in beta testing. Microsoft's annual event, Build 2025, is in full swing, which means right now is one of the best possible times to be a Windows fan. During Build 2023, Microsoft announced that it would be integrating its AI assistant, Copilot, into Windows. Since then, Microsoft has directed the bulk of its efforts toward making Copilot as capable as it possibly can be and has consistently updated it with new features to position it as a viable competitor to other leading AIs like ChatGPT and Gemini. And while Copilot's a major reason why some people stay away from Windows 11, that doesn't mean Microsoft is stepping away from developing it. So, to no one's surprise, Copilot is taking center stage at this year's Microsoft Build too. Today, Microsoft announced a slew of new Copilot features for Outlook Mail and Calendar, and it might finally be compelling enough to make long-time Gmail users seriously consider making the switch. Related How to use Microsoft Copilot Microsoft Copilot is quite similar to ChatGPT, but it has a few key differences. Here's how to use it! Posts 1 Copilot is making Outlook less of a chore to deal with In a world where everyone is racing to integrate AI into their services, a lot of companies fail to get the memo about adding features that are actually useful. Thankfully, the Copilot features that Microsoft's adding to Outlook Mail and Calendar seem genuinely useful, and are designed to save you from spending time on the same ol' redundant tasks. Microsoft is adding a feature in Outlook that will use Copilot to summarize search results and attached files directly within emails. So, instead of wasting time reading lengthy emails just to realize there's nothing of value, Copilot will do all the heavy lifting for you and summarize the contents. Though other AI tools can do the same thing, this feature will be integrated right within your inbox. Instead of needing to copy the email you just received and then prompt an AI chatbot separately, Copilot will handle everything in place. So, if you're used to nervously opening your email inbox on a Monday morning fearing all the emails that must be waiting for you, this feature will definitely come in clutch, especially when you're short on time and just need the gist without the fluff. Source: Microsoft If your calendar is filled with meetings during the work week, you know how time-consuming it can be to prepare for meetings in advance. Thankfully, Copilot can help you in that department too. Microsoft mentions that Copilot can "surface and summarize relevant context, tasks, documents, and other resources related to the meeting topic." While I don't expect the tool to do these tasks with 100% accuracy, since of course, it's AI, I can still see myself using the feature often, especially when you're hopping from one meeting to another and just need a quick refresher on what's what. Both the features mentioned above are generally available, meaning they've been fully released to the public and aren't in beta testing.

A new Microsoft 365 Copilot app starts rolling out today

Surprising no one, Microsoft's Build 2025 conference is mostly centered around its Copilot AI. Today, the company announced that it has begun rolling out its "Wave 2 Spring release," which includes a revamped Microsoft 365 Copilot app. It's also unveiled Copilot Tuning, a "low-code" method of building AI models that work with your company's specific data and processes. The goal, it seems, isn't to just make consumers reliant on OpenAI's ChatGPT model, which powers Copilot. Instead, Microsoft is aiming to empower businesses to make tools for their own needs. (For a pricey $30 per seat subscription, on top of your existing MS 365 subscription, of course.) Microsoft claims that Copilot Tuning, which arrives in June for members of an early adopter program, could let a law firm make AI agents that "reflect its unique voice and expertise" by drafting documents and arguments automatically without any coding. Copilot Studio, the company's existing tool for developing AI agents, will also exchange be able to "exchange data, collaborate on tasks, and divide their work based on each agent's expertise." Conceivably, a company could have its HR and IT agents collaborating together, rather than being siloed off in their own domains. With the new Microsoft 365 Copilot app, Microsoft has centered chatting with its AI to accomplish specific tasks. The layout looks fairly simple, and it appears that you'll also be able to tap into your existing agents and collaborative pages as well. As Microsoft announced in April, you'll also be able to purchase new agents in a built-in store, as well as build up Copilot Notebooks to collect your digital scraps. Like an AI version of OneNote or Evernote, Notebooks could potentially help you surface thoughts across a variety of media, and it can also produce two-person podcasts to summarize your notes. (It's unclear if they'll actually sound good enough to be useful, though.)

Microsoft Build summary: 4 big announcements you'll want to know

Microsoft Build 2025 is almost at an end. Microsoft's annual developer conference might be aimed at software engineers and cloud devs, but realistically, there's plenty in there to dig into even if you don't work as a programmer. Unsurprisingly, the theme throughout the conference this year (and for some years previous now) has been AI. In his opening keynote, Microsoft's CEO Satya Nadella highlighted the importance of AI and the company's plan of "building the open, agentic web at scale." The idea is to hand over the reins to Copilot and let the AI agents take over repetitive, costly tasks. Here are some of the most important announcements from this year's Microsoft Build. Recommended Videos Windows File Explorer gets an AI-powered boost By the sound of it, this is a tool we might all benefit from and not something strictly aimed at devs. Windows File Explorer will now receive something Microsoft refers to as "AI actions." Available in Windows 11, AI actions (or shortcuts, if you will) will let you right-click on a file of your choosing and use AI to get things done easier. Some of the highlights here include the ability to get Copilot to summarize an Office document for you, right from the File Explorer menu. You can also erase unwanted objects from photos, again, thanks to AI, or blur or remove the background with Paint (via Copilot, that is). As reported by The Verge, there might be more coming than what Microsoft specifically spoke about; four new image-related AI actions are currently in the Dev Channel builds of Windows 11. This includes the ability to find similar images on the web with the help of Bing. GitHub gets an AI coding agent The big announcement here is that GitHub Copilot will now be available to all Copilot Enterprise and Copilot Pro+ users, but also that Copilot's coding agent will save devs a lot of time -- which could reduce the time it takes for new features to come out and be available to us all. Although many developers aren't huge fans of the use of AI in their daily work, many others find the benefits in automating simpler tasks, which frees them up to work on more complex code. For the latter, Microsoft has just introduced a new coding agent, now available on GitHub. The agent was made to help programmers with one of the most annoying parts of their jobs -- bug fixes. It'll also take care of adding features and refactoring code. "GitHub continues to be the home for developers. [...] We're doubling down for developers building any applications. Trust, security, compliance, auditability, data residency are even more critical today. Open-source is at the core of GitHub, and we're taking this next big step," said Nadella. You can now translate PDFs directly in Edge If you deal with a lot of PDFs, you'll love this one: You'll soon be able to translate them directly in the Microsoft Edge browser. Simply clicking "translate" in the address bar will let you leverage AI to translate the entire document into one of over 70 languages supplied by Microsoft. This appears to only be a feature in Edge for Business, though. Right now, it's rolling out to Windows Canary users and is said to be available next month. Microsoft 365 gets a major AI boost with new agents As reported by PCMag, the new update to Copilot is said to be huge. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella himself referred to it as the biggest update since the launch of Teams -- and whether you love it or not, it's hard to deny that Teams turned out to be a pretty big thing worldwide. Copilot's current arsenal of AI-powered goodies includes Chat, which is essentially Microsoft's version of ChatGPT. Search lets Copilot dig through your files and help you find what you're asking for. The results of both those tools can be summarized in Notebook. Of course, you can also generate images, PowerPoints, and videos with Create. Microsoft is now taking AI a few steps further by adding Agents. Agentic AI is a big topic these days, so it's not a surprise to see Microsoft jumping on the bandwagon. Microsoft's AI agents now include Researcher and Analyst. Researcher relies on deep reasoning to help you create comprehensive reports. Copilot's Researcher will be able to search the web and your own files, giving it a solid overview of various sources. Analyst fills in the gaps by being able to analyze data, including massive spreadsheets, to help you analyze (well, duh) various data points and draw accurate comparisons. Although exciting, these new AI agents will be available to large enterprises. The company needs to be included in Microsoft's Frontier program to benefit. Perhaps with time, Microsoft will bring AI agents to Copilot at large. AI, AI everywhere At this point, no one is surprised when an event such as Microsoft Build focuses solely on the use of AI. Many hoped to hear more about things like the Xbox handheld, but alas, that did not happen. A lot of the new features and improvements announced during Build weren't consumer-centric, but I recommend watching the full video if you're curious about what else is new. Remember to also check out our Best of Computex 2025 roundup to give you a better overview of the exciting tech that made a debut in the last week.

New Microsoft Copilot Features Enhance Meetings, Design and Data Analysis

What if your workday could be transformed from a series of tedious tasks into a seamless flow of creativity and efficiency? With the latest updates to Microsoft Copilot, that vision is closer than ever. By harnessing the power of advanced AI and large language models, Microsoft has introduced tools that don't just automate -- they elevate. Imagine walking into a meeting armed with a fully prepared agenda, or creating professional-grade visuals without ever leaving your Microsoft 365 apps. These updates are more than just features; they're a bold step toward redefining how we work, collaborate, and innovate. In this feature, PBA explores how Microsoft Copilot's newest capabilities are reshaping productivity across three key areas: meeting preparation, creative content design, and data analysis. You'll discover how tools like the Researcher Agent can save hours of prep time, how Copilot Create enables even non-designers to produce stunning visuals, and how the Analyst Agent turns complex data into actionable insights. But these innovations don't stop at individual tasks -- they're seamlessly integrated across the Microsoft 365 ecosystem, making sure your workflow is as cohesive as it is powerful. As you read on, consider how these tools could not only simplify your work but also unlock new possibilities for creativity and strategic thinking. Meeting preparation often demands significant time and effort, but Microsoft's Researcher Agent is designed to alleviate this burden. By seamlessly integrating with Outlook and Calendar, this tool ensures you have all the necessary context at your fingertips. Its core capabilities include: These features enable you to walk into meetings fully prepared, equipped with detailed agendas and actionable insights. For instance, instead of manually sifting through emails or files, the Researcher Agent automates the process, allowing you to focus on meaningful discussions and strategic decision-making. This not only saves time but also enhances the quality of your contributions during meetings. Visual content creation is now more accessible than ever with Copilot Create, a feature designed to rival traditional design platforms. Integrated directly into Microsoft 365 applications, this tool enables users to produce professional-quality visuals without requiring external software. Key functionalities include: Whether you're a marketer crafting a campaign, an educator designing instructional materials, or a content creator developing social media posts, Copilot Create simplifies the process. For example, creating a polished presentation or an engaging infographic can now be accomplished in minutes, all within the familiar Microsoft ecosystem. This feature not only enhances creativity but also ensures consistency across your projects. Here is a selection of other guides from our extensive library of content you may find of interest on Microsoft Copilot. The Analyst Agent is transforming how you interact with and interpret data. By analyzing large datasets, it delivers actionable insights and visualizations that make complex information more digestible. With just a simple prompt, you can: For instance, if you're monitoring quarterly sales performance, the Analyst Agent can highlight key trends, pinpoint areas of improvement, and present the findings in an easy-to-understand format. This eliminates the need for hours of manual analysis, allowing you to focus on strategic planning and execution. Professionals across industries, from finance to marketing, can benefit from this tool's ability to simplify data interpretation and enhance decision-making. Microsoft has enhanced Copilot's integration across its suite of productivity tools, creating a seamless and cohesive user experience. These updates ensure that AI capabilities are accessible and consistent across various applications. Key benefits of this integration include: For example, you can draft a comprehensive report in Word, analyze supporting data in Excel, and coordinate team efforts in Teams -- all while benefiting from Copilot's AI-driven insights. This interconnected approach ensures that your workflow remains uninterrupted, efficient, and productive, regardless of the complexity of your tasks. The latest updates to Microsoft Copilot highlight the fantastic potential of AI in modern workplaces. By combining innovative technology with practical tools for meeting preparation, creative tasks, and data analysis, Microsoft is setting a new standard for productivity software. These advancements go beyond automation -- they empower you to work smarter, make informed decisions, and achieve more in less time. As AI continues to evolve, tools like Copilot are poised to become indispensable in shaping the future of work. Whether you're managing complex projects, analyzing critical data, or creating compelling content, these innovations are designed to help you stay ahead in an increasingly dynamic professional landscape. By integrating AI into everyday workflows, Microsoft is not just enhancing productivity but also redefining what's possible in the workplace.