Weeks after making its Copilot AI features free for Microsoft 365 (the successor to Office), subscribers in certain parts of Asia and Oceania (perhaps a precursor of things to come around the world), Microsoft announced at its Ignite conference today that it’s now vastly expanding what Copilot and AI can do in its office apps.
The juiciest of the new features center around new “AI Agents,” essentially pitched as set-it-and-forget-it virtual coworkers who can help collaborate on and automate repetitive tasks. These could be anything from drafting up summaries of Teams meetings, helping answer IT questions, or even planning and assigning projects. While this isn’t Microsoft’s first go at AI Agents, with previous releases being more aimed at sales and finance, it drastically increases what they can do within Microsoft 365.
If that all sounds a little enterprise focused, Microsoft’s AI can also now use Copilot Actions, which are similar to AI Agents but considered separate, to help on an individual level. For instance, Copilot will soon be able to translate entire PowerPoint presentations across 40 different languages. Alternatively, upcoming versions of Excel will begin suggesting AI-baked templates to help you get started on a presentation.
Not all of the agents Microsoft discussed today are available yet. One of the AI agents, a real-time Teams translator bot called Interpreter, is slated for next year. Microsoft will be adding available agents to Copilot Studio, currently an extra $200 charge on top of Microsoft 365, as they are ready, with a library for downloading agents currently in public preview. Developers are also able to create their own agents for 365, too, via an SDK that’s also now in public preview.
As for Copilot Actions, these are currently in private preview and will seemingly be available for everyone with a Microsoft 365 Copilot subscription (although Microsoft is mostly talking about them in an enterprise context). They are currently an extra $30 on top of the base Microsoft 365 subscription, assuming you don’t live in one of the areas that just got access to Copilot in 365 for free.
It’s likely, given Microsoft’s experiments with making Copilot free in Office in other markets, that pricing is set to change in the future, with AI simply becoming an expected fact of life within our productivity software as it gets cheaper to make. “Copilot will empower every employee to do their best work in less time, and focus on more meaningful tasks,” Microsoft says. At the same time, it’s not hard to see how having a bot that can assign tasks or answer benefits questions might make it easier for a company to save some cents on salaries, or at least expect more out of the project managers and HR representatives they do keep around.
