MANILA - Microsoft on Monday took the wraps off new features on its Copilot AI platform on the company's 365 suite of office productivity apps.

A year after rolling out Copilot in Windows 11 and 365, the tech giant said users of its office platform can expect even more AI tools through "Wave 2" of Copilot innovation.  

In a statement, Microsoft said users' reception of Copilot has been positive and that its Teams, Excel, PowerPoint, Word, Outlook and OneDrive apps will soon get even more helpful features.  

"Our customers tell us Copilot in Teams has changed meetings forever—in fact, it’s the number one place they’re seeing value," according to Jared Spataro, Microsoft Corporate Vice President, AI at Work.

Companies subscribed to Copilot can already hold meetings on Teams and have the app generate a transcript and a summary. But soon, Copilot in Teams can also tap what's being said in the chat and "reason over both the meeting transcript and the meeting chat" to give users a complete picture of what was discussed, Microsoft said.

"For instance, you can ask Copilot if there were any questions that you missed in a meeting, and it will quickly scan across what was said, and what was typed in the chat, to see if anything was left unanswered," Microsoft said.  

Excel is also getting an upgrade with what Microsoft said is advanced data analysis, which will allow users to work even with data that hasn’t been formatted as a table. Copilot in Excel can now work with text, in addition to numerical, data, the company said.

Copilot in Excel can now also work with Python to conduct advanced analysis like forecasting, risk analysis, machine learning, and visualizing complex data—all using natural language with no coding required.

"It’s like adding a skilled data analyst to the team," Microsoft said.

Copilot in Outlook meanwhile will help users sift through tons of emails for priority messages. "Prioritize my inbox" will help users quickly get to important messages that matter by analyzing the inbox based on both the content of the email and the context of a user's role.

With Copilot, Word users will be able to quickly reference not only web data and work data--like Word, PowerPoint, PDFs, and encrypted documents--but also emails and meetings.

PowerPoint is also getting a feature called Narrative Builder which allows a prompt to build an outline for a first draft. Upcoming features include adding files to the outline to ground topics, and Brand manager which taps a company’s branded template.

Microsoft said Copilot will also let OneDrive "reason over all your files" to quickly to find the information you need.

Aside from these, Microsoft said it is also rolling out Copilot agents, which are AI assistants designed to automate and execute business processes, working with or for humans.

"They range in capability from simple, prompt-and-response agents to agents that replace repetitive tasks to more advanced, fully autonomous agents," the company said.

Most of these features are rolling out this month or in the public view, the company said. Copilot's enterprise features, however, require a subscription, in contrast to its consumer features which are now available for free on most Windows 11 PCs.

According to Microsoft, 60 percent of Fortune 500 companies now use Copilot. Among them is Cognizant which provided 25,000 employees with Copilot. 

"Early results show a 10 percent reduction in time spent on emails and a 27 percent increase in employees leaving meetings early, thanks to Copilot. Additionally, there was a 73 percent boost in document creation, indicating more time spent on high-value content for clients," Microsoft said. 

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