With Microsoft’s latest Copilot updates, IT leaders face both new opportunities and new governance challenges. Here’s what CIOs and CTOs need to know about the latest Microsoft AI innovations.
Microsoft’s agentic AI ‘agents’ are embedded across Microsoft 365 and go beyond chatbots capability to proactively collaborate with users, handling multi-step processes with minimal oversight.
A Facilitator agent in Teams can generate real-time notes, summarise decisions, manage agendas, and create follow-up tasks—automatically.
A Project Manager agent in Planner can turn a project description into a full work breakdown structure, assigning tasks and timelines.
Nadella uses the term “Copilot as the UI for AI” to describe how these agents form a scaffolding for work. Instead of we humans clicking through apps, we increasingly steer Copilot agents with natural language, and they carry out the heavy lifting. Nadella’s blog essentially shines a spotlight on the ones he’s using the most right now, giving IT leaders a glimpse of how agentic AI is already in action at the highest levels of Microsoft.
The new Agent Mode that turns Copilot into an operations expert works directly inside Excel. This agent can build multi-sheet models, run analyses, and manipulate Excel content all within the workbook UI, prompted by natural language.
This Excel-based agent is just one example of how Copilot is automating complex multi-step work. Nadella’s post hinted at the broader promise of such agents: they will be able to string together multiple services and steps autonomously.
Key considerations for IT leaders
Operations agents can significantly enhance operational efficiency, but only in well-governed environments. IT leaders must clearly define data ownership and access protocols, including who is responsible for managing and maintaining data quality. Without a structured approach, these agents may struggle to locate the correct lists and data, limiting their effectiveness.
There are now ‘multi-player AI’ experiences: collaborative agents in Teams. These are Copilot Agents that operate within group contexts – whether a team channel or a meeting – rather than just one-on-one with a user. In practical terms, a collaborative agent in Teams acts like another participant or teammate.
For instance, they can join meetings to capture live notes, respond to questions, highlight decisions, and keep track of time; summarise long channel threads or recommend turning messages into tasks; and provide context-aware answers by referencing shared files and group conversations. These agents help keep everyone aligned and informed, reducing manual admin and information gaps.
The Knowledge Agent is all about leveraging an organisation’s internal content and metadata to provide better answers and to improve the content itself. This Copilot Agent lives largely in SharePoint (and the broader Microsoft Graph). It can do two major things: provide detailed, context-rich answers to questions, and optimise SharePoint content by identifying broken links.
Any IT leader who has managed an intranet or knowledge repository knows how quickly content can grow stale or disorganised. Now we have an AI assistant that not only makes that content more searchable (through AI Q&A) but also tunes the content itself.
Not all of Nadella’s favourite agents live in the business productivity realm; one is aimed at developers and tech teams. He referenced what he called “GitHub for Microsoft Teams” – essentially, bringing a Copilot coding agent into Teams. The idea is to go from conversation to code. Imagine an engineering team’s chat: developers discuss a feature, and someone can @mention the Copilot coding agent right in Teams to generate a code snippet or even create a task in GitHub or Azure DevOps.
With all these powerful agents at work – accessing data, generating content, automating actions – it’s natural for CIOs and CTOs to have a nagging question: Are we in control? Our enthusiasm for Copilot comes with a clear understanding that governance and security are more critical than ever. In fact, Microsoft’s recent SharePoint Showcase blog on governance in the AI era emphasised that admins now have new tools to keep AI-driven collaboration compliant and secure.
Among the most significant updates, Copilot customers now benefit from SharePoint Advanced Management (SAM) at no additional cost. Enhanced permission reporting tools have been introduced to enable comprehensive audits of access, while new site lifecycle policies help to tidy up outdated or redundant content. In addition, the introduction of document watermarks and data loss prevention (DLP) policies provides an extra layer of protection for sensitive outputs, supporting a more secure and well-governed digital workplace.
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