Microsoft Unveils Several New “AI Agents” in Office
Weeks after making Copilot AI features free for Microsoft 365 (Office’s successor) to subscribers in parts of Asia and Oceania (perhaps a harbinger of things to come globally), Microsoft announced today at its Ignite conference that it is now significantly expanding Copilot and AI capabilities into its office applications.
The most interesting of the new features centers around new “AI agents,” essentially presented as set-it-and-forget-it virtual colleagues that can help collaborate and automate repetitive tasks. This could be anything from summarizing Teams meetings, helping answer IT questions, or even scheduling and assigning projects. While this isn’t Microsoft’s first foray into AI agents , as previous releases were more aimed at sales and finance, it greatly expands their capabilities in Microsoft 365 .
If this all sounds a little corporate, Microsoft’s AI can now also use co-pilot actions, which are similar to AI agents but considered separate to help on an individual level. For example, Copilot will soon be able to translate entire PowerPoint presentations into 40 different languages. Additionally, future versions of Excel will begin offering AI-generated templates to help you get started on your presentation.
Not all of the agents Microsoft announced today are available yet. One of the AI agents, a Teams real-time translation bot called Interpreter , is planned for release next year. Microsoft will be adding available agents to Copilot Studio , which currently costs an additional $200 on top of Microsoft 365, as they become available, with a library for downloading agents currently in public preview. Developers can also create their own agents for 365 using the SDK, which is also currently in public preview.
As for the Copilot activities, they are currently in private preview and will apparently be available to anyone with a Microsoft 365 Copilot subscription (though Microsoft is mostly talking about them in an enterprise context). They currently cost an extra $30 on top of a basic Microsoft 365 subscription, provided you don’t live in one of the regions that just got free access to Copilot in 365.
It’s likely that, given Microsoft’s experiments in making Copilot free in Office in other markets, prices will change in the future and AI will simply become an expected fact of life in our productivity software as it becomes cheaper to produce. “Copilot will enable every employee to do their jobs better 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 questions about benefits could help a company save a few cents on payroll, or at least expect more from the project managers and HR reps they rely on near.