Explore Copilot and agents at work

  • 6 minutes

Work is changing fast. AI and intelligent agents are introducing a new concept: "intelligence on tap". This is the concept of knowledge and insights available instantly, whenever you need them. In this new era, organizations are asking a critical question: How can we apply AI at work to gain a competitive edge?

Microsoft 365 Copilot is designed for this moment. It’s secure, integrated, and enterprise-ready from day one—built on Microsoft’s deep understanding of how work really happens: how teams collaborate, how decisions get made, and how businesses run. Copilot doesn’t just automate tasks; it accelerates the decisions and actions that move your business forward.

We see Copilot and AI agents transforming work in three key ways:

  1. Accelerating personal productivity. Every employee gets an AI assistant that removes repetitive tasks and speeds up work, freeing time for higher-value activities.
  2. Improving processes. Agents act as digital teammates, collaborating alongside people to make existing workflows more efficient and consistent.
  3. Driving functional transformation. Entire processes can be redesigned so agents run them end-to-end. Humans set goals and guardrails, stepping in only when needed.

Let’s explore each of these areas—and what they mean for your organization.

Accelerate personal productivity with Microsoft 365 Copilot

Microsoft 365 Copilot is more than an AI-powered assistant—it’s the hub for intelligent work. Copilot brings advanced AI capabilities into the apps and experiences people use every day, helping individuals and teams boost productivity, creativity, and decision-making. It’s where users interact with AI and agents seamlessly in the flow of work.

Key AI capabilities for productivity

There are several key AI capabilities to help your organization be more productive.

Secure AI Chat

Copilot Chat is the starting point for AI in Microsoft 365. It’s a secure, business-ready chat experience, grounded in your organizational data and enhanced by knowledge from the web. Built on the latest models, Copilot Chat is designed for everyday use across apps like Word, PowerPoint, and Excel—helping you draft, summarize, and reason with confidence.

Search in Microsoft 365 is now AI-powered, delivering a unified experience that helps users quickly find relevant information across your organization. It’s fast, secure, and familiar—making it easy to locate what you need, when you need it, without switching contexts.

Agents

Agents take Copilot beyond assistance into orchestration. You can access prebuilt agents in the Agent Store or create custom ones using Copilot Studio. Agents perform specialized tasks with minimal input, respond to inquiries in real time, and even operate independently to run processes, adapt to new challenges, and improve over time.

Notable agents included with Microsoft 365 Copilot include:

  • Researcher. Handles multi-step research with exceptional depth and accuracy, combining OpenAI’s advanced research model with Microsoft 365 Copilot’s orchestration and deep search capabilities.
  • Analyst. Thinks like a skilled data scientist, transforming raw data into insights in minutes. Analyst uses chain-of-thought reasoning to iterate through problems and deliver high-quality answers that mirror human analytical thinking.

Notebooks

Notebooks let you pull everything that matters for a task into one place. Combine Copilot Chat, files, pages, meeting notes, links, and more into a single, dynamic workspace. As you work, Copilot provides answers tailored to your notebook’s content, and updates stay in sync as your project evolves.

Create

Create brings generative AI into design and storytelling. Generate images, videos, infographics, and presentations aligned with your organization’s brand identity—helping teams communicate ideas visually and at speed.

Process improvement

Agents are joining the workforce as digital teammates, working alongside humans to drive process improvement. This collaboration delivers measurable ROI through time savings and efficiency gains—and across the organization, these scenarios add up to significant cost reductions.

Agents exist on a spectrum, from simple prompt-and-response to fully autonomous. In this section, we focus on agents designed for work and common processes where they add value.

How AI agents improve processes:

  • Task automation. Streamline repetitive tasks so employees can focus on higher-value work. Examples include automating customer inquiries, managing scheduling, and processing transactions.
  • Advanced data analysis. Analyze large datasets quickly to extract insights for strategy. Agents can process feedback, sales data, and market trends to identify patterns and inform decisions.
  • Decision-making. Operate independently using data inputs and algorithms—prioritizing tasks, recommending actions, or autonomously optimizing inventory based on forecasts.
  • Adapting to challenges. Learn from interactions and feedback to improve performance over time. For example, in IT operations, agents can refine incident response strategies to reduce resolution times.

Functional transformation

Autonomous agents enable organizations to move from legacy processes to AI-first workflows, operating within human-set guardrails. Examples include:

  • Sales Qualification Agent. Helps sellers focus on high-priority opportunities by researching leads, prioritizing outreach, and drafting personalized communications.
  • Supplier Communications Agent. Optimizes supply chains by tracking performance, detecting delays, and responding autonomously—freeing procurement teams from manual monitoring.
  • Customer Intent and Knowledge Management Agents. Support customer care teams by resolving issues and autonomously adding knowledge articles to scale best practices.

More autonomous agents are available through Dynamics 365, and custom agents can be built with Copilot Studio to fit your unique business needs.

Tip

Prebuilt agents accelerate adoption, but custom agents unlock tailored value. Use Copilot Studio to create agents that understand your workflows and act on your behalf—delivering support across roles, teams, and functions.

Note

The following are some examples of what companies are doing today:

  • Organizations like Clifford Chance, McKinsey & Company, Pets at Home and Thomson Reuters are already creating autonomous agents to increase revenue, reduce costs, and scale impact.
  • Pets at Home, the U.K.’s leading pet care business, created an agent for its profit protection team to more efficiently compile cases for skilled human review, which could have the potential to drive a seven-figure annual savings.
  • McKinsey & Company is creating an agent that will speed up the client onboarding process. The pilot showed lead time could be reduced by 90% and administrative work reduced by 30%.
  • Thomson Reuters built a professional-grade agent to speed up the legal due diligence workflow, with initial testing showing some tasks could be done in half the time. This agent can help Thomson Reuters increase the efficiency of work for clients and boost its new business pipeline.

AI agents are transforming work by automating tasks, analyzing data, and adapting to dynamic challenges—delivering measurable ROI and enabling functional transformation across sales, service, finance, and supply chain. With prebuilt and custom agents, organizations can reimagine processes and accelerate innovation.

Tip

Take a moment to consider how AI agents might improve processes in your organization.

Next, let’s learn about Microsoft’s Cloud & AI Platforms.