As Microsoft’s annual business applications event ends for another year, we take a look at the more significant product announcements.
What is Microsoft Ignite?
Ignite is Microsoft’s annual gathering of technology leaders and experts and is for anyone interested in the latest developments in Microsoft’s business applications. In-person and virtual sessions enable people in all roles, from developers and IT implementers to those who make purchasing decisions for enterprise technology and security solutions, to get updated on the latest Microsoft developments.
What areas did this year’s event cover?
This year’s event focused on these key areas:
- AI/Copilot
- Azure
- Edge
- Industry-specific AI models
- Microsoft 365
- Power Platform
- Security
- Windows
This blog post looks at announcements focused on Dynamics 365, Copilot, Microsoft 365 and Power Platform.
Agents
A range of purpose-built AI-powered agents have been announced that work alongside you in Microsoft 365 products, handling a range of tasks, from simple, everyday tasks to complex multi-step processes:
- Agents in SharePoint. These allow users to ask questions of SharePoint data and get real-time responses. Users can easily create their own agents, tailored to specific SharePoint files, folders or sites that support common business processes. This feature is in general availability.
- Employee Self-Service Agent. Available in Microsoft 365 Copilot Business Chat (BizChat) and provides answers to common workplace policy-related questions and can take action on key HR and IT related-tasks. Users can retrieve benefits and payroll information, start a leave of absence, request new IT equipment and even get assistance for Microsoft 365 products and services. This feature is in private preview.
- Facilitator agent. Working within Teams meetings and chats for more effective collaboration, the agent takes real-time notes, allowing everyone to co-author and collaborate seamlessly. In chats, the agent shares a summary of important information as the conversation happens. This feature is currently in preview.
- Interpreter agent. Enables real-time interpretation in Teams meetings in up to nine languages so each participant can speak and listen in the language of their choice. Meeting participants can also have the Interpreter simulate their personal voice for a more inclusive experience. This feature will be in preview early next year.
- Project Manager agent. Automating project management within Planner, the agent handles everything, including plan creation and executing tasks. Plans can be created automatically from scratch or via pre-configured templates. The agent then oversees the entire project, including task assignment, progress tracking, reminders and notifications and status reporting. It can also complete tasks, including content creation. This feature is currently in preview.
Copilot Studio updates
- Autonomous agentic capabilities. Makers can now build an agent that takes actions on their behalf, without having to prompt the agent each time. Autonomous agents act in the background to respond to events, like the receipt of an email or recording an uploaded file, without needing human interaction.
- Agent library. Copilot Studio can now give users a head start with agents, providing templates for commonly used agent scenarios, allowing for customisation where needed. Examples include leave management, sales order and deal acceleration agents.
- Image upload. Users will be able to upload images to Copilot, have an agent analyse the image and engage in Q&A. Powered by the GPT-4o foundation model, users will save the time required to manually translate data from images. This feature is currently in preview.
- Voice-enabled agents. Organisations will be able to embed voice-enabled agents into apps and websites, providing a more immediate response to employee and customer needs. This feature is currently in private preview.
- Advanced knowledge tuning. Resolve unanswered questions by matching specific instructions to fix the knowledge gap at the root of each unanswered question. Makers can continuously add new sources of knowledge, including documents and databases, improving answer rates. This feature is currently in preview.
Copilot Actions
With Copilot Actions, anyone can easily delegate a task to Copilot – whether asking for status updates, agenda items, compiling weekly reports or scheduling a daily email summarising important conversations. Customisable prompt templates can be automated, used on demand or triggered by specific events to gather information and present it in specified formats.
This feature is currently in private preview.
Copilot in Teams enhancements
- Analyse content presented in Teams. Copilot already analyses spoken words and chat messages, but with the addition of interpreting on-screen content, the user now has a complete overview of meetings. Users will be able to ask Copilot to summarise content shared on-screen, such as “Which products had the highest sales?”, “What was the feedback per slide?” and draft new content based on the meeting. This feature will be in preview in early 2025.
- File summaries in one-to-one and group chats. Copilot in Teams will be able to quickly summarise a file’s content without the user having to open the file. This feature will be available in preview in early 2025.
Copilot in PowerPoint enhancements
- Narrative Builder based on a file. When starting from a template with a prompt and a referenced file, Copilot’s Narrative Builder will be able to create a compelling narrative, with branded designs from templates, speaker notes and built-in transitions and animations. This feature will be generally available with Copilot in PowerPoint from January.
- Presentation translation. Copilot will be able to translate an entire PowerPoint into one of 40 languages, all while keeping the overall design of each slide, saving time and money and helping to promote inclusivity. This feature will be generally available with Copilot in PowerPoint on the web from December and for desktop and Mac from January 2025.
- Organisation image support. Copilot will use images stored in asset libraries, including SharePoint Organisation Asset Library and now Templafy, saving time and ensuring presentations are kept on-brand. This feature will be generally available with Microsoft 365 Copilot in the first quarter of 2025.
Copilot in Excel enhancements
- New start experience. People will be able to tell Copilot what they want to create, and Copilot will suggest and refine a template with headers, formulas and visuals, enabling Excel users of all skill levels to create a spreadsheet that meets their requirements. This feature will be generally available by the end of the year with Microsoft 365 Copilot in Excel.
Copilot in Outlook enhancements
- Schedule focus time or one-to-ones. Copilot will find the best available time for both people.
- Draft an agenda. By providing details about a meeting’s goals, Copilot will then create an agenda to help the meeting stay on track.
Copilot in OneNote enhancements
- Organise ideas. Pulled from a combination of typed, handwritten and voice notes on pages, users will be able to ask Copilot to organise their current section and Copilot will provide a preview of the organisation it would apply, allowing the user to refine if required, before proceeding. This feature is currently in preview.
Copilot Pages enhancements
Launched in September, Microsoft’s Copilot Pages is a feature within Microsoft 365 Copilot, designed for collaborative work. It provides a dynamic and persistent canvas where users can refine and organise AI-generated responses into structured content. A number of improvements for Pages have been announced:
- Rich artifacts. In addition to text, Pages will support more content types, including code, interactive charts, tables, diagrams and math from enterprise or web data.
- Multi-Page support. Users will have the ability to create multiple new Pages in a single chat session or combing content from multiple chat sessions to a single Page.
- Based on Page content. Copilot chat prompts will be grounded on the Page content as the page is updated, making subsequent responses more relevant.
- Mobile support. Users will be able to continue working with Copilot and colleagues while on the go, with the ability to view, edit and share Pages on mobile devices.
Microsoft Places
Now in general availability, Places brings AI-powered location understanding to Teams and Outlook to help employees optimise in-office days to drive more in-person connections. Features include:
- Recommended in-office day. Copilot provides recommendations of when to go into the office based on scheduled in-person meetings, team guidance and collaborators’ planned attendance.
- Managed Room Bookings. Copilot will manage room bookings for single or recurring meetings, catering for changes, updates and conflicts, ensuring that the appropriate space is always booked.
- Workplace presence. Allows employees to update their location to “office” or to a specific office location when in office to help coordinate in-person meetings and connections.
- Places finder. An updated room and individual desk booking experience that can include images of the space, floor plans and information about the technology available.
- Space analytics. Allows admins to analyse intended versus actual occupancy to make more effective space decisions.
Copilot Control System
Designed for IT departments to confidently adopt and accelerate the business value of Copilot and agents, Copilot Control System includes:
- Data protection. Enables intelligent grounding on enterprise data while respecting an organisation’s controls. SharePoint Advanced Management is also included at no additional charge for Copilot customers to accelerate adoption and address oversharing, with built-in content governance reports and controls. This feature will be generally available in early 2025.
- Management controls. Allows IT to govern the access and usage of Copilot and agents, including controls over which users access. Copilot in Microsoft 365 admin centers will also be available to all Copilot customers to automate time-consuming IT tasks, provide personalised insights to improve tenant management, and answer admin questions. This feature is currently in private preview.
- Copilot Analytics. Allows IT and business leaders to track adoption patterns and return on investment from the use of Copilot and agents. Powered by Microsoft Viva Insights – included in Copilot at no additional charge – Copilot Analytics provides out-of-the-box experiences to measure Copilot adoption and business impact and customisable reporting for deeper analysis. Copilot Analytics will be generally available in early 2025.
Copilot Prompt Gallery
Formerly known as Copilot Lab, enables AI users to share their prompting success and find inspiration from others. New enhancements will include:
- Agent prompt support. Users can discover prompts for agents provided by their organisation that are tailored to specific roles.
- Trending prompt lists. New and trending prompt lists will keep users updated on the latest and most popular prompts within their organisation.
Microsoft Teams enhancements
A range of multilingual improvements were announced:
- When enabled, meeting participants will be able to select one of the 51 spoken languages and one of the 31 translation languages, and the meeting transcript will capture the discussion, regardless of languages spoken.
- Live translated captions and live translated transcript will also support translation for multilingual meetings. This capability will be available next year in Teams desktop, web and mobile apps.
- Users will get an intelligent meeting recap automatically generated in the translation language they selected for the meeting. This capability will be available next year in Teams desktop, web and mobile apps.
Storyline in Microsoft Teams will simplify the ways that leaders and employees share and connect with colleagues across the company, increasing visibility and engagement. The Storyline integration allows employees of all levels to follow updates and notifications from leadership, discover content, and contribute their own ideas – all within Teams. This new integration will be available in preview early next year.
Power Platform enhancements
- Supported by Copilot in Power Apps, users will be able to define a business problem and then step through and review Copilot-proposed roles and requirements, working alongside Copilot to help ensure it reflects the true business problem. Copilot will then iteratively build a solution architecture from apps, pages, automations and agents as possible assets.
- Agent Builder in Power Apps allows users to build agents for their app from within Power Apps Studio, using the lightweight Copilot Studio experience. The app-specific agents will utilise logic, knowledge and actions already existing in the apps to execute tasks autonomously.
- AI-generated record summary cards will enable makers to improve the user experience in low-code apps with several generative AI features, including adding a custom prompt to their apps helping users to easily gain insights from their records.
- A new ability to customise chat for individual apps, enabling creators of model-driven apps to make them more relevant for their users by adding new knowledge sources and skills, resulting in each app having its own distinctive custom Copilot to answer user questions.
- Users will be able to fill out forms on model-driven apps using files and emails as a source of data, generating form field suggestions automatically.
- With custom prompts to generate text input, Canvas app users will be able to simply jot down a few ideas and Copilot will automatically generate the required text.
Summary
Unsurprisingly, AI and Copilot featured heavily at the event, with its influence having an impact on virtually the whole Microsoft business application range. Time will tell which of these features will prove most valuable to organisations, but it is clear that Microsoft are continuing to invest heavily in AI-related technologies and will continue to do so. If you are an existing Strategy 365 client and wish to discuss any of the announcements in this blog post with one of our experts, feel free to get in touch.
