Copilot Radar
Field Notes from the Frontier
Intelligence briefing
What's new in
Microsoft AI.
Microsoft Copilot
Features, releases & announcements
Copilot in SharePoint and OneDrive both reach general availability
Copilot in SharePoint is now generally available for creating content, asking grounded questions, generating metadata and building reusable skills, and Copilot in OneDrive has been rebuilt on the same SharePoint foundation. Copilot Search is becoming the default search experience across both, starting in Frontier.
Teams Phone Agent takes the repetitive calls
Microsoft's AI calling receptionist now fields routine inbound requests for customer-facing organizations, and it works across more than 60 languages. It rolled out in September.
A slash calls an agent, an at-sign calls a skill
Copilot prompts now take agents inline with a slash and skills with an at-sign, so a specific capability can be pulled into a sentence instead of switching surface first. The change rolled out in September.
A central plugin registry, managed from the admin center
Microsoft has published a central catalog of Copilot plugins, with management handled from the Microsoft 365 admin center rather than left to each user. It gives admins one place to see and control what is extending Copilot.
Up to 100 SharePoint sites can be marked authoritative
Admins can designate as many as 100 SharePoint sites as verified content sources for Copilot Search from the Microsoft 365 admin center, and view, add, remove or bulk import and export that list. It is the lever for steering Copilot away from stale duplicates.
One Copilot now holds Home, Code and Autopilot
Microsoft has reorganized Copilot into three parts: Home, where Chat and Cowork sit together with the full power of Office; Code, for building solutions; and Autopilot, a persistent cloud-hosted agent. The new shape is rolling out through the Frontier program.
Code lets a non-developer describe an app and get one
Code extends solution building past developers: describe what you need in plain language and Copilot assembles it, from a desktop widget up to a cloud-hosted app, running sandboxed inside your own tenant. It is built on the same underlying technology as GitHub Copilot.
Federated connectors read third-party data without storing it
Federated Copilot connectors open real-time links to popular third-party sources over the Model Context Protocol, with no customer data copied into Microsoft services. They are supported in Researcher, Microsoft 365 Chat and Excel editing.
Copilot now deletes, moves and files your mail
Outlook triage in Copilot has grown to cover deleting, moving, copying and categorizing messages, plus managing inbox rules and folders, with confirmation prompts before bulk or mailbox-level changes. That confirmation step is the control worth pointing at in a governance conversation.
Microsoft Copilot Cowork
Agentic task execution for the enterprise
Cowork stops being a destination and becomes a mode
In the new Copilot, Cowork sits inside Home next to Chat rather than as its own place to go — Chat for quick questions and drafts, Cowork for delegating complex work end to end. Office creation is built into the same surface.
Cowork edits an existing Office file without breaking its history
Cowork can now edit Word, Excel and PowerPoint files already sitting in OneDrive and SharePoint, preserving the shared file and its version history instead of producing a fresh copy. That removes the main reason people were re-uploading documents to get work done.
Cowork builds a working app from a sentence
A built-in App skill turns a described problem — run my daily scrum, visualize this data — into a lightweight interactive app. Refine it in chat, open it, publish it, then share it with people in your organization.
Claude Fable 5.1 takes over the top of Cowork's model picker
Fable 5.1 replaces Fable 5 as the most advanced option for ambitious work in the Cowork model selector. It is an Anthropic model, so the tenant-wide Anthropic family toggle and the provider's data-retention terms both still apply.
GPT 6 Astra joins the picker for the tough problems
Astra is the newest OpenAI option in the Cowork model list, published as the latest model for tough problems. Leaving the picker on Auto lets Cowork choose from whatever the tenant has enabled.
Plugins become discoverable on the Cowork mobile app
The mobile Microsoft Copilot app can now find and configure Cowork plugins from the attach menu under Skills. Custom skills are still desktop and web only.
A CSP incentive now pays partners for Cowork activation
Microsoft launched the Copilot Cowork CSP Activation Incentive on 1 September, rewarding indirect resellers and direct bill partners for driving customer adoption and usage of Cowork. It stacks on top of the existing CSP incentives.
Microsoft Scout (now Autopilot)
Always-on personal AI agent — private preview
Scout has a new name: Autopilot
Microsoft renamed Scout to Autopilot as part of the new three-part Copilot, pairing it with Home and Code. The digital-teammate idea is unchanged; Autopilot is the name customers will hear from here on.
Autopilot lives in your tenant with its own identity and memory
Autopilot runs inside the tenant with its own identity, memory, computer and workspace, built on Microsoft IQ so it carries a model of how the organization actually works. It is cloud-hosted rather than tied to a device, with permissions, audit and governance behind it.
You give Autopilot a name, a role and a goal
Setup is a name, a role and a goal — after that it watches channels, follows up on threads, runs recurring work and picks a project back up days later without waiting for a prompt. It turns up in Teams, Outlook, chats and documents, where you @mention it like a colleague.
Autopilot enters private preview at the end of September
Microsoft says Autopilot expands to private preview at the end of the month, with team-aware @Copilot in Teams on the same timing and a proactive Today experience following in private preview in October. Home and Code roll out to Frontier participants in the meantime.