Microsoft on Monday released a new line of AI agent products for enterprise customers, evolving its CoPilot tool from an AI assistant to a broader ecosystem of agentic features.
The launch, dubbed “Wave 3” by Microsoft of its 365 CoPilot rollout, focuses on a new feature called copilot colleagueBuilt in collaboration with Anthropic and powered by the cloud model of the independent Generator AI vendor. The move represents somewhat of a shift for Microsoft, which was originally closely associated with Anthropic’s rival, OpenAI. This tool is designed to handle complex, multi-step tasks from a single user request. By accessing a user’s work apps and context, it can provide more targeted, tailored responses to the task at hand, Microsoft said.
Copilot Cowork is being piloted with select customers and is set to enter Research Preview in March as part of Microsoft’s new Frontier Worker product suite.
Microsoft said that cloud will also be fully available now copilot chat Experience.
Meanwhile, Microsoft is planning a new generation of agentic features for Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook, which will give employees a better chat experience, the ability to create and enhance artifacts and tools to create their own agents.
Additionally, Microsoft said it will make its Microsoft Agent 365 system generally available on May 1. Governance and transparency – increasingly important considerations for enterprise AI deployments – are featured prominently in this release. “The pace of agent development and proliferation tells us that customers see the value, but without guardrails the speed of adoption turns into blind spots, reducing ROI and reducing real security risks,” said Jared Spataro, Microsoft’s chief marketing officer for AI in the workplace. wrote in a blog post At launch. “As AI agents become more capable and autonomous, trust cannot be compromised.”
Addressing these concerns, Microsoft said Agent 365 gives IT and security leaders a single platform to “monitor, govern, manage, and secure” agents across their organization.
The vendor also highlighted interoperability as the main motivation behind the update, as well as the difficulties Microsoft is causing for organizations looking to pursue AI technologies at scale.
“As teams bring their own AI into the business, leaders are managing overlapping tools, inconsistent experiences, and rising costs,” Spataro said. “The result is broken context for users, unnecessary overhead for organizations, and the burden of model selection placed on people who just want to work.”
