News Analysis
Microsoft unveiled its Wave 2 update for Microsoft 365 Copilot on Sept. 16. The update came 10 months after the initial release of the AI assistant and introduced several new features aimed at enhancing collaboration and improving digital worker productivity.
Key additions include:
1. Copilot Pages: Pages makes it possible to convert Copilot chat sessions into shareable and editable documents in an effort to make interactions between humans and AI more dynamic and actionable.
2. Copilot Agents: With Agents, people will be able to create custom AI agents using Copilot Studio. These autonomous agents can be:
- Grounded in organizational data sources such as SharePoint or Dynamics 365.
- Taught specific skills, like creating support tickets or responding to emails.
- Deployed across various Microsoft 365 applications, including Microsoft Teams.
The Copilot system fully manages and orchestrates these custom agents, meaning they come with built-in integrations throughout the Microsoft 365 environment as well as inheriting any access and security settings within an organization's tenant.
Microsoft's Strategy With the Copilot Wave 2 Update
The updates come at a time when businesses are increasingly looking for generative AI solutions to produce quantifiable results. Microsoft has been pouring billions into the technology and has consistently rolled out updates and enhancements into Copilot in an effort to make it a more versatile, capable and powerful tool for modern workplaces — and a more palatable investment for business leaders.
A blog post from Microsoft’s Jared Spataro, corporate VP for AI at Work, indicates just how much Microsoft is betting on this new wave, and future waves to come. He positions Copilot as the new user interface for artificial intelligence in the workplace.
At the heart of this innovation is Business Chat (BizChat), a centralized platform that integrates various data sources — including web content, internal work documents and line-of-business information — directly into workflows. BizChat allows workers to pull from all of those data sources to create documents, presentations and other business resources.
Building on this foundation, the blog reads, comes Copilot Pages. Pages offers a dynamic and persistent workspace designed specifically for multi-user AI collaboration. Microsoft views Copilot Pages as a canvas for humans and Copilots to collaborate in real time in a single surface.
One other noteworthy addition is Copilot Agents. According to the blog, Agents are AI assistants designed to automate and execute business processes, working with or for humans. Notably, the blog posits Agents as an opportunity to "scale your team like never before."
The company is doing a gradual roll out of the new features, with Pages becoming generally available in September and Agents expected in preview in October.
Related Article: Are Business Leaders Prioritizing AI Innovation Over Existing Jobs?
Wave 2 Had Some Exciting Announcements, With Some Caveats
While it is too early to judge how the Wave 2 updates will be received by Microsoft 365 customers, Tom Keuten, SVP and Microsoft Alliance Lead at Rightpoint, told Reworked that their significance depends on how immersed individual organizations are with the current technology.
For those with a deep understanding of Microsoft's technology offerings, Wave 2 had some exciting announcements like Pages and BizChat and how best to take advantage of them. The release also signals Microsoft's continued investment in and commitment to release new capabilities for the product, which will potentially make the product more appealing to customers who have not yet invested in Copilot, he said.
1. Copilot Pages
Keuten said Microsoft helped change the way employees collaborate with the Teams persistent chat function and posits this new user interface as another place for persistent chat. However, Pages takes it one step beyond, where the team can collectively prompt the generative AI, moving it to a collaborative activity rather than an individual. But Keuten flagged potential issues with Pages and suggested Microsoft should now work out how to join these interfaces together to reduce the number of places employees have to work in. Additionally, he called for more transparency around where Microsoft stores these interfaces, and how enterprises will be paying for it.
2. Copilot Agents
While the concept of Agents is not new, Keuten noted the branding is. Companies have already been experimenting with Agents through Copilot Studio after they were introduced at Build last year. The new branding distinguishes Copilot Agents from the previous iterations, which Keuten argues is a smart move on Microsoft's part to avoid the confusion caused by “too many Copilots.” At first glance, Copilot Agents look like a powerful technology for typical employees to use, but he sees most enterprises using highly trained specialists or hiring outside experts to help create them.
Related Article: Where Copilots Fit in Microsoft's MOCA Framework
A Marketing Push to Overcome GenAI Doubts
While Wave 2 is a significant release, Deep Analysis founder Alan Pelz-Sharpe told Reworked, it is as much an acceleration of Microsoft's marketing efforts due to the slow monetization and widespread doubts about the value and effectiveness of generative AI.
Enterprises are pushing back against the unprecedented cost of generative AI, he continued, as it remains hard to justify its value. Moreover, there are deep concerns regarding accuracy, security and compliance.
“Wave 2 as such, in theory at least, focuses more on internal data than external data sources. Moreover, the pitch of Agents is specific to job roles, rather than just generic task support, so the hope is this will gain more traction,” Pelz-Sharpe said. “There are certainly some good RPA-style use cases (repetitive and highly predictable tasks) that will benefit here — but beyond that it’s not so clear.”
Undoubtably this will improve collaboration for some, he acknowledged, as by default it has more of a human touch. But where it will add value, and how many will embrace it is an open question. “That being said, this is hitting a truly huge customer base so there will be some traction for sure,” he said. “Moreover, it’s worth noting that there is potentially more here for Microsoft customers with big skills and investment in Power Automate, as that's what is powering the Agents' actions.”
Pelz-Sharpe is cautious about predicting where and what Agents will be able to do not just for collaboration but for the workplace. “This is the biggest question of all. In theory, Agents replicate human job roles. The tech is sound enough, but it’s unclear how many, if any, enterprises have accurate, relevant easily accessible and compliant data for the agents to use,” he said.
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It's doubtful that enterprises have documented and accurate workflow steps surrounding a job role, he continued, as in reality much of this is in the heads of the human worker. The system simply records that a job was done, and at best provides a rough sketch of how it was done.
“Agents are the next big thing ... in terms of marketing and sales push from major vendors like Salesforce, Microsoft, Oracle and Google — and surely everyone else will follow in their footsteps,” Pelz-Sharpe said.
But there are huge unanswered questions regarding their effectiveness or validity that need to be answered. Not least of which is the curious argument by these vendors that in no way do agents replace human workers, whilst at the same time boldly declaring that they replicate the work job role of a human worker, he noted. That's at best confusing, and at worst, a deliberately misleading message, he concluded.
Related Article: It Could Be 5 Years Before We See Productivity Gains From Generative AI
Classification and Content Governance Are Needed Before Wave 2 Can Work
For Designing Collaboration partner Andrew Pope, little will change, initially at least, in the way work is done. He predicts Pages will suffer from the same fate as Loop, as another tool within a tool that offers subtle differences to the basic premise of team collaboration. Workers tend to understand chat and channel messages, but having an additional means to collaborate and co-work without understanding 'why' is going to be a tough ask, he told Reworked.
Having said that, Pope does see Pages as offering a good interface to co-create content with colleagues and AI. He notes this informal method of collaboration moves businesses away from document-based collaboration. “It's also the first way that more than one person can interact together with Copilot easily, so there are advantages,” he said.
However, given that people tend not to collaborate well in current tools (e.g., wikis, Loop, etc.), Pope questions why this is being introduced now. "Most of us don't use Microsoft 365 collaboration tools in a particularly mature way, so there is only going to be limited uptake in the short- to medium-term,” he added.
Pope said it was too early to see how and even if Agents would work. A prerequisite for the tool working is if an organization has robust classification and governance of content — something most organizations are lacking, he noted. Perhaps they have specific libraries that are trusted and up to date, but Pope said on a widespread scale, businesses need to do a lot of very dull background work first.
“Digital maturity in Microsoft 365 is still low. We need to have higher maturity in use of collaboration tools and in content governance/ classification to really reap the benefits,” Pope concluded.