Monthly Round Up: New Features in Microsoft 365 Copilot
November was a big month for Copilot and Copilot Studio, driven largely by the announcements at Microsoft Ignite 2025 and a major model update in Copilot Studio. We saw Copilot get smarter about your work with Work IQ, new Word/Excel/PowerPoint agents in chat, and deeper teamwork features in Teams, while Copilot Studio picked up GPT-5 Chat as a generally available orchestration model and better retrieval for SharePoint-grounded agents.
Let’s break down what changed.
At a Glance
- Work IQ intelligence layer behind Copilot and agents
- Word, Excel & PowerPoint agents in chat with expanded Agent Mode
- Microsoft Agent 365 announced as the control plane for agents
- Voice enhancements in the Microsoft 365 Copilot mobile app
- Teams Mode and collaboration-focused agents for meetings and channels
- GPT-5 Chat generally available in Copilot Studio
- Improved knowledge retrieval for SharePoint-grounded agents
- Updates across Windows, Power BI, Fabric SQL, and more
Work IQ
Work IQ is the new intelligence layer behind Microsoft 365 Copilot and custom agents. It blends your work data, preferences, relationships, and patterns to guide next actions. It also supports custom agents you build in Copilot Studio or via API, while respecting permissions, sensitivity labels, and compliance settings.
Word, Excel & PowerPoint Agents
Word, Excel, and PowerPoint agents are now available in Copilot chat with expanded Agent Mode inside the apps.
- Word Agent is generally available and can help draft, refine, and iterate on documents.
- Excel Agent supports different reasoning models for analysis and decision support.
- PowerPoint Agent is available through the Frontier program and focuses on helping build and improve presentations.
These agents allow you to keep context across chat and app workflows instead of starting from scratch in each surface.
Microsoft Agent 365
Microsoft Agent 365 is the new control plane for managing AI agents across your organization. It centralizes:
- Agent inventory
- Governance and policies
- Security and compliance controls
- Monitoring and performance insights
The goal is to give organizations one place to understand which agents exist, what they can access, and how they’re being used.
Mobile & Outlook Enhancements
The Microsoft 365 Copilot mobile app now supports voice interactions, enabling hands-free updates and queries. You can speak to Copilot to:
- Get a quick summary of your day
- Catch up on meetings
- Ask for document or email summaries on the go
In Outlook mobile, Copilot improvements include:
- Smarter triage and priority summaries
- Assistance scheduling meetings
- One-tap actions to draft replies or propose times
These changes make Copilot feel more like a real-time assistant when you’re away from your desk.
Teams Enhancements
Teams picked up several Copilot and agent-focused capabilities:
- Teams Mode lets you convert a Copilot chat into a group chat in Teams so everyone can see and build on the same thread.
- Collaboration-focused agents can join meetings, channels, and conversations to surface risks, track follow-up actions, and coordinate next steps.
- The Facilitator agent is now generally available and helps keep meetings on track by managing agendas, notes, and action items.
- Agents can integrate with third-party systems like GitHub, Asana, and Jira through MCP servers, pulling in work items and context directly into Teams.
Copilot Studio Updates
Copilot Studio had two big November highlights:
- GPT-5 Chat is now a generally available orchestration model, providing improved reasoning and responsiveness for agents.
- SharePoint-grounded agents benefit from enhanced knowledge retrieval using tenant graph grounding, which produces more accurate and context-rich answers for content stored in Microsoft 365.
Studio continues to expand its production-ready capabilities across:
- Testing scenarios
- Versioning and rollback
- Deployment workflows
This points clearly toward larger, more mission-critical agents being built and maintained in Copilot Studio.
Other Updates to Watch
- Copilot in Fabric SQL Database: Now generally available, helping users generate and optimize SQL with natural language
- Power BI enhancements: Expanded Copilot mobile capabilities and improvements to AI-driven insights
- Work IQ features: Extended to custom agents, not just first-party Microsoft experiences
- Edge with Copilot Mode: Multi-step workflow improvements, making it easier to chain actions together while browsing
- AI video creation upgrades: Available through the Frontier program, supporting richer content workflows that can complement Copilot-driven planning and writing
- New admin dashboards: Better diagnostics for agent errors, failure states, and bottlenecks so teams can tune and govern their AI footprint more effectively
My Take
November really strengthened the entire ecosystem. Work IQ gives Copilot and agents a smarter foundation. Office agents blur the lines between apps and conversations. Agent 365 starts solving the governance puzzle for organizations deploying multiple agents. And Copilot Studio’s GPT-5 Chat support shows Microsoft expects AI agents to move into serious production use.
If September was momentum and October was capability, November is refinement — and refinement is what turns an AI system from powerful to dependable.
