AI adoption has skyrocketed, climbing from 55% in 2023 to 75% in 2024, and the trend shows no signs of slowing down in 2025. On the financial front, generative AI delivers impressive results: for every $1 invested, companies see a return of $3.70. The die is cast—future-proofing your business means taking generative AI seriously today. Microsoft makes it easier by enrolling new out-of-the-box agents that take unique roles and complex tasks, advancing Copilot capabilities in Microsoft 365.
Purpose-Built Agents
Agents in SharePoint: Create your own agents, give them personalized names and behaviours, and share them easily across meetings, chats and emails. Sounds good? Agents in SharePoint can do magic with SharePoint content while following existing user permissions and sensitivity labels to prevent the oversharing of delicate information. SharePoint agents are now generally available!
Employee Self-Service Agent: Start a leave of absence, request a new laptop, retrieve benefits and payroll information, all from BizChat. In Microsoft 365 Copilot Business Chat (BizChat), the Employee Self-Service Agent (in private preview) offers instant answers to most asked questions about workplace policy and take action on basic HR and IT tasks.
Interpreter and Facilitator Agents: Teams Meetings are about to level up! The Interpreter Agent (preview in the next year) makes it possible for participants to speak and listen in the language of their choice. It enables real-time interpretation in up to nine languages. Meanwhile, the Facilitator agent (in preview) takes notes and shares in chat a summary of the most important information. Everyone can co-author, so the collaboration is seamless and more effective.
Project Manager Agent: From plan creation to executing tasks, the Project Manager Agent (in preview) can automate everything. It can use a pre-configured template or even make a new plan from scratch. The Project Manager Agent oversees the entire project, including the assignment of tasks, progress tracking, notifications, reminders and status reporting.
New Copilot Studio Capabilities
Autonomous Agentic Capabilities & Agent Library: To help users in agent creations, Microsoft Copilot Studio brings several updates, including autonomous capabilities. Agents can act independently, performing tasks such as recording uploaded files, responding to emails, and managing events without constant user input. For commonly used agent scenarios, such as leave management, sales order and acceleration agent, Copilot Studio provides templates for its users.
Advanced knowledge tuning in Copilot Studio: Makers will be able to 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 to improve answer rates and evolve the agent over time. This feature is in preview.
Other notable Copilot updates:
- • Easily delegate repetitive tasks with Microsoft 365 Copilot Actions (in private preview)
- • Analyze screen-shared content and summarize with Copilot in Teams (early 2025 preview)
- • Enable faster creation and more inclusivity with Copilot features in PowerPoint (generally available starting January 2025)
- • Create a task-tailored spreadsheet template with Copilot in Excel (generally available by the end of 2024)
- • Make meeting management easier with Copilot in Outlook (generally available)
- • Organize multimodal notes in OneNote with Copilot (in preview)
- • Measure AI impact with Copilot Analytics (starting early 2025)
Azure AI Foundry
Foundry is the place where the next generation of AI apps and agents are designed and managed at scale. It’s where organizations access Azure AI models and tooling to build custom AI solutions. New capabilities include:
Azure AI Foundry SDK (in preview): Benefit from a unified toolchain to customize, test, deploy, and manage AI apps with enterprise-grade control. You can also get a productivity boost through prebuilt templates and integration with familiar tools like GitHub, Visual Studio and Copilot Studio.
Azure AI Foundry Portal (in preview): Your cross-functional team now has a visual interface that centralizes AI model discovery, subscription management, and resource optimization.
Azure AI Agent Service (in preview): For developers, it enables to deploy and scale enterprise agents with features like private networking and data compliance.
Global Infrastructure
This year, Microsoft’s Azure adaptive cloud approach continues to support the global infrastructure. In this context, we introduce you to Azure Local (generally available), a new hybrid infrastructure platform enabled by Azure Arc. It extends Azure services to customers’ locations so they can run workloads, cloud-native apps and AI with enhanced flexibility.
Azure Local, in partnership with OEMs like Dell, HP, and Lenovo, offers secure, pre-validated hardware integrated with cloud services. It supports a range of infrastructure options, from small industrial PCs to enterprise-class server deployments, including disconnected environments to meet regulatory and compliance requirements.
Microsoft Fabric
Fabric Databases (in preview): Intuitive and autonomous databases designed to simplify AI application development. As the first database engine to unify data within Fabric, it seamlessly integrates operational and analytical data while enabling AI-powered insights.
Data is automatically replicated to OneLake, making it immediately available for analysis by Fabric’s engines. Native vector search capabilities, combined with embedding models, support advanced patterns like retrieval-augmented generation. Additionally, Copilot in Fabric enhances developer productivity by translating natural language queries into SQL, providing inline code completion, and offering code fixes and explanations.
AI in Fabric
Fabric’s AI functions simplify text-related tasks, enabling users to perform text summarization, translation, classification, sentiment analysis, grammar correction, and more with minimal code. Notebook users benefit from a streamlined API that applies popular AI enrichments efficiently with fewer lines of code.
In Azure AI Agent Service, seamless integration with enterprise data sources like Microsoft SharePoint and Fabric’s AI skills allows for intelligent grounding and automated actions. Together, these features enhance productivity and streamline workflows across platforms.
Leverage AI in Power Apps
New AI-driven capabilities in Microsoft Power Apps are set to transform how makers build intelligent, low-code solutions. With Copilot, makers can iteratively define business problems, generate solution architectures, and accelerate development within a unified Power Apps Studio experience. The platform introduces app-specific agents that autonomously execute tasks using existing app logic, with users able to oversee and intervene as needed.
Enhancements like AI-generated record summaries, customized chat capabilities, and smarter form-filling from files and emails streamline workflows and boost productivity. Additionally, bi-directional integration between Dataverse and Snowflake brings advanced analytics and real-time data insights to both platforms (in preview in December).
Better Automations in Power Automate
Microsoft Power Automate introduces new AI and governance features to streamline automation creation and management. Enhancements include next-generation document processing with GPT-4o, enabling automation of emails, documents, and images with multimodal support, now in preview. Generative actions will allow users to create AI-powered steps from natural language input, previewing in December.
The Copilot expression assistant helps build complex expressions with ease, while the Repair with Copilot feature for RPA recommends fixes for UI issues in desktop flows, both available in preview. Additionally, the Automation Center, now generally available, centralizes the management of automations at scale, boosting operational efficiency.
Elevated experiences in Power Pages
Microsoft Power Pages introduces new capabilities to deliver secure, intelligent, and streamlined solutions for evolving business needs. Agent-enabled workflows empower digital experiences with autonomous agents secured by robust access controls. Enhanced List AI Insights offer actionable recommendations to optimize user engagement, while the new Site Copilot supports structured Q&A and streamlined Application Lifecycle Management for seamless website management and improved deployments. These features are now available in preview.
Power Platform Admin Center
The updated Power Platform admin center enhances governance and security with an intelligent control plane for IT admins. New features in preview include tools to manage low-code assets, monitor agent adoption in Copilot Studio, oversee capacity and licenses, and optimize performance. A revamped security page provides visibility, actionable recommendations, and controls to strengthen enterprise security posture, ensuring effective platform management at scale.
Microsoft Security Exposure Management, now generally available, empowers organizations to assess and reduce cyber threat exposure across hybrid, multi-cloud, and on-premises environments. By consolidating data silos, it offers a unified view of attack surfaces, automates assessments of attack paths, and provides prioritized, context-driven recommendations to enhance security posture.
Key features include Attack Surface Management for discovering and safeguarding critical assets, Attack Path Analysis to identify and mitigate potential threats, and Unified Exposure Insights, which aggregates data from Microsoft and third-party vendors to align security investments with business needs and compliance. Integrated with Defender XDR and Security Copilot, it ensures comprehensive protection pre- and post-breach.
With a continuous threat exposure management approach, organizations can proactively monitor, manage, and mitigate risks to critical assets, ensuring stronger cyber defenses.
Microsoft Purview
Microsoft Purview Insider Risk Management (IRM) introduces tools to detect risks tied to generative AI (GenAI) apps, helping organizations monitor sensitive prompts and responses in tools like Microsoft 365 Copilot and ChatGPT Enterprise. New metrics such as jailbreaks and hallucinations enhance Communication Compliance and adaptive protection against insider risks. IRM alerts now integrate with Microsoft Defender XDR, offering enriched incident analysis and deeper investigations via Advanced Hunting. This integration improves threat visibility, reduces false positives, and aligns containment actions with business priorities. Additionally, IRM now incorporates Microsoft Entra alerts to better identify and address compromised user risks.
At Microsoft Ignite 2024, Microsoft has set the bar even higher with groundbreaking innovations designed to transform the way businesses work. As a proud Microsoft partner, we are excited to see the powerful new tools and updates—like the enhanced Copilot Studio, Azure’s AI capabilities, and the latest security innovations—that will empower us and our clients to push the boundaries of productivity, automation, and security. From streamlining workflows with Microsoft 365 Copilot to safeguarding data with Microsoft Purview, the future is looking smarter, faster, and more secure than ever before. Embrace these advancements, and let’s continue to lead the way in driving digital transformation for businesses across the globe.
