Microsoft kicked off April with details on a wide range of Microsoft 365 Copilot enhancements spanning governance and security and AI features in productivity apps.
Governance and security features include new Copilot usage measures, content/data sourcing safeguards in Microsoft Purview, and controls governing the information sources used by AI models. New app-based AI features include enhanced Copilot-driven automation in Excel, PowerPoint, and SharePoint, as well as expanded meeting summary features.
The March enhancements were outlined in a Microsoft blog; in this report, I’ll present highlights from the lengthy list of new features.
Governance Controls
Microsoft is now providing visibility into high-usage users in the Microsoft 365 admin center to help IT and finance identify individuals and teams driving high consumption of usage-based services. This new feature gives admins visibility into cost drivers and enables informed decisions on license optimization to better manage spend and improve license allocation.
With new metrics rolling out this month, admins can understand common user intents and usage patterns for Copilot across Microsoft 365 apps in the Copilot Dashboard. Admins can track Copilot tasks in the Microsoft 365 Copilot app, Edge, and OneNote.
Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention (DLP) is being enhanced with safeguards that prevent sensitive information from being used in Copilot prompts. Admins can define policies that detect and restrict Copilot from responding to prompts, connecting to internal data sources, and performing web searches if a prompt contains sensitive information such as financial data or bank account numbers.
The company also introduced several controls over web searches and sourcing.
Microsoft Purview DLP will safeguard web searches containing sensitive data for Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Chat users. This will mitigate data leakage and oversharing risks by preventing users from using sensitive information in prompts for web search, while allowing the response to be grounded in internal data sources.
Admins can manage authoritative sources within the Copilot Search experience in the Microsoft 365 admin center. For example, they can designate SharePoint sites as authoritative content sources for their organization, which will enhance ranking of these sites in Copilot search results.
Another governance feature, domain exclusion for web grounding, allows administrators to specify sites to exclude in Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Chat, providing control over which external web sources Copilot can reference when generating responses.
Copilot Productivity App Enhancements
Copilot enhancements for personal productivity apps have been rolled out for Excel, PowerPoint, meeting summaries, and SharePoint.
In Excel, Microsoft WorkIQ now automatically brings in the most relevant context – from emails, meetings, chats, and files – without requiring users to reference them manually. As a result, Copilot makes accurate, multi-step edits reflecting the latest context about users and their work.
In addition, Copilot can now make multi-step edits to Excel workbooks that are stored locally on Windows or Mac devices, eliminating the requirement to store files in the cloud.
For PowerPoint, a new ‘Edit With Copilot’ in PowerPoint lets users standardize a presentation’s appearance by automatically updating fonts, font sizes, and bullet styles across all slides at once, eliminating manual adjustments and letting users invest more time in their content and less painstaking time in content formatting.
Microsoft is delivering two meeting summary enhancements. First, when users ask Copilot Chat to summarize a meeting, they’ll now get a video recap alongside the written recap. Video recaps transform the meeting summary into a narrated highlight reel, combining key takeaways with short, relevant clips that emphasize important outcomes from a meeting. Video recap is available in Copilot Chat and Microsoft Clipchamp web player for meetings that are at least 10 minutes long with recording enabled.
In addition, audio recap is now available in seven additional languages, so global teams can easily catch up on meetings in the language that works best for them. Expanding beyond English, users can listen to AI summaries in Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish.
In SharePoint, new AI features automatically extract and apply metadata, adapt libraries as content changes, and ensure information is structured to support accurate Copilot and agent experiences across Microsoft 365. These features are powered by Anthropic Claude.
Researcher, Notebook and Tuning Enhancements
The final set of enhancements we’ll address in this analysis apply to Researcher agent, Copilot Notebooks, and Copilot Tuning.
Researcher agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot is being enhanced with new options that let users generate reports in their preferred formats. Users can convert Researcher reports to PowerPoint, PDF, infographic, or audio overview.
Copilot Notebooks now feature a revamped user experience that makes navigating and working more intuitive. Notebooks lets users gather project-related content such as documents, emails, chats, links, and Copilot Pages, and apply AI reasoning. The updates bring references, content in Copilot Pages, and Copilot chats into a single side-by-side view.
Copilot Tuning has added new templates in Agent Builder designed for tasks such as drafting complex documents, validating documents against guidelines, and editing to match a specific writing style. This feature will be available to enterprises with at least 5,000 Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses.
Related Microsoft and AI Insights:
- Microsoft Exec: With Latest AI Tools, Agent Positioned to Make up 20% of Every Team
- MCP Enablement Brings AI Automation to Dynamics 365 at Vast Scale
- Microsoft Agent Framework Enables Complex, Multi-Agent Actions
- Copilot’s Advantage vs. Stand-Alone Chatbots
Ask Cloud Wars AI Agent about this analysis
