Microsoft 365 Copilot Wave 2 was unveiled Wednesday, featuring “reasoning” agents that are available in the company’s Agent Store, AI-powered enterprise search that locates data across diverse applications, new image generation functions, and “notebooks” that help to organize a wide variety of content for end users.
On the same day, the company released its 2025 Work Trend Index, which quantifies the ways business leaders are looking to tap “digital labor” in the coming months, augmenting their work forces and automating workstreams. As such, the company continues to advance the notion of humans and agents working in concert — to the extent that agents will increasingly be included in org charts.
“Organizations will need to consider if there are times when human and digital labor outperform AI alone, when customers prefer a human touch or when society expects people to be responsible for the consequences — like a high-stakes product or finance decision,” said Jared Spataro, chief marketing officer, AI at Work for Microsoft, in a blog post detailing the report’s key findings.  “Whether it’s a customer conversation, a strategic decision or a product launch, knowing how to staff the right mix of humans and agents will define how work gets done — and how success is measured.”
This report will provide details on the new Copilot/agent product functionality from Microsoft, as well as my take on key findings from the Work Trend Index.
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Wave of AI Advances
The company said that the recently disclosed Researcher and Analyst Reasoning Agents, powered by OpenAI deep reasoning models combined with Microsoft 365 Copilot’s advanced orchestration and search capabilities — are now available in the new Agent Store where customers can select prebuilt Microsoft agents as well as agents from partners including Jira, Monday.com, and more.
Researcher delivers insights with high quality and accuracy in complex, multi-step research. This includes tapping third-party data via connectors to provide more comprehensive insights from external sources, such as Salesforce, ServiceNow, and more, directly into Microsoft 365.
Analyst functions like a data scientist, enabling companies to translate raw data into business insights; it will progress through problems iteratively, taking steps to refine its reasoning and provide a high-quality answer that mirrors human analysis.
Copilot Search is enterprise search tech that helps you find what you need quickly with context-aware answers extracted from your organization’s apps and data. It connects to first- and third-party apps — examples include ServiceNow, Google Drive, and Slack — so you get fast, relevant results no matter where your data lives.
The new Create functionality leverages OpenAI’s GPT‑4o AI image generation to enable anyone to perform design and content creation including marketing content, social posts, and surveys. A user can also modify or customize brand images or generate images aligned to a company’s brand guidelines.
Copilot Notebooks allows you to pull together content from notes, documents, websites, meeting and recordings; it then grounds Copilot to deliver relevant actions and insights — all while scanning your source material to update in real time as your content updates. Notebooks can be used to create a podcast-style audio overview of your content with hosts that walk you through the key points.
With new memory and personalization functions, Copilot learns to understand your needs and preferences through chats, job profile details, custom instructions, and more. Memory and personalization is privately managed by you; if you’re working with sensitive information, you can control what Copilot remembers.
The new Skills agent is a clear-cut indicator of the evolving relationship between humans and agents that’s also detailed in the new Work Trend Index. Skills agent, powered by a new People Skills data layer in Copilot, lets leaders easily create dynamic skill-based teams to tackle projects, while facilitating connections between employees looking to find skills needed to complete work.
Agents Multiply Workforce Capacity
Based on the data presented in the 2025 Work Trend Index, the functionality of the Skills agent from Microsoft detailed above should fill an important requirement for tech and business leaders.
Among the key findings on current and planned usage of AI agents:
- 82% of business leaders expect to use AI agents to meet the demand for additional workforce capacity
- 45% position “maintaining headcount but using AI as digital labor” as a top workforce strategy, second only to the 47% who cite “prioritizing AI-specific skilling of existing workforce” (see chart)
- 78% of leaders say they’re considering hiring for AI-specific roles to prepare their firms for the future
- 46% say their companies are using agents to fully automate workflows or processes; they list customer service, marketing, and product development as the top three areas for accelerated AI investment
There are also several compelling data points around the evolving nature and relationship of agents and humans, which Microsoft officials have previously referred to in context of the agent-to-human ratio:
- 28% of managers are considering hiring AI workforce managers to lead agent-people hybrid teams
- 32% plan to hire specialists to design, develop and optimize AI agents within 12-18 months
- 42% expect their teams will build multi-agent systems to automate complex tasks within five years
- 46% of respondents see AI as a thought partner and expect to have conversational exchanges in order to challenge their thinking, spark creativity, or brainstorm ideas
Closing Thoughts
Taken together, Microsoft’s Copilot and agent functionality, as well as the workforce evolution that AI is prompting, paint a clear picture of a rapidly changing work environment where AI agents can provide an always-on resource that can do everything from automate rote tasks that people dread, to becoming an interactive resource that can handle complex tasks, interact with humans to refine their thinking, and help offload steps that require significant time but limited expertise.
That’s a future that even skeptics or those fearing AI can look forward to, provided they embrace the upskilling and new ways of thinking these changes require in order to capitalize on AI’s enormous potential.
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