Microsoft announces Wave 2; AI integrated across all Microsoft 365 products

Microsoft 365 Copilot is changing the way businesses work, with nearly 60 per cent of the Fortune 500 companies using it. The tool is designed to assist employees in completing tasks, holding meetings, and automating workflows and processes.

As part of Microsoft 365 Copilot: Wave 2, the company announced 700 product updates. The company, in a live-streamed event, said that over 150 new features have been shipped already. The company also added that these new features have dramatically improved performance, including moving to the GPT-4o model.

With these updates, Microsoft is bringing together work, web, and pages. Along with this, Copilot is now part of Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and OneDrive.

Satya Nadella, chairman and CEO, Microsoft, during the announcement, called these updates the UI for AI.

“It has just been 18 months since we launched Microsoft 365 Copilot. It is rapidly becoming an organising layer for work; how work gets done, transforming the workflow and work artifacts for more than 400 million people who use Microsoft 365,” said Nadella during the live stream.

He further added that the number of people who use Copilot daily at work has nearly doubled quarter over quarter. “Customers are coming back to deploy more seats. Copilot adoption rates, in fact, are faster than any other new Microsoft 365 suite,” he added.

The company also said that the number of customers with more than 10,000 seats more than doubled quarter-on-quarter. For instance, Vodafone has invested in 68,000 licences for its 100,000 employees. According to Microsoft, Vodafone employees save around three hours a week, leading to improved work-life balance and increased productivity. The legal and compliance team has reduced contract drafting time by an hour.

Honeywell users save an average of 92 minutes per week, equivalent to 390,000 hours over a year. Finastra uses Copilot to create marketing assets faster, while Bank of Queensland has reduced document creation time.

Other companies, such as Progressive Insurance, Lumen Technologies, Teladoc, Amgen, Cognizant, ICG, PKSHA, Joos, Morula Health, and Floww, have also experienced productivity boosts and efficiency gains since adopting Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Microsoft explained that Copilot will evolve in three major ways. First, it will bring the web, work, and pages together. This means that Copilot can take any information from the web or from a user's work and turn it into a multiplayer AI canvas.

Second, Copilot is being deeply integrated with various Microsoft products such as PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook, etc. And finally, Microsoft will be introducing Copilot agents.