Build what’s next with Microsoft AI

Generative AI uses deep learning to create new content in response to natural language prompts. It can also generate text, images, music, and code.

There are several types of AI, each designed for different purposes:

Traditional AI - Automates specific tasks using predefined rules and algorithms, often used in manufacturing and data processing.

Predictive AI - Analyzes historical data to forecast future outcomes, commonly used in finance, healthcare, and marketing.

Conversational AI - Powers chatbots and virtual assistants to facilitate natural language interactions, generating human-like responses.

Generative AI is different because it creates content rather than simply analyzing or predicting based on existing data.

Copilots are chat-based generative AI interactions from Microsoft. They have specialized functionality based on their users and use cases. Some Copilots are experienced standalone, while others are integrated into Microsoft products, services, and devices.

Included in this portfolio are Microsoft Copilot, Microsoft 365 Copilot, Microsoft Security Copilot, and GitHub Copilot, among other generative AI solutions and experiences.

AI can be a powerful ally in boosting productivity and efficiency. Here are some ways Microsoft AI can help streamline your daily tasks:

Microsoft Copilot understands your questions and provides direct answers, assists with writing, and even creates images. For example, Copilot can help you give your resume a quick update, craft a post for social media, or write an email.

Microsoft 365 Copilot integrates AI with Microsoft apps like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook. It can assist with tasks like drafting emails, summarizing lengthy documents, creating reports from data, and managing your calendar.

AI features in Microsoft Teams include real-time transcription, translation services, meeting summaries, and action items following the meeting.

With Copilot Studio, you can easily design, test, and publish agents that suit your needs for internal or external scenarios across your industry, department, or role. You can build a standalone agent or publish to Microsoft 365 Copilot.

For more customized productivity solutions, Azure offers a suite of tools to help you develop and deploy intelligent applications tailored to your needs.

To have full access to Copilot in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Teams, your organization needs to have a license for a qualifying Microsoft 365 plan and a license for Microsoft 365 Copilot —even if you already use Copilot outside of work or have limited access in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Teams.

AI features are available in Microsoft 365 applications through Copilot and can be used in many ways, such as:

Writing and editing. Copilot in Word can provide prompts to help you start writing quickly, help edit existing documents, and help trim down and summarize longer texts.

Data analysis. Copilot in Excel can help analyze data, write formulas, and organize unstructured data into a more digestible format.

Creating presentations. Copilot in PowerPoint can help build presentations, edit notes, and rearrange slides.

Streamlining collaboration. Copilot in Teams can summarize meetings, provide transcripts, and share insights from discussions.

There are additional partner AI solutions that tailor Microsoft 365 to individual business needs.

Microsoft Copilot remembers details that matter to your daily life while keeping your personal data secure and protecting your privacy. You can always manage your privacy preferences in your Copilot Privacy settings.

When you’re using Copilots at work, all your existing security and compliance requirements are inherited, so only people with the right permissions can access the content it generates.

As a company, Microsoft is committed to providing trustworthy AI —with decades of research, customer feedback, and learnings informing the capabilities that deliver privacy, safety, and security.

Implementing generative AI comes with several considerations, including data security, biases, misinformation, and regulatory compliance. Ensuring the security of sensitive data and managing potential biases in AI-generated content are critical concerns—in addition to challenges related to transparency, accountability, and the potential misuse of AI technologies. Microsoft’s strategy paper, Minimize Risk and Reap the Benefits of AI, provides a comprehensive guide to navigating the challenges and opportunities of using generative AI.

Ensuring the accuracy and reliability of AI-generated content requires evaluating and monitoring the performance of generative AI models. Microsoft Foundry offers evaluation metrics that assess the quality, safety, and relevance of generated content. Techniques such as Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) can also improve accuracy by using sourced data instead of relying solely on the model's training data.

No. If Copilot is enabled you are already getting it. Microsoft describes Work IQ as built directly into the Microsoft 365 intelligence stack, invisible to users, with no new controls or UI to manage. It is not a separate thing you license or configure.

What you do control is the data it reasons over. See the governance boundaries for where those limits sit.

Unstructured Microsoft 365 content first: SharePoint sites and files, OneDrive activity, Teams chats and meeting data, Outlook mail plus attachments. Calendar signals such as meeting participation, recency and frequency add the time dimension that tells it what is current. It also draws on structured sources such as Power Apps and Dynamics 365.

Microsoft splits the layer itself into data, memory and inference. Our Microsoft 365 Copilot page carries that breakdown in Microsoft’s own words.

Because an untranscribed meeting is invisible to the intelligence layer. Decisions made out loud and never written down cannot be connected to the documents or the people they relate to.

Microsoft’s own rollout treated turning transcription on as the highest-value change it made. It flags the hard part as cultural rather than technical. Meeting labels keep the classification attached to recordings, transcripts and notes, so this does not trade governance for coverage. Full account in what Microsoft learned running it on itself.

Yes, through MCP servers. Microsoft frames that as a deliberate governed choice rather than something that happens by default: each server exposes a scoped slice of Microsoft 365 signals to an agent while still honoring permissions, sensitivity labels and tenant policies. The developer detail sits on AI agents.

Priority scoring. Work IQ lets Copilot reason across email signals, conversation history, meeting patterns plus calendar behaviour instead of keywords or unread status, so a thread is ranked by how urgent and relevant it is to your work. Calendar signals such as participation, recency plus frequency add the time dimension.

Microsoft Digital also reports proactive nudges that surface what changed. Full account in what Microsoft learned running Work IQ on its own tenant.

Yes. Thread summaries highlight owners, decisions made plus next steps, which is what makes them useful for catching up rather than skimming. Someone added to the thread late or back from time away gets the state of a complex conversation without reading every past message or the documents attached to them.

Microsoft Digital frames this as taking cognitive load off people, not as a feature to learn. There are no commands or rules to set up.

Transcripts, speaker contributions, shared content plus AI-generated summaries. Capture starts the moment the meeting is recorded. The result is folded into the attendees’ ongoing work context with no manual note-taking. The transcript then connects to the people involved, the SharePoint sites they used plus related work happening elsewhere in the organization.

Microsoft draws the contrast with third-party meeting tools: the data never leaves the tenant, so permissions plus sensitivity labels keep applying. See what an agent did with one of those transcripts.