Millions of working professionals rely on the Microsoft 365 suite of applications for their daily workflows. To speed up some of these everyday business processes, the company is now adding two new AI agents to its Microsoft 365 Copilot offering.
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On Tuesday, Microsoft unveiled its Researcher and Analyst deep-reasoning agents for work capable of conducting higher-level research and data analysis. Both agents leverage existing OpenAI models to deliver more advanced, personalized support tailored to the specific needs and workflows of Microsoft 365 users.
Researcher
The Researcher agent functions similarly to OpenAI‘s and Google’s Deep Research features, sifting through robust amounts of information from the web and outputting that information into a neat report with sources.
Moreover, Microsoft’s Research Agent is powered by OpenAI’s Deep Research model in combination with Microsoft 365 Copilot’s “advanced orchestration and deep search capabilities,” according to the release.
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As a result, Microsoft’s version can go one step further from existing research agents, also pulling context from your work data, such as your emails, meetings, files, chats, and more. When combined with all of the information available on the web, it is able to create really personalized and rich reports.
For example, Microsoft says Researcher can put together a comprehensive quarterly report for a client that combines information found across your apps as well as external news. The Researcher agent can also pull in data from third-party sources, such as ServiceNow and Salesforce, to better inform its outputs.
Analyst
The Analyst agent was built on OpenAI’s o3-mini reasoning model to provide users with comprehensive insights from raw data in minutes, according to Microsoft. Meant to act as a skilled data scientist, it uses chain-of-thought reasoning, another term for step-by-step processing, to work through complex queries. Users can watch the code running in real-time to learn from its processes and double-check the process.
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Availability
Both the Researcher and Analyst agents will start rolling out to customers with a Microsoft 365 Copilot license in April. The rollout will be part of a new Frontier program that lets customers experience early Copilot innovations while they’re still being developed.
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