Introducing Researcher and Analyst in Microsoft 365 Copilot

Today, we’re excited to introduce two first-of-their-kind reasoning agents for work: Researcher and Analyst. They analyze vast amounts of information with secure, compliant access to your work data—your emails, meetings, files, chats, and more—and the web to deliver highly-skilled expertise on demand.

Researcher helps you tackle complex, multi-step research at work—delivering insights with greater quality and accuracy than previously possible. It combines OpenAI’s deep research model with Microsoft 365 Copilot’s advanced orchestration and deep search capabilities. You can use Researcher to build a detailed go-to-market strategy based on the context of all your work data and broader competitive data from the web; identify whitespace opportunities for a new product based on emerging trends and internal data; or create a comprehensive quarterly report for a client review detailing work to date along with the latest market analysis. And Researcher can leverage third-party data via connectors to enhance its capabilities and provide more comprehensive insights—allowing it to integrate data from external sources, such as Salesforce, ServiceNow, Confluence, and more, directly into Microsoft 365 Copilot. It can even pull in data through other agents such as Sales Chat.

See more examples of Researcher in action.

Analyst thinks like a skilled data scientist, so you can go from raw data to insights in minutes. Built on OpenAI’s o3-mini reasoning model and optimized to do advanced data analysis at work, Analyst uses chain-of-thought reasoning to progress through problems iteratively, taking as many steps as necessary to refine its reasoning and provide a high-quality answer that mirrors human analytical thinking. It can run Python to tackle your most complex data queries—and you can view the code it’s running in real time and check its work. For example, you can use Analyst to turn raw data scattered across multiple spreadsheets into a demand forecast for a new product, a visualization of customer purchasing patterns, or a revenue projection.

See more examples of Analyst in action.

Researcher and Analyst will start rolling out to customers with a Microsoft 365 Copilot license in April as part of a new “Frontier” program that gives customers early access to new Copilot innovations while they’re still in development.

Read more about Researcher and Analyst.

Deep reasoning and agent flows in Microsoft Copilot Studio

We’re also announcing deep reasoning and agent flows in Microsoft Copilot Studio, a comprehensive platform to easily create, manage, and deploy agents for your unique business needs. Organizations can build deep reasoning into their agents to execute complex and multi-faceted business processes, while also using flows to automate processes quickly and predictably. Learn more about these new reasoning capabilities in Copilot Studio.

And lastly, new capabilities that enable you to build autonomous agents in Copilot Studio are generally available today. Now, agents can act independently, initiate events, and automate complex business tasks.

IT teams can confidently adopt all these innovations by using the Copilot Control System. It enables intelligent grounding on enterprise data while respecting your organization’s controls, and it empowers IT to govern access and usage of Copilot and agents.

See Researcher in action

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See Analyst in action

Transform every business process with agents

These announcements further our ambition to empower every employee with a Copilot and transform every business process with agents. With Researcher and Analyst, every employee has access to expertise on demand—right in the flow of work. We can’t wait to see what you do with them.