A year of Copilot: the Microsoft 365 features that actually change the working day

At Ignite in November 2025, Copilot was mostly an assistant for drafting, summarising and answering questions inside the Office apps. A year later a lot has changed. In 2026 alone, Microsoft's roadmap lists more than 240 Copilot items marked as launched. Many are small tweaks, but a handful genuinely change how people work.

Here is a selection of those, separating what you can use today from what is still on its way. Everything below comes from the Microsoft 365 roadmap and message center, checked on 22 September 2026.

Agent mode in Office: presentations built from your own material

Agent mode in PowerPoint and Word no longer stops at suggesting sentences. You ask for a complete deliverable and it builds it from whatever material you point it to: an email or a Teams conversation, an earlier deck (so it keeps the style), a web page or, through Work IQ, the context of what the company is working on.

It also prepares the executive summary slide on its own and lets you choose which AI model it uses, including Anthropic's, which admins can enable for specific users or groups only.

Copilot Notebooks, one topic in one place

A project's information is usually spread across emails, meetings and documents. Copilot Notebooks are there to pull it together: you add Outlook emails, Teams meetings, documents or Power BI reports as sources, and Copilot can generate a Word document, an Excel file or a presentation from them.

It also draws mind maps, and from your phone you can record voice notes or take photos that go straight into the notebook.

Meetings

Teams recaps can now be watched as a video with the key moments, for anyone who couldn't attend. Organisations that can't keep full transcripts for compliance reasons can still get a recap, without the transcript. And inside the meeting itself there's a switch to turn the AI off when what's about to be discussed shouldn't be summarised.

Per-person voice recognition means the minutes know who said what, so decisions and owners are attributed correctly. Facilitator, the agent that takes live notes and helps create tasks and documents from the meeting, is now reaching channel meetings and rooms with Teams Rooms too.

Vision: show it your screen instead of describing it

With Vision you share your computer screen or your phone's camera and ask Copilot about what it sees; it answers out loud, in real time. It can help a technician standing in front of a network cabinet, a salesperson photographing a delivery note, or anyone looking at an error they can't quite describe. Copilot can also take a screenshot itself and work on it without leaving the conversation.

SharePoint and the official version of things

Copilot answers with whatever it finds, and many intranets hold several versions of the same procedure. Authoritative sites, already available, help with that: an admin marks which SharePoint sites are the official source (policies, templates, news) and Copilot Chat and Copilot Search give them priority when answering.

SharePoint can also now show which documents and pages Copilot cites in its answers and how often, which tells you what content is actually being used. You can create charts on pages with AI, Copilot understands metadata better when you ask about a specific library, and a site's agents can be queried from a Teams chat.

Agents without code

With Agent Builder you can create an agent from, say, a SharePoint list, publish it to your organisation's agent store and share it in Teams as if it were another contact. The usual cases are simple: one agent that answers questions about the catalogue, another about holidays and the staff handbook, another about quality procedures.

Controls have arrived alongside the agents. Admins decide who can upload agents and plugins to the tenant, manage connectors from a single place and, since late August 2026, have Agent 365, a console showing which agents exist in the organisation, who published them and what they can reach.

Purview and Edge on the security side

Purview can now stop Copilot from processing content with certain sensitivity labels, wherever it's stored. And Edge detects so-called Shadow AI, meaning company information being pasted into unsanctioned AI tools.

Cowork, the underlying shift

The most significant change of the year is Copilot Cowork, generally available since 16 June 2026. Until now Copilot answered messages. With Cowork you hand over a job (preparing a meeting, sorting the inbox, writing a report from several sources) and it works through it step by step, taking as long as it needs. Before sensitive actions, such as sending an email, it asks for confirmation.

New controls came with Cowork as well: you can choose how much effort the model puts into each task, decide whether it may use the browser on your behalf, and see from the admin center what it's doing and what it costs.

What's about to land

None of this is available to everyone yet, but it's already on the roadmap:

• MCP Apps. Agents will be able to show tables, charts and buttons inside the chat instead of replying with text only.
• Plugins and skills in Copilot in SharePoint, to connect a site to outside systems (CRM, helpdesk, repositories) and not just read from them but write back too. IT decides which plugins exist and who can use them.
• HTML pages in SharePoint. Whatever Copilot generates, such as a report or a small dashboard, can be published as a page as it is.
• Workflows created with Copilot in SharePoint, by describing the process in words.
• Apps built from Cowork and Copilot Studio, with their data layer, Entra security and DLP policies already included, and visible to IT.
• Purview data loss prevention for Cowork as well.

And yes, the bill has changed too

For years the maths was simple: so many licenses at so much a month. Now there's another layer. The license is still there, but experiences that use a lot of resources, such as Cowork and autonomous agents, are paid by usage through what Microsoft calls Copilot Credits.

Three dates are worth writing down:

• 1 July 2026. Usage-based billing became mandatory to keep using Cowork in the early-access channel.
• 19 October 2026. For new Microsoft 365 Copilot Business purchases made directly from Microsoft, usage-based billing comes switched on by default, with a spending policy created automatically.
• 2 November 2026. The same for purchases through a partner (CSP).

You only pay for what's used, and limits are set from Cost Management in the admin center. Even so, it's a real shift: from a fixed, predictable cost to one that can grow as soon as the team gets used to delegating long tasks. If you're buying Copilot in the coming months, check the spending limit on day one. Microsoft's documentation on usage-based billing and credits explains how to set it up.

There's a related detail. Since July 2026, in organisations with up to 300 seats, any user can start a 30-day trial from Copilot Chat without giving payment details. It's on by default and every trial creates a license request in the admin center. Leaving it open is a good way to measure real interest, and closing it is a reasonable choice too. What matters is that it's a decision rather than something you find out about later.

Where to start

If you're weighing up Copilot, or you already have it and aren't getting much out of it, this is what we'd do:

1. Pick one repetitive task you can measure, such as preparing quotes, writing minutes or answering support queries, instead of handing licenses to everyone.
2. Mark your authoritative sites in SharePoint.
3. Review permissions and shared links. An agent doesn't bypass permissions, but it brings to light everything that was open too widely.
4. Set spending limits as soon as usage-based billing appears.
5. Measure with the adoption dashboards and citation analytics, and ask the team what they've stopped doing by hand.

If you'd like us to look at your case (which licenses you have, which features are worth it for you and where to start), tell us in three lines.