Microsoft
AI Usage at a Glance
Timeline
Sep 7, 2021
RecommendationPractice documented: Microsoft Start is a personalized news feed that uses AI and machine learning to select articles, videos, and stories from over 1,000 publishers based on each user's reading habits and stated interests. It launched in September 2021 and is built into Windows 10, Windows 11, and the Microsoft Edge browser — appearing automatically when users open a new browser tab.
Practice DocumentedView practice →Jun 21, 2022
ProductivityPractice documented: GitHub Copilot is an AI tool built into coding software that suggests lines of code — or entire functions — as a developer types, acting like an autocomplete that understands programming. It launched in June 2022 and is used by millions of developers worldwide. A more recent "coding agent" version can work through programming tasks on its own, with minimal human input.
Practice DocumentedView practice →Oct 12, 2022
Creative GenPractice documented: Microsoft Designer and Bing Image Creator let anyone type a description and get a new AI-generated image back in seconds — like describing a picture to an artist who draws it instantly. Both tools are powered by OpenAI's DALL-E models and launched in late 2022, with an upgrade to DALL-E 3 in late 2023. Designer is aimed at graphic design tasks like social media posts and presentations; Image Creator is built into Bing and Edge for everyday use.
Practice DocumentedView practice →Oct 12, 2022
OtherPractice documented: Seeing AI is a free Microsoft app for people who are blind or have low vision. It uses the phone's camera and AI to narrate the world around the user — reading text out loud, identifying products by barcode, describing scenes, and recognizing faces. It launched on iOS in 2017 and became available on Android in December 2023, supporting 18 languages.
Practice DocumentedView practice →Mar 6, 2023
Customer SvcPractice documented: Microsoft offers Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Service, an AI assistant for customer service agents, announced in March 2023. When an agent handles a customer issue, the AI reads the conversation in real time, suggests reply text, and retrieves relevant answers from knowledge bases, reducing time agents spend searching for information. Administrators must enable the feature; it is available by default to environments in the US, Australia, India, UK, and Europe.
Practice DocumentedView practice →May 23, 2023
Data AnalysisPractice documented: Copilot in Power BI lets business users ask questions about their data in plain English and get charts, summaries, and reports back automatically — no spreadsheet formulas or technical skills required. It became generally available in June 2024 for enterprise customers using premium Microsoft data licenses.
Practice DocumentedView practice →May 23, 2023
ModerationPractice documented: Azure AI Content Safety is a Microsoft cloud service that other companies can plug into their own products to automatically screen text and images for harmful content — such as hate speech, sexual material, violence, and self-harm. It launched in May 2023 and also powers safety filters inside Microsoft's own AI products, including Bing and GitHub Copilot.
Practice DocumentedView practice →Jun 26, 2023
RecommendationPractice documented: Performance Max is an AI-powered advertising product that automatically creates, places, and adjusts ads across Microsoft's network — covering Bing, MSN, Edge, Outlook, and partner websites — without requiring advertisers to manage individual placements. Advertisers provide their goals and creative assets; the AI handles the rest. It became globally available in March 2024.
Practice DocumentedView practice →Sep 21, 2023
ProductivityPractice documented: Microsoft 365 Copilot is an AI assistant built into Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams that can draft emails, summarize meetings, build presentations, and answer questions about your own files and data. It launched for large businesses in November 2023 at $30 per user per month and expanded to smaller businesses in early 2024.
Practice DocumentedView practice →Nov 15, 2023
Customer SvcPractice documented: Microsoft Copilot Studio is a tool that lets businesses build their own AI-powered chatbots — called virtual agents — to handle customer questions automatically, without requiring programming expertise. It was rebranded from Power Virtual Agents in November 2023 and now uses generative AI to hold more natural conversations with customers.
Practice DocumentedView practice →Dec 4, 2023
OtherNew evidence: Seeing AI App Launches on Android – Including new and updated features and new languages.
Evidence AddedView practice →Mar 4, 2024
RecommendationNew evidence: Microsoft's Performance Max now available globally
Evidence AddedView practice →Mar 13, 2024
OtherPractice documented: Microsoft offers Security Copilot, a generative AI assistant for security and IT professionals, generally available worldwide since April 2024. It processes natural language questions from analysts and returns findings drawn from Microsoft's global threat intelligence to help teams detect, investigate, and respond to security incidents. In March 2025, Microsoft announced six autonomous AI agents for Security Copilot, available for preview in April 2025, designed to handle high-volume tasks such as phishing triage, access policy optimization, and vulnerability remediation without requiring step-by-step human input.
Practice DocumentedView practice →Mar 21, 2024
OtherPractice documented: Project InnerEye is a Microsoft Research initiative that uses AI to analyze 3D medical scans — primarily CT scans used for cancer radiotherapy planning — and automatically highlight the areas that need treatment. Peer-reviewed research found it can complete this task up to 13 times faster than a clinician doing it manually, while staying within the range of human expert accuracy.
Practice DocumentedView practice →May 14, 2024
ModerationPractice documented: Xbox uses AI tools to automatically detect and block harmful messages, images, and voice chat on the Xbox gaming network — without waiting for players to report them. By November 2024, the system had blocked over 45 million harmful text messages and helped reduce voice-based harassment by 43%.
Practice DocumentedView practice →Jun 3, 2024
Data AnalysisNew evidence: The general availability of Copilot for Power BI is rolling out starting today
Evidence AddedView practice →Jun 17, 2024
OtherPractice documented: Windows Recall is an AI feature for Windows 11 that continuously takes screenshots of everything on a user's screen and stores them locally, so the user can later search their own history by typing questions like "find that recipe I was looking at last week." Announced in May 2024, it faced immediate criticism from security and privacy experts and was delayed multiple times before a limited release.
Practice DocumentedView practice →Oct 1, 2024
Creative GenNew evidence: AI art improvements with DALL-E 3
Evidence AddedView practice →Nov 13, 2024
ModerationNew evidence: Xbox Introduces New AI Solutions to Protect Players from Unwanted Messages in its Multifaceted Approach to Safety
Evidence AddedView practice →Nov 14, 2024
ModerationNew evidence: Xbox AI transparency report reveals 19 million toxic messages blocked, and improved player safety in Minecraft and Call of Duty
Evidence AddedView practice →Nov 19, 2024
ProductivityPractice documented: Copilot Cowork is a new AI feature announced in March 2026 that goes beyond answering questions — it carries out multi-step work tasks on its own, in the background, across Microsoft 365 apps. A user describes what they want done, and the AI creates a plan and executes it automatically, checking in with the user at key points.
Practice DocumentedView practice →Mar 24, 2025
OtherNew evidence: Microsoft unveils Microsoft Security Copilot agents and new protections for AI
Evidence AddedView practice →May 19, 2025
ProductivityNew evidence: GitHub Copilot: Meet the new coding agent
Evidence AddedView practice →Feb 18, 2026
ProductivityNew evidence: Microsoft says Office bug exposed customers’ confidential emails to Copilot AI
Evidence AddedView practice →Mar 9, 2026
ProductivityNew evidence: Microsoft announces Copilot Cowork with help from Anthropic — a cloud-powered AI agent that works across M365 apps
Evidence AddedView practice →Mar 9, 2026
ProductivityNew evidence: Copilot Cowork: A new way of getting work done
Evidence AddedView practice →Recent activity
Project InnerEye is a Microsoft Research initiative that uses AI to analyze 3D medical scans — primarily CT scans used for cancer radiotherapy planning — and automatically highlight the areas that need treatment. Peer-reviewed research found it can complete this task up to 13 times faster than a clinician doing it manually, while staying within the range of human expert accuracy.
Developed over more than a decade by Microsoft Research's Cambridge (UK) lab, Project InnerEye uses deep learning models — a type of machine learning inspired by how the brain processes information — to perform automatic segmentation of medical images, meaning it identifies and outlines specific organs and tumors in 3D scans. The open-source InnerEye Deep Learning Toolkit was released under an MIT license in September 2020, built on PyTorch and Azure Machine Learning. A key real-world deployment is OSAIRIS at Cambridge University Hospitals NHS (UK), which uses InnerEye-based software to reduce wait times for cancer radiotherapy patients. Results were published in JAMA Network Open in 2020. The GitHub repository for the toolkit showed reduced activity after 2022, and the current status of the project under Microsoft Health Futures should be confirmed.
Seeing AI is a free Microsoft app for people who are blind or have low vision. It uses the phone's camera and AI to narrate the world around the user — reading text out loud, identifying products by barcode, describing scenes, and recognizing faces. It launched on iOS in 2017 and became available on Android in December 2023, supporting 18 languages.
Seeing AI originated from a 2015 Microsoft Hackathon project led by Saqib Shaikh, a software engineer who is blind. The app uses Azure Cognitive Services (Microsoft's cloud AI platform for vision, speech, and language tasks) to power its features: reading printed and handwritten text, scanning documents, identifying products via barcode, recognizing faces and emotions, describing scenes, identifying currency, and detecting colors. By the time of its Android launch, the app had helped users with over 10 million tasks. The app is part of Microsoft's broader AI for Accessibility grant program, which provides funding and technology to organizations building AI tools for people with disabilities. Seeing AI has received broad praise as a practical, beneficial use of AI with no significant controversies reported.
Windows Recall is an AI feature for Windows 11 that continuously takes screenshots of everything on a user's screen and stores them locally, so the user can later search their own history by typing questions like "find that recipe I was looking at last week." Announced in May 2024, it faced immediate criticism from security and privacy experts and was delayed multiple times before a limited release.
Announced at Microsoft Build on May 14, 2024 as a flagship feature for Copilot+ PCs (devices with a dedicated neural processing unit capable of 40 TOPS or more). Recall uses on-device optical character recognition (OCR) and machine learning to index the content of screenshots, enabling semantic search of past activity. Upon announcement, security researchers discovered the initial version stored all data in an unencrypted database, creating a significant vulnerability. Privacy advocates described it as a keylogger-like feature, and the UK Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) opened formal discussions with Microsoft. Microsoft delayed the release multiple times, eventually making it opt-in, encrypting the database, requiring Windows Hello biometric authentication to access stored data, and allowing users to uninstall the feature entirely. As of early 2025, Recall remained in Windows Insider preview and was not yet broadly available.
All practices by category
Project InnerEye is a Microsoft Research initiative that uses AI to analyze 3D medical scans — primarily CT scans used for cancer radiotherapy planning — and automatically highlight the areas that need treatment. Peer-reviewed research found it can complete this task up to 13 times faster than a clinician doing it manually, while staying within the range of human expert accuracy.
Seeing AI is a free Microsoft app for people who are blind or have low vision. It uses the phone's camera and AI to narrate the world around the user — reading text out loud, identifying products by barcode, describing scenes, and recognizing faces. It launched on iOS in 2017 and became available on Android in December 2023, supporting 18 languages.
Windows Recall is an AI feature for Windows 11 that continuously takes screenshots of everything on a user's screen and stores them locally, so the user can later search their own history by typing questions like "find that recipe I was looking at last week." Announced in May 2024, it faced immediate criticism from security and privacy experts and was delayed multiple times before a limited release.
Microsoft offers Security Copilot, a generative AI assistant for security and IT professionals, generally available worldwide since April 2024. It processes natural language questions from analysts and returns findings drawn from Microsoft's global threat intelligence to help teams detect, investigate, and respond to security incidents. In March 2025, Microsoft announced six autonomous AI agents for Security Copilot, available for preview in April 2025, designed to handle high-volume tasks such as phishing triage, access policy optimization, and vulnerability remediation without requiring step-by-step human input.
Copilot Cowork is a new AI feature announced in March 2026 that goes beyond answering questions — it carries out multi-step work tasks on its own, in the background, across Microsoft 365 apps. A user describes what they want done, and the AI creates a plan and executes it automatically, checking in with the user at key points.
Microsoft 365 Copilot is an AI assistant built into Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams that can draft emails, summarize meetings, build presentations, and answer questions about your own files and data. It launched for large businesses in November 2023 at $30 per user per month and expanded to smaller businesses in early 2024.
GitHub Copilot is an AI tool built into coding software that suggests lines of code — or entire functions — as a developer types, acting like an autocomplete that understands programming. It launched in June 2022 and is used by millions of developers worldwide. A more recent "coding agent" version can work through programming tasks on its own, with minimal human input.
Microsoft Copilot Studio is a tool that lets businesses build their own AI-powered chatbots — called virtual agents — to handle customer questions automatically, without requiring programming expertise. It was rebranded from Power Virtual Agents in November 2023 and now uses generative AI to hold more natural conversations with customers.
Microsoft offers Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Service, an AI assistant for customer service agents, announced in March 2023. When an agent handles a customer issue, the AI reads the conversation in real time, suggests reply text, and retrieves relevant answers from knowledge bases, reducing time agents spend searching for information. Administrators must enable the feature; it is available by default to environments in the US, Australia, India, UK, and Europe.
Performance Max is an AI-powered advertising product that automatically creates, places, and adjusts ads across Microsoft's network — covering Bing, MSN, Edge, Outlook, and partner websites — without requiring advertisers to manage individual placements. Advertisers provide their goals and creative assets; the AI handles the rest. It became globally available in March 2024.
Microsoft Start is a personalized news feed that uses AI and machine learning to select articles, videos, and stories from over 1,000 publishers based on each user's reading habits and stated interests. It launched in September 2021 and is built into Windows 10, Windows 11, and the Microsoft Edge browser — appearing automatically when users open a new browser tab.
Xbox uses AI tools to automatically detect and block harmful messages, images, and voice chat on the Xbox gaming network — without waiting for players to report them. By November 2024, the system had blocked over 45 million harmful text messages and helped reduce voice-based harassment by 43%.
Azure AI Content Safety is a Microsoft cloud service that other companies can plug into their own products to automatically screen text and images for harmful content — such as hate speech, sexual material, violence, and self-harm. It launched in May 2023 and also powers safety filters inside Microsoft's own AI products, including Bing and GitHub Copilot.
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