Productivity AutomationAugments Human LaborVerified
Reviewed and published by trentmaziarz, March 22, 2026. Discovered and drafted by our automated research pipeline.
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.
Details
Announced March 16, 2023, Microsoft 365 Copilot combines large language models (LLMs) with Microsoft Graph — a system that connects to a user's emails, calendar, files, and chats — so the AI can reference personal and organizational context when generating responses. An Early Access Program ran with around 600 companies before the enterprise launch. In November 2024, Microsoft added Copilot Actions, which automates repetitive multi-step tasks. A bug disclosed in February 2026 exposed some customers' confidential emails to the Copilot AI system. Internal data can be inadvertently surfaced if file permissions are not carefully managed.
Products affected
Microsoft WordExcelPowerPointOutlookTeamsOneNoteLoopOneDriveSharePointMicrosoft PlannerCopilot Studio
Sources & Evidence
Company Disclosure
Other practices by Microsoft
OtherProject 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.OtherSeeing 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.OtherWindows 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.
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