Microsoft's Copilot Wave 2 has arrived, bringing agents and unanswered questions.

First up are BizChat and Copilot Pages. BizChat is a central hub, intended to bring together all a customer's data - be it web, corporate, or line of business - into a single place in the flow of work. Lurking as a persistent canvas in BizChat is Copilot Pages, which takes ephemeral AI-generated content and makes it durable so it can be edited, added to, and shared with others.

"This is an entirely new work pattern - multiplayer, human to AI to human collaboration," Microsoft said. It's also only available to customers that have paid for Copilot for Microsoft 365. However, it will be coming to customers using the free Microsoft Copilot with a Microsoft Entra account.

We're not sure it is an entirely new work pattern. It looks an awful lot like copying and pasting the response from a Copilot request into a shared document and then fiddling with it. Although Microsoft says Pages has Enterprise Data Protection, the company has been very light on the details.

The Register asked Microsoft if Pages respected user permissions - for example, preventing confidential information in a response being shared - but have yet to receive a reply. The company also failed to make any representative available for interview.

It's not just Pages, Copilot is making its presence felt throughout the Microsoft 365 suite. Copilot in Excel is now generally available, and Copilot in Excel with Python is in public preview. Copilot has appeared in PowerPoint in the form of the Narrative build, aimed at "iterating together to build a great first draft in minutes while keeping you in control of the creative process," and Brand Manager, to ensure presentations are on-brand. Just when you thought endless PowerPoint presentations couldn't get any blander.

Copilot has also shown up in Word and is due to hit OneDrive in a month as an improvement in the current search functionality. It will also, according to Microsoft, "compare up to five files with a clear, easy-to-read summary of the details and differences within your files - without opening a file."

Presumably, something has to open the files at some point to build those summaries. Probably Copilot, to whom we're sure customers would have no problem entrusting their data.

Microsoft did not provide a spokesperson to answer any questions about the technology. It usually publishes something called a Big Book of News to accompany significant announcements. This was more like a Light Leaflet of Marketing. But then, the company seems to be all about LLMs nowadays.

Rounding out the "innovations," which include Copilot in Teams to summarize meetings and Copilot in Outlook to analyze messages, are Copilot agents.

Copilot agents are Microsoft's latest attempt to automate business processes, except this time with bots. "They range in capability from simple, prompt-and-response agents to agents that replace repetitive tasks to more advanced, fully autonomous agents," according to Microsoft. The company has announced an agent builder in Copilot Studio to simplify the creation of services.

"This is just the beginning of Wave 2 of Copilot innovation," wrote Microsoft in its blog post. None of the services appear to require a Copilot+ PC.

Presumably, that will have to wait until Wave 3, and whatever Copilot innovation that will bring forth. Hopefully a bit more than a version of Recall that won't cause security researchers to snort with derision. ®

Updated at 1630 UTC on September 16

Microsoft clarified that Copilot Pages essentially allows users to copy Copilot responses into a new, editable, and shareable space. A spokesperson told The Register, "Pages features will now be accessible via the "Edit in Pages" button, bringing the Copilot response into a new page that sits alongside the chat thread, where it is both editable and sharable. Users can come back to these pages via a new module in the Microsoft 365 app (the pages module)."

On privacy and security concerns, the spokesperson said security and compliance measures will apply to the feature. "If someone were to share something confidential from Copilot with someone who shouldn't have access to it, the same security and compliance measures that apply to other Microsoft 365 services would be in effect."

And as for the cost? No additional fees. "Access to Pages will be included in Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses. If a user has access to Microsoft 365 Copilot, they will be able to create Copilot Pages," the spokesperson told us.

https://www.theregister.com//2024/09/16/microsoft_copilot_wave_2/