Last week, Microsoft unveiled exciting new updates to Copilot, taking the tool from a chatbot to something much bigger. With its new features, Home, Code, and Autopilot, your team can seamlessly collaborate between platforms, build apps, automation, and solutions using natural language, and gain a true digital teammate.
Let's break down these new features and how to leverage them for the greatest impact.
Copilot's new Home feature creatures a unified workspace to bring your AI experiences together in one spot. It serves as the new starting point for Copilot, bringing together Chat and Cowork to more easily transition between the two. This joint view allows you to revisit recent activity, get recommendations on where Copilot can help, and pick up work right where you left off. This combined experience is paving the way for an even more inclusive workflow where Copilot will route you to Chat, Cowork, or Code based on the task you're working on.
Home also encompasses the full power of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint with Office in Copilot. This view creates consistencies across your work to prevent broken formatting, stray versions, and starting from scratch when you switch between asks. By bringing together these tools into one platform, you're able to use editable documents, workbooks, or presentations that update live for your whole team to collaborate on.
Copilot Code helps users build apps, automations, and solutions using natural language. It brings solution-building outside of the developers' realm and across more parts of your team. With Code, users can describe an app, tracker, dashboard, or workflow in natural language, and Copilot designs an approach to build it.
Code runs in a sandboxed environment to be hosted securely within your tenant and is powered by the same underlying technology as GitHub Copilot. It allows for everything you create to be grounded in the context of your own work with automatically synced plugins. Code will be rolling out to Frontier with broader availability in the coming weeks, and it will be in preview for Microsoft 365 Premium and Pro subscribers in the coming months.
Formerly known as Scout, Autopilot joins your organization as a digital teammate. This feature goes beyond prompted outputs, allowing it to do more for your team. Autopilot can watch channels, follow up on threads, manage recurring work, and revisit projects days later without waiting for a prompt. The tool is cloud-hosted, allowing it to keep working while you focus your attention elsewhere.
Autopilot lives in your tenant with its own identity, memory, and workspace, and it shows up in applications your team already works in, like Teams, Outlook, chats, etc. You can mention it like you would a colleague while still having control of its permissions, audit, and governance. All you need to do is set the objective and boundaries, and Autopilot is off to the races.
Microsoft has been swiftly integrating new updates and features within Copilot, and there are some exciting announcements on the horizon as we approach the end of 2026. Its upcoming feature, Today, is a personalized command center across your mail, calendar, Teams, meetings, and more. It helps prioritize your tasks by showing you what you missed, what's urgent, and what can be moved down on your to-do list. It can draft responses, schedule meetings, and provide follow-up reminders to get yourself back on track.
AI is rapidly moving from a tool that simply answers questions to a tool that can build, orchestrate, and execute work on your half. The question is shifting from "how do I use AI?" to "what work do I want AI to do for me?"
At ivision, we've incorporated these tools into our daily operations, making each member of our team aware of the impact and benefits before we bring it to our clients. As a Microsoft Managed Partner with specializations in Copilot, Data Security, Business Applications, and more, we're equipped with the expertise and exclusive resources to help your team make the most of your Microsoft investment and AI journey. Connect with our team to get started.