Microsoft Build, Microsoft’s main event for announcing its latest product developments, unsurprisingly had a strong focus on AI, and as expected, there were some significant announcements for Microsoft Copilot and the broader Copilot ecosystem. In this article, we highlight 6 of our favourite changes and updates on new features recently added.

1. Better prompt responses

We’ve already seen notable improvements in Copilot’s responses, thanks to Microsoft changing the underlying “foundational” model that’s used. Interestingly, the consumer version of Copilot, designed for personal use, is delivering better responses for the same prompt compared to the enterprise version, “Microsoft 365 Copilot”. This suggests that the paid-for version of Copilot may still be running on an older model, but is likely to improve at some point in the near future, especially for those who are expecting “Reasoning” models, which have made their way to Microsoft 365 Copilot using agents (see more below).

2. Copilot Notebook – A copy of Google NotebookLM

Copilot Notebook allows users to store a wide range of content, including lots of different notes, research and links, and then use Copilot prompts to summarise or find specific information. This is a direct copy of a similar feature available in Google AI, even offering the ability to generate a podcast from your notes. This could be especially valuable for Analysts, enabling them to combine and consolidate extensive notes and investor research on a particular company, and then use Copilot to efficiently sift through the information or generate concise summaries.

3. Copilot Create – Image and video generation

Microsoft has updated the underlying AI model used for media generation, resulting in more accurate and higher-quality images and videos. A new, dedicated interface media generation – “Create”, offers a more guided experience, providing starter templates and simple selections for style, size and theme. Notably, the new “Create Video” feature allows users to transform PowerPoint presentations into video format, providing a compelling alternative to simply sharing slide decks with clients.

4. Copilot Agents – Some new built-in agents using “reasoning”

Whilst Copilot Agents have been around for a little while, Microsoft has now introduced new built-in agents that leverage advanced reasoning models. These models enable the agents to perform deeper analysis of your prompts, resulting in more accurate and insightful responses (albeit a lot slower). In this category, we have “researcher” and “analyst”: with “researcher” designed to excel at textual analysis, whilst “analyst” is designed to be better at data analysis. Both offer significantly better responses compared to the regular Microsoft 365 Copilot, but may be overkill for general, everyday questions.

5. Copilot Agent MCP, Windows MCP – Easier AI automation

We’ve seen a lot of buzz around MCP (Model Context Protocol), and it's well justified. MCP is an open-source interface anyone can adopt to make their existing applications and websites more friendly to AI Agents, unlocking powerful automation capabilities. Microsoft has announced native support for MCP in Copilot Agents and will incorporate an MCP server directly into Windows and Dynamics 365, paving the way for AI agents to perform automated tasks seamlessly within those platforms.

6. Fine Tuning – Thinking more like your business

Copilot Fine Tuning offers a more advanced and effective way to train Microsoft Copilot using your organisation’s existing work data. This goes above and beyond previous methods of “teaching” Microsoft Copilot, which were relatively limited in intelligence. With this new capability, you can provide specific documents, such as RFP responses, and Copilot Fine Tuning will then train a special agent to generate output that reflects the tone, structure and content of those documents. This feature is not yet generally available and will take some time before it is rolled out.

Strong competition is driving advancements

We’re really excited to see these latest developments in Microsoft Copilot, especially as the wider AI landscape remains extremely competitive, with AI vendors constantly overtaking each other in terms of capability and features. For Lanware, Microsoft Copilot remains a really strong and strategic choice for organisations in financial services, offering robust protections for commercial data and continually evolving compliance controls.