Microsoft's Copilot gets personal in first major update

Microsoft is rolling out the first major batch of updates to its Copilot AI since launch, and it is making the corporate assistant a lot more personal.

Announced at Microsoft Ignite, the biggest changes are coming to Teams meetings. Historically, bringing AI into a meeting often meant keeping a persistent transcript running for everyone. Microsoft has now officially divorced Copilot from meeting transcriptions.

Private prompts and real-time meeting notes

That means you can now prompt Copilot privately during a live Teams call to dig up data or ask questions, and none of those side interactions will be logged in the meeting record.

Starting next year, Copilot will also handle real-time note-taking and distribute summaries to attendees once the call wraps. If you need exact phrasing from a key stakeholder, you can prompt the bot to quote specific people, and it will capture their exact words.

On the collaboration side, Copilot can now map discussion points directly onto a shared Microsoft Whiteboard in real time for everyone in the room to see.

Tailored tones and specialized roles

Outside of Teams, Microsoft is introducing personalized instruction controls. You can now tweak Copilot's tone and formatting so it writes more like you, starting in Word and PowerPoint before hitting the rest of Microsoft 365.

PowerPoint will soon let users point Copilot toward enterprise image libraries and edit assets using Microsoft Designer. Come spring, Outlook and calendar integrations will prep you for meetings by compiling email threads and docs into pre-read briefs. Word will also soon catch you up on past document revisions.

Microsoft is also carving Copilot out into role-specific packages. Alongside field technician support in Copilot for Dynamics 365, the company announced Copilot for Service arriving in early 2024 for customer support, and Copilot for Sales landing in Q1 2024 to automatically draft briefs featuring attendee names, titles, and CRM records.

Why it matters

Separating private Copilot queries from public meeting transcripts is the smartest tweak in this release.

In enterprise software, psychological safety drives adoption. When asking an AI for help risks broadcasting your knowledge gaps to the entire meeting transcript, people simply close the tool. Allowing covert queries turns Copilot into a genuinely safe backchannel assistant.

For the broader industry, Microsoft is moving past one-size-fits-all chatbots. By unbundling Copilot into Service and Sales bundles, it is taking direct aim at specialized enterprise vendors like Salesforce.

The friction point will be cost and complexity. While stitching calendar, email, and CRM data into meeting briefs is undeniably valuable, companies will have to decide whether these specialized tiers justify a compounding monthly subscription bill.