Microsoft launches Loop app with built-in Copilot

Microsoft is finally taking the fight to Notion.

The company announced the public preview of Microsoft Loop, a new collaborative workspace that blends flexible canvases with modular content that syncs across Microsoft 365 apps. While Loop components have been quietly floating around Teams and Outlook for months, the standalone Loop app is now live on the web, Android, and iOS.

Documents that travel everywhere

Loop revolves around three elements: workspaces, pages, and components. Think of a workspace as your project hub, pages as flexible canvases, and components as live snippets that can live anywhere.

Setting up a workspace is surprisingly hands-off. Type in a title and relevant keywords, and Loop automatically searches your files to suggest related resources.

Inside a page, typing "/" summons labels, live dates, images, checklists, and tables, while "@" mentions teammates or files. But the real hook is how components work: you can turn any section of a page into a live component, copy it, and paste it into Teams chat, Outlook emails, Whiteboard, or Word for the web.

If someone prefers working inside email, they can edit your table directly inside Outlook, and the original Loop page updates instantly. Task lists within Loop also sync bidirectionally with Microsoft Planner and To Do.

Multiplayer AI with Copilot

Fresh off last week's Microsoft 365 Copilot announcement, Microsoft is also bringing generative AI directly into Loop, currently in private preview.

Instead of treating AI like a private chatbot, Copilot in Loop works like a collaborative scratchpad. You and your teammates can see each other's prompts, refine AI-generated drafts together, and turn the resulting ideas into shareable components.

Copilot can also summarize entire Loop pages or linked documents, giving team members a quick way to catch up. Microsoft plans to roll out page summarization over the next few months.

Why it matters

We think Loop is Microsoft's smartest offensive move against Notion in years.

For enterprise users, the biggest hurdle to adopting tools like Notion or Coda has always been inertia: nobody wants to migrate an entire department to another standalone island. Loop sidesteps that completely by meeting people where they already work. You can assemble your thinking in Loop, but your colleagues can interact with it without ever leaving Outlook or Teams.

Backing this with Microsoft 365 enterprise-grade security and permissions gives it an immediate foot in the door that startups simply cannot match.

The real test will be whether Loop creates more chaos than clarity. Syncing dynamic widgets across multiple apps sounds great on paper, but it risks fragmenting team communication if nobody remembers where the source document lives. Still, if your team lives inside Microsoft 365, testing Loop on the web today is a no-brainer.