Introduction to Microsoft’s New Copilot Tools

Microsoft has launched two new "reasoning agents" for Copilot, designed to analyze vast amounts of work data, including emails, meetings, chats, and documents.

Researcher: A New Tool for Complex Research
The first tool, called "Researcher," is based on OpenAI’s deep research model combined with Copilot’s advanced orchestration and deep search capabilities. Researcher is designed for "complex, multi-step research" at work, allowing users to create market strategies and comprehensive quarterly reports by combining internal work data with external information from the web, such as competitive data, emerging trends, and the latest market analysis. It can also pull data from Salesforce, ServiceNow, and other external sources.

Analyst: A Skilled Data Scientist
The new "Analyst" tool, on the other hand, was built to function like a skilled data scientist, based on OpenAI’s o3-mini reasoning model and using "chain-of-thought reasoning" to solve issues in multiple steps, providing answers that mirror human analytical thinking. It can process raw data across multiple spreadsheets to predict future revenue and expenses, forecast demand for a new product, and visualize customer purchasing patterns. For complex data queries, it can run Python, and users can view the code in real-time.

Availability of Researcher and Analyst
Both Researcher and Analyst will be available to customers with a Microsoft 365 Copilot license starting in April as part of the "Frontier" program. Customers enrolled in this program will get access to Copilot technologies while they’re still in development, starting with these two new tools.

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