Microsoft announces Copilot Wave 2 release

Microsoft has launched its Copilot Wave 2 spring (northern hemisphere) release, introducing advanced artificial intelligence agents, and enhanced capabilities designed to boost human-agent collaboration at work.

The updated Microsoft 365 Copilot app will serve as a central hub for AI agents with new features powered by more sophisticated models, adaptive memory, and reasoning capabilities that work alongside human users.

Researcher and Analyst are two features that the company says are the first-of-their-kind reasoning agents.

They are powered by OpenAI's deep reasoning models that began rolling out to customers this week through Microsoft's Frontier programme.

"The 2025 Work Trend Index reveals the emergence of the Frontier Firm—built around intelligence on tap, human-agent teams, and a new role for everyone: agent boss," Colette Stallbaumer, general manager of Microsoft 365 Copilot and WorkLab cofounder, said.

Researcher is designed to tackle complex, multi-step research tasks, delivering insights with greater accuracy, while Analyst functions as a data scientist, allowing users to transform raw data into actionable insights.

These new agents will be available through Microsoft's new Agent Store, which provides a centralised location for accessing both prebuilt agents and those from third-party partners such as Atlassian Jira, Monday.com, and Miro.

The Wave 2 release also introduces Copilot Search, an AI-powered enterprise search function that delivers context-aware answers from across an organisation's data ecosystem, including third-party applications like ServiceNow, Google Drive, Slack, and Confluence.

Microsoft has enhanced Copilot's personalisation capabilities, allowing the system to learn user preferences through chats, job profiles, and custom instructions.

The company emphasises that these memory features are private to individual users, with controls for managing what information Copilot retains when working with sensitive data.

Creative capabilities have been expanded with Copilot Create, which brings OpenAI's GPT-4o AI image generation into the workplace.

This feature enables users to modify brand images or generate new visuals aligned with company guidelines for marketing materials, presentations, and other content.

For information management, the new Copilot Notebooks allows users to aggregate diverse content including notes, documents, websites, and meeting recordings.

The system can then provide relevant insights while continuously scanning source materials for updates, and generate podcast-style audio summaries of key points.

Microsoft is introducing a Skills agent designed to help leaders to create dynamic, skill-based teams by identifying domain expertise across the organisation through the People Skills data layer.

Hardware integration is also coming, with Microsoft adding a dedicated Copilot key to Windows 11 PCs and introducing a Win + C shortcut for quick access to Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat.

For IT administrators, the Copilot Control System has received new capabilities including Apps and Agents in Data Security Posture Management, Agent Management in the Microsoft 365 admin centre, and enhanced analytics to measure usage and business impact.

Most Wave 2 spring release features will begin rolling out to customers in late May, though Researcher and Analyst are already available to select customers through the Frontier programme.