Ep 25 - The latest roadmap for M365 Copilot

In this episode of Copilot Connection, Zoe and Kevin discuss the latest roadmap items for Microsoft 365 Copilot, highlighting Teams, Microsoft 365 apps, Extensibility, SharePoint, Admin and Purview. Hear about the latest batches coming in February and March and what it could mean to you.

Takeaways

• Roadmap updates indicate a significant increase in available tools and capabilities.
• Teams updates focus on enhancing collaborative productivity.
• Accessibility features are being prioritized in new updates.
• The ability to analyze on-screen content will improve meeting experiences.
• Voice recognition technology will enhance transcription accuracy.
• Upcoming updates will roll out in batches, indicating a fast-paced development cycle.
• Developers will soon have tools to create custom agents for Copilot.
• Extensibility is becoming more tangible and accessible for organizations.
• The integration of AI into business processes is crucial for future productivity.
• The new SharePoint features allow for better content discoverability management.
• Viva Connections cards will enhance Copilot functionality.
• Usage reports for integrated apps will provide valuable insights.
• Microsoft Purview is improving security management capabilities.
• Data Loss Prevention will restrict Copilot processing on sensitive content.
• Identifying risky AI usage is crucial for security.
• Real-life use cases of AI agents are emerging.
• Upcoming events will provide more insights into AI advancements.
• The conversation around AI is evolving rapidly.
• Engagement with the community is essential for knowledge sharing.

Key links

Roadmap - Teams

Roadmap - M365 Apps

Roadmap - Extensibility

Roadmap - SharePoint and Admin
Roadmap - Purview

Transcript

Kevin McDonnell (00:11)
Welcome to the Copilot Connection.

Zoe Wilson (00:14)
We're here to share with you all the news, insights and capabilities of the Microsoft Copilot ecosystem from across the entire Microsoft stack. I'm Zoe Wilson and I lead the Copilot Business Transformation Practice covering all Copilot agents and AI for Accenture and Avanade. I'm an MVP for Copilot and Teams and a Microsoft Regional Director.

Kevin McDonnell (00:35)
Kevin McDonnell. I'm also an MVP and I'm the Copilot strategy and modern workplace AI leader, Avanade. And we'll be releasing these episodes as podcasts and on YouTube with insights from across the community of Microsoft and all the different areas of Copilot. We'll be talking about how they'll impact your organization, what you need to do, prepare for them, what you need to do, start implementing and even how you can extend them.

Zoe Wilson (01:02)
So today we're going to just dive straight into something that we've not done for a little while. But when we did this the last time, Kevin, this was a really popular episode, wasn't it? And I think just with how fast, quickly things are changing, what we'll take you through today will hopefully be super interesting and helpful for you.

Kevin McDonnell (01:22)
but may all have changed next month as well.

Zoe Wilson (01:24)
Yeah, so we're going to take a look at the roadmap updates for Copilot in the Microsoft 365 space.

Kevin McDonnell (01:35)
Absolutely. Although we do have one little exciting announcement because we thought we'd get this in at the beginning on there rather than wait till later. We'll mention it again at the end just to make sure you sign up. But we've been having some fantastic Copilot fireside chats powered by Empowering Cloud. And we're really excited for the next one. I'm just checking the date on there. On the 26th of February, we've got Abram Jackson, who's the PM for

extensibility for M365 Copilot. We need to be talking about updating that header on there otherwise we're going to get in trouble about renaming some people catching us out. But we've got Abram.

Zoe Wilson (02:13)
I'm assuming though, Kevin, that they've copied that from his LinkedIn. So maybe it's Abram that we need to raise it with.

Kevin McDonnell (02:20)
Yes, I was trying to be nice and not call him out on that one. And I'm sure we can have that as the first question. But no, really excited about having him. And what I'm excited about is kind of his day job of being the PM for extensibility on copilot is exciting enough as it is. anyone who follows him on LinkedIn knows he loves this world and he kind of explores the AI side.

Zoe Wilson (02:23)
Hahaha

Kevin McDonnell (02:44)
around this doing an awful lot within there. I've been following it probably since last March when I first met him, the MVP Summit. And his was my favorite session where he kind of pulled a lot of things together. So started following LinkedIn and his insights on the world are fantastic. So he's not just taking the Microsoft view. He's also looking at the wider, the wider galaxy as you have behind you, Zoe.

He's looking at the world of agents there as well. So I'm genuinely excited about this session as

Zoe Wilson (03:15)
Yeah, I think it's worth saying as well. If you are interested, these sessions are not recorded. We had the January fireside chat this week with Donna Sarko, who turned up with lots of truths about the world of agents and AI. It was a really great session, but it's live only. Yep, sparkling wine.

Kevin McDonnell (03:32)
Lots of sparkling wine as well.

Zoe Wilson (03:37)
So you have to be there. But what this means is that you can ask the hard questions. We can have really open conversations with people who are really at the coalface of all of the innovation that's happening here. So I'm really excited for this one. And we've already got some wonderful guests lined up following this as well. So stay tuned to find out more. But please go and register. And hopefully, we'll see you in the session.

Kevin McDonnell (04:01)
So very excited about some of the guests we have lined up as well that we'll announce soon. And I would say if there are people you want to hear from that you've kind of maybe heard a little bit and you want to ask some questions, we are very happy to be shameless and go out and try and invite them along. Yes, yeah, we will ask Satcha. We'll try. I'm not expecting too much from there, but, you know, we can we can ask these things. But yeah, if you do have ideas and if it's...

If it's other people not at Microsoft you want to hear from as well. You know, I was thinking this this morning, Zoe, and I'm to do this publicly and getting trouble later, but maybe getting someone who's using Copilot, who's kind of been involved in a large scale rollout at a particular organization would be interesting to hear from from that as well. So if you've got ideas, if you want to come speak, let us know.

Zoe Wilson (04:52)
Yep, sounds great. All right, let's get into the roadmap.

Kevin McDonnell (04:56)
Now, this is fun. So we were having a look through this. I might make that a little bit larger as well. On there and looking through the different items. So we've kind of taken the roadmap, microsoft.com slash microsoft 365 slash roadmap. I'll be honest, I always go into Bing or Google and just look for Microsoft 365 roadmap because I can never remember the link. And it's very useful. You can filter this lots of different ways.

Zoe Wilson (05:21)
same.

Kevin McDonnell (05:26)
I'm going to put a slight caveat because we've kind of pre-filtered on this. We thought we'd start talking about the Teams updates first. It's kind of interesting. I filtered it on the oldest and it's telling me in development it's a whole lot of things from January 2024. yeah, they probably need to use Copilot to update it a bit more effectively as well.

Zoe Wilson (05:44)
Is this...

Yeah.

I was going to say, is this just a sign of how fast things are changing? But you know, the fact that they're not actually updating the status of things properly. One thing that I thought was super interesting though, Kevin, compared to the last time we did this. Yeah. I mean, one thing that I thought was interesting though, was just how many things are in the roadmap. I remember like how excited I got the first time I went to the M365 roadmap and search for copilot. And there were like three things that appeared.

Kevin McDonnell (05:58)
That's very nice of you, but January 2024?

Zoe Wilson (06:18)
And now there are hundreds of things that are in development. There are tons that have rolled out.

Kevin McDonnell (06:21)
Yeah, actually, that's a good show.

Zoe Wilson (06:36)
Yeah, so, okay, so let's have a look at the roadmap announcements for Teams. And I mean, for those of you who follow Ignite, there were tons of things that were announced at Ignite, which is actually really exciting to see now in the roadmap with rollout start dates.

Kevin McDonnell (07:04)
Am I back again, sorry?

Kevin McDonnell (09:54)
Hello.

Zoe Wilson (09:55)
No, that took you a while.

Kevin McDonnell (09:59)
I don't know, you usually it kind of screws up on the connection. And then grumbles at me, but this just hung.

Zoe Wilson (10:09)
Yeah, I was just sat here like, woo, dancing like you were. So I was just saying on WhatsApp, because we've got what, 25 minutes before I need to head out. Have you got any time Monday morning? Is it worth just rescheduling?

Kevin McDonnell (10:14)
Yeah.

I won't be able to do until Wednesday. That's the problem. I'm up in Manchester on Monday.

Zoe Wilson (10:30)
Ah shit, here you are. It's all right. Let's have a look at what in this day.

Kevin McDonnell (10:41)
The rest of your day was shit, wasn't it, as well?

Zoe Wilson (10:44)
Yeah, I mean, so I, this is, this is why I have to head out before my appointment because I've got to be back at my desk.

Kevin McDonnell (10:50)
Yeah. Let's,

let's get 20 minutes in and see where we get to.

Zoe Wilson (10:57)
Cool, all right, have you seen the mark clip thing at the bottom so you can mark where we pick up again?

Kevin McDonnell (11:02)
Oh,

nice. Oh, that's a good idea. Right. So we'll do a three, two, one. Can we go back? Because you talked about how many there were. So I'm going to jump back and just show how many that there's 141 in development. And then we'll go back to the teams bit and I'll work out how I did it later. Does that sound good? Right. I'll do a three, two, one and add more.

Zoe Wilson (11:20)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Are you going to pick up or am I?

Kevin McDonnell (11:30)
Shall I pick up, talk about the number here and then hand back to you to talk about the Teams one? Is that good? Yeah. Okay.

Zoe Wilson (11:36)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Kevin McDonnell (11:40)
Three, two, one. don't you just love the internet and how it works? Sorry, I think we had a couple of issues which hopefully I've edited mostly out. But just in case, what I was jumping in to say, and I think Zoe, you were talking about the number of different copilot items that have been in there. There's actually, well, there's 134 launched, which is huge. There's 141 still in development, which is just massive and should probably

Zoe Wilson (12:08)
Yeah.

Kevin McDonnell (12:09)
Go into those teams ones now before we run out of time.

Zoe Wilson (12:14)
Yeah, perfect. for those of you who were following the news at Ignite, there were some really interesting things that were announced and it's really exciting to see these in the roadmap now. one of the ones I think is particularly, and quite soon, yeah, one of the ones I think is particularly interesting is the on-screen content analysis. So the second from the bottom.

Kevin McDonnell (12:24)
And quite soon as well.

yeah, that yes, yes. Now that is really nice.

Zoe Wilson (12:41)
Yeah. And I think we, don't know if we talked about this one before, but I remember when this was announced, my assumption at first was that this would be, that it would rely on it being PowerPoint live or whiteboard or something like that. So the content's cached in the team's meeting, but actually it's not, it's passing through the content on the screen. And actually you can see in the update, it's saying that PowerPoint live and whiteboard support will come at a later date. So actually it's not, yeah, it's not.

Kevin McDonnell (13:06)
that is interesting.

Zoe Wilson (13:09)
It won't be able of, it won't be capable of analyzing those, but it will analyze what's being pushed through in a screen share. And I do wonder if this is using the highly controversial recall capability that they announced for Windows.

Kevin McDonnell (13:29)
Probably, yeah, they're probably a similar model. wouldn't thought it. So you're saying that and everyone's going to go, what? It's going to be running on my machine. So I would guess it's not going to use it. It's not going to be needed to be running on the machine to be able to use that. But at the same the same sort of idea and back end processing.

Zoe Wilson (13:48)
No, no, no, no, no,

Yeah, the ability to actually look at what's being shared in that screen container.

Kevin McDonnell (14:01)
Yeah, and I know for those who can't see that, I think some of the things are like demos. You you're doing a presentation, it will pick up the text and images on there. Even here, we're using Riverside here, but if I was using Teams, then I could share this and it will kind of pick up the text from this and you'll be able to ask questions from it. And I think it's fascinating. you know, we're talking here and I'm trying to describe it because I know that people aren't watching.

Now imagine for accessibility, the capability of this where people are sharing things on the screen and where you don't know what it is and maybe the people presenting haven't described it so well. You can just type in your chats and get the responses back from there. I think it's huge this one.

Zoe Wilson (14:47)
Yeah, really interesting. And then the bottom one as well, the facilitator agent, the ability for Copilot to exist as an actual entity in the meeting. So instead of me being a participant in the meeting and being able to ask my Copilot a question, being able to use Copilot in the meeting to populate the notes for everybody based on what people are talking about. Now I see...

Kevin McDonnell (15:04)
Mm.

Zoe Wilson (15:14)
There's potentially a sticking point here for adoption, is I think this will need to use full transcription rather than Copilot only during the meeting. And for a lot of big enterprise organizations, they might not have allowed full transcription. So I think this is a really valuable one, a really interesting one. But I think it will be interesting seeing it. Does this become almost a force in function to make enterprise organizations?

get their act together in terms of transcript management.

Kevin McDonnell (15:45)
Yes, I agree. And I think the other one you touched on it there that and we've talked about on the show before the shift of copilot from personal productivity to kind of collaborative productivity. This is another great indication of that as well. I've had a few people say, what's the difference? This is just copilot. I can ask about the notes and it's exactly as you say it. Everyone can. It's that joint working together without rather than it's just for me.

It doesn't mean if you ask stupid questions, everyone can see it, but that's that's up to us to not ask stupid questions as well. I think on that enterprise. Yes, yes, absolutely. I think on the enterprise, the one I noticed here, and I'm a huge fan of this one, and I think it's it's copilot ish, but this is around the the voice and face enrollment. So within teams, you can train teams on your voice. And I love this for going to the office where noise cancelling works.

Zoe Wilson (16:19)
Yeah, they're human in the loop.

Kevin McDonnell (16:42)
but it will pick up other noises behind you, which isn't always you speaking. I've got a colleague who always does this and sits there never muting his microphone and you always pick up people behind. This will recognize your voice. It's really useful, but a lot of clients I'm working with don't have that enabled on there. And this will enable it by default. Now, while I really like, I'm just going to link this back to Copilot.

Where this means is if you've got it running in a meeting where you're all in the room together, it will recognize your voice and attribute that transcription to you on there without just being identifying different people within a room. It will actually know it's you. So really useful for co-pilots as well. The challenge I can see to this is Germany and countries like that that haven't enabled this for a reason that they're kind of concerned around the personal identification.

within this and making sure it's in there. So I would say to people to make sure they're looking this, I think there is huge value. But if you have concerns over it, keep an eye on this one, because you will need to actively make sure it is turned off, not just assume it is.

Zoe Wilson (17:55)
Yeah, I think that's a really good point. And I mean, when you look at the rollout dates for these, it looks like we're going to get a batch of updates in February and then another batch of updates in March. So continuing that pace of rapid rollout of new features, which I think is great.

Kevin McDonnell (18:14)
And just to see if Lauren Strand is listening. Look, Microsoft's Places. I know it's your favorite. So we'll highlight that one just for you.

Shall we jump on to the next one?

Zoe Wilson (18:26)
All right, so where,

yeah, where we're heading next.

Kevin McDonnell (18:30)
So we're looking at the sort of general Microsoft 365 ones on here as well and it's interesting, I was looking at these earlier and I ran out of time so I haven't looked because some of these are showing up. Oh in fact there they are, the Jan 2024. I'm just wondering, you know, some of these I think takes emails and meetings into account in Word. I mean it says it's rolling out, I'm pretty sure that is rolled out.

Zoe Wilson (18:45)
Hahaha!

I'm sorry.

Kevin McDonnell (19:00)
I might go back and kind of update people later and test on these things, because I think these have been there a long time and I'm pretty sure something create the perfect banner for your document with Copilot and Designer. That's rolled out. We got some of the prompt gallery and I think these are some really nice ones around there. The ability of the prompt gallery to to share your prompts with other people to kind of save them within there to have kind of enterprise wide prompts to find is some really

nice capability from that. So I think there's some lovely updates with those ones as well. let's jump ahead from the ones that probably should be out there already and get a little bit more future focused on here. I've noticed a few of these. I can't see the other ones. Now I'm looking at it. But one driver asked copilot questions around images. I really like this. I think that's kind of

that growing scope of what copilot can do of being able to ask questions of the contents of images. know, we were just talking about that sharing a screen, but maybe where you've taken some whiteboard shots. I'm loving this. was in a in-person workshop. It was a non-profit on there and we did lots of sticky ones. We were all there in person. So we'd go back to sticky notes and it felt like the good old days. And then I had to kind of write it up and I had to kind of take the results from all those stickies.

and kind of group them together. I think from this, I could take a picture of those and ask it to group them together. would treat it as text a bit like you would do in the digital whiteboard. I can kind of bring that that physical whiteboard into the same story by taking a photo of my camera, having one drive, have it and analyze that. So I kind of like the sound of this.

Zoe Wilson (20:47)
Yeah, that sounds quite interesting, doesn't it? It's good to see some of the copilot in Excel with Python updates coming through as well. I know we've got kind of got one for language expansion. There are, when I was looking through this, I think we've got other updates in the roadmap for it rolling out for Mac, which I think is, I think that's due in March.

Kevin McDonnell (20:53)
Hmm

Zoe Wilson (21:11)
I know I feel like this is going to be one that will be useful for a lot of people. So good to see that that's going to start landing in more people's apps.

Kevin McDonnell (21:21)
Yeah, absolutely. All these places sneaking up again. Read aloud available in Microsoft 365 Copilot chat. It's interesting. We were having a chat about sorting out how to get effective drafts and things for blogs in a WhatsApp chat today, weren't we Zoe? I can't remember who was, but someone mentioned the idea of reading that out aloud so you can kind of feel more confident about what it sounds like.

like this idea. This also feels like it's bringing together some of the Copilot's consumer app, which is very voice, very strong in the voice side, maybe bringing some of that to it as well. So that's interesting.

Zoe Wilson (21:57)
Mm.

Yeah, I mean, I think

it's, I think it's better from an accessibility perspective as well. mean, I've talked about read aloud in Word and the benefits for accessibility for years. And, you know, I've used it for, if you're writing a huge proposal or RFP or something like that, and you get a bit blind, it's good because you use a different part of the brain to process it. So I think that accessibility thing, but you know, people being able to interact with the Copilot generator.

generate the content in a different way is great.

Kevin McDonnell (22:32)
And if you're having trouble sleeping and you've got those large proposals, just put that really loud. If you're really sleeping, no time would be perfect. Try to see any other. This was one I liked the look of and very excited about this. The Viva Connections cards in Microsoft 365 copilot. Before anyone asks, no, I'm not going to comment on Viva and what's happening with that and the fact it's being renamed Connection somewhere.

Zoe Wilson (22:36)
Bye.

Kevin McDonnell (22:58)
The capability that's here is the important one for this. So where you've got those kind of dashboard items on your internet homepage, those very rich and powerful dynamic elements that connect to other systems, can be custom built, you'll be able to deploy those into Copilot. So for example, if you had like a leave booking Viva Connections card saying I want to see my leave or be able to book that.

if you said book leave within Copilot, it can surface that connections card in there. So it kind of brings actions in a very guided way on that. And I think there's an interesting chat people will need to have within their org around do they want to have it in natural language? Would I want to type? I want to book leave and have it connect up to whichever system or do I want it that kind of more guided visual way? I think there'd be some interesting adoptions of that of how people work out between those two things. But

love this capability to have that that choice and that flexibility as well.

Zoe Wilson (23:59)
Yeah, agreed. I think there's another really interesting one here as well, which is Copilot using enterprise assets hosted on the SharePoint organization asset library when creating presentations with Copilot. And for people who've tried Copilot in PowerPoint, that's one of the, well, there've been a few complaints or criticism, shall we say, of the capability, particularly at the start.

Kevin McDonnell (24:23)
Suggestions, suggestions.

Zoe Wilson (24:25)
And

yeah, one of the loudest was first of all, how can I use Copilot with my branded template? And then the second one was, we've got a swathe of approved organizational images that may be relevant to our brand or the industry that we operate in. They might be pictures that we as an organization have had taken. And when we create presentations, these are the only things that we want people to use.

So for organizations who've put those into an org asset library, being able to point copilot at that and say, you know, we want to use images from here, I think is really powerful.

Kevin McDonnell (25:06)
Yeah, yeah, really looking forward to that. I'm still I'm still wanting an org prompt library that it would use so that you could define a style for creating images and be able to create your own ones off that. But I still haven't seen that rolled out yet. I've actually got a sticky note next to me saying, can we define a kind of prompt to make a document like an Avanade document on there? That's a nice idea. And I haven't got to yet.

Zoe Wilson (25:08)
Yeah.

Interesting. Yeah. Yeah, interesting.

Yeah, so

a little bit like system instructions where you could say to people, we'll let you create images using AI, but you have to give it these system instructions or a system prompt to make sure that it's in the brand guidelines that will be acceptable to us.

Kevin McDonnell (25:47)
Yeah, absolutely. That'd be really nice. Another one here, and I'm going to be slightly cautious because I've seen some pieces on this one. I'll make sure I don't say too much on this, but catch up with OneDrive. So getting a summary of your mentions in your documents and changes made to files and new files shared with you. I'm quite excited about this one and the potential for this. So especially if you're working, you you talked about a large proposal there or you're working on a project.

Zoe Wilson (25:49)
Yeah.

Kevin McDonnell (26:17)
There's a lot of changing documents and it's hard to keep up with those. And even where you're mentioned, I keep glancing down because I'm seeing messages come up where I've been tagged in a document right now on there. And this will give that ability to give a really a kind of quick summary of those things. And I'm hoping we'll kind of understand some of the priority, know a bit about you and what what sounds like you need to do this now versus.

here's something for you to review at some point, which you can kind of park down from there. So really, really excited to see this one come through as well. Although I do notice it does say copilot for Microsoft 365 there, but we'll ignore that for now.

Zoe Wilson (27:00)
Yeah, I mean, that's obviously an old entry. Well, hopefully an old entry, shall we say. Added to roadmap, 20th of November. No, they should have known better. Yeah, we try to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Kevin McDonnell (27:06)
We try and be nice, we try and be nice, but it's hard sometimes. Yeah,

absolutely. And again, I think another one here about reading out, dictate your prompts in copilot chat. So the other side to read aloud. Interesting, that's coming slightly later, but good to see that in there. Here's the one I was looking for, prioritise my inbox.

I again, I was just talking about prioritizing mentions there to be able to flag your high priority emails. I'm someone who just I don't try and section my mails into other folders. Really excited about this one to kind of pick out some of the more important things to focus on with that.

Zoe Wilson (27:53)
Yeah, agreed, agreed. I can see this being super valuable.

Kevin McDonnell (27:58)
I've just seen another one sneaking there that I hadn't noticed before. Convert Copilot response into a Word file.

Zoe Wilson (28:07)
Yeah. So I, I, I had the same reaction. I was looking through this Kevin, before he jumped on the call earlier and I forgot to highlight this one because I didn't know about this either. So being able to take a response that copilot gives you and then translate that into a word document, I think is good. And I know that it's possible to edit in pages. Now, I think we've talked about this before because it's something I, I, I find quite useful and you know, I can, I can ask copilot question and I can choose to edit in pages. can share that.

Kevin McDonnell (28:10)
I'm

Mmm.

Zoe Wilson (28:36)
with you because it's essentially a loop component. But a lot of people are scared of loop. They don't understand what pages are and they want to just have that traditional co-authoring experience in Word. So I think this will be valuable for a lot of people.

Kevin McDonnell (28:53)
Absolutely agree. No, that's interesting. It's been announced in the...

Zoe Wilson (28:55)
And, and a lot of people, yeah.

And one of the things I find super interesting is, I'm hearing anecdotally from a lot of people that, they will, if they're, if they're doing something with copilot, they'll start in copilot chats, either in teams or in the browser, because they feel like they're getting the better, more well-rounded response there.

Kevin McDonnell (29:12)
Mm.

Zoe Wilson (29:17)
I think it was Paul Bullock the other day who saying he gets better Excel formulas by starting in copilot chat than he does by asking copilot in Excel. And, you know, I think, I think this allows people to start in a place where they feel like they're going to get the best copilot response and then move it to the place where they're going to work with other people.

Kevin McDonnell (29:24)
Really interesting.

Yeah, no, absolutely. And this is going to be a shameless transition to the next bit. And they can extend into other areas, which might take us nicely into looking at some of the extensibility from within there. So let's again skip through some of these that have come out. Developers can use Kyoto as an API plugin generation. Now, probably two thirds of you have just gone whoosh.

What on earth is Kyoto for this? I am very excited. again, I've actually been working at trialing some of these things out. But effectively, what this is is a way to connect to other APIs. So you can already do it with open API definitions, a way of defining an API such as connecting to, say, Salesforce or ServiceNow. They've got APIs, so you can integrate with those.

Zoe Wilson (30:07)
Yeah, count me in the two-thirds.

Kevin McDonnell (30:35)
Some of them have open API definitions, but they're huge and very painful to kind of work with from there. So this is a way to kind of make it easier to connect to those, to make it easier to define what you want, and also to make it easier to define the kind of intent mapping, your system prompts that trigger when to go from that, what to do from there. So I'm going to shut up now because I'm...

think we'll see something in the not too distant future announced around this and we'll add a bit more information. But I think to allow your extensibility to other APIs to have more actions from there, this is going to be a really strong way and also a really strong way to kind of ease the those who want to go down the pro code route within that. So really, really looking forward to that as well.

Zoe Wilson (31:29)
Yeah, I think that sounds good. then, I mean, if you look at the dates of these, we've got the developers will be able to create, test and update custom engine agents to run in M365 Co-pilot and Teams in April. And then a huge swathe of developer related announcements where Rollout Start is slated for May, which to me indicates that they're trying to align the availability of those features with Microsoft Build.

Kevin McDonnell (31:32)
fetch links.

I can't wait for this.

Yeah. And I'd say for those who aren't devs looking at this again, two things I picked from this custom engine agents for those who don't know, these are where you've built an agent, a virtual assistant that isn't embedded into Copilot. So you could say it's your box from the old worlds could be a full multi agent platform, but you've still got that kind of chat interface to it. Effectively, what we're saying is we try and move that into.

we try and move that into Copilot as the interface. So really excited about that, that it kind of opens up things. And that could be ones you developed yourself, or it could be ones, other ones that are out there natively, such as ServiceNow and Salesforce. So this will open up that kind of UI for AI that Sacha keeps talking about. It's another opening up for that, which I'm really excited about. And then these other ones about type spec, project scaffolding, graph connectors.

These are all about making it easier to actually connect these things together again from that. again, most of you won't use this, but you'll use the outputs because we'll see more agents embedded within CoPilot that can do more. And I think that's that's the exciting bit to this as

Zoe Wilson (33:15)
Yeah, it really feels like the extensibility capabilities and the scaffold and the tools that people need to be able to move this forward at pace and at scale. You know, we've been talking about extensibility for what, more than 18 months now, Kevin, but it feels like we're getting to a point where it's actually becoming much more real and tangible.

Kevin McDonnell (33:32)
Yeah, at least.

Yeah, I think people are realizing what they can do with it, what works well, what isn't working quite as well. And they're focusing on the good bits to get those there and making them easy to use and embedded. I really feel that story's worthwhile. I am starting to use agents within my copilot quite a bit now.

Zoe Wilson (33:58)
Yeah, cool.

Kevin McDonnell (34:00)
think we're going to take a little pause for us but for you we're going to have a Scooby Doo moment and you won't see any difference apart from us probably having been to a few more calls and looking a bit more haggard but we're going to do a brief break here and we'll be back with the next section shortly.

Kevin McDonnell (34:17)
OK, we've had a little bit of a pause and this was actually meant to be out last week, but our calendars have clashed and no, before any of you say it, Copilot cannot help with that. We have tried.

Zoe Wilson (34:28)
I

wish Curfile It could help with my calendar.

Kevin McDonnell (34:32)
That would be nice. So we're going to crack on with where we were. I think we were just talking about extensibility, at least that's what I've gone back to look at. And it says we were and we're going to cover some of the admin areas of the roadmaps. So I am hoping that the road map hasn't changed anywhere in between this time. We can see we've got about 10 items here and we're just looking at well, we're looking at

SharePoint ones and the admin center as the backend. The reason we got SharePoint ticked is because there's a few around SharePoint advanced management, which I think are interesting. think particularly this one restricted content discoverability. And I can never remember the name of this because there's restricted site search, which you can have a set of sites that copilot will only search for that. But out in preview at the moment and rolling out any day now.

is this ability to actually say, I don't want you to search these sites. So you can kind of go one way or the other. You can either say, I want you to look at this subset or I don't want you to look at this subset. And I think this will be really helpful for people who are kind of a bit nervous or maybe they've got some messy structures and permission structures in there. Now they can kind of say, OK, let's just take that off for now. Let's deal with that and then add it in later. So I like this kind of options that are coming from there.

Zoe Wilson (35:56)
Yeah, I feel like I need to read a little bit more about this because I know the restricted search that came out last, no, I'm assuming there might be blogs or something that will be about for reading and consuming. But basically my issue that I had with the restricted site search one was that for anybody who's put the time and effort into configure Microsoft search or who leverages search within SharePoint and within Microsoft 365.

Kevin McDonnell (36:00)
There's not much here.

Zoe Wilson (36:25)
If you say, okay, we only want copilot to look at these 50 sites that basically breaks search for everything else and everyone else. So I know it, I mean, I know that like a site owner level, people have been able to exclude individual sites, but I like the fact that this is going to be an admin thing that people can do at that SharePoint advanced management level. And if this works without actually breaking Microsoft search, I think this is a much better option rather than that temporary sticking plaster.

Kevin McDonnell (36:55)
Yeah, I think the other caveat and similar to your last comment, we need to see what kind of comes out around this. But I believe in the text and I'll try and dig out links and share there that you can have one or the other from this. And this was in the Microsoft Learn stuff. So you can either allow or disallow. You can't kind of do a little bit of a combo of both, which kind of makes sense. But I can see that there's a there could be a frustration.

Zoe Wilson (37:16)
Can I do both? Yay. Yeah. Yeah.

Kevin McDonnell (37:24)
with that as well or confusion. something to make sure you kind of think about, you either need to allow sites or not allow sites within there. And there's no permissioning. You can allow some people and not others.

Zoe Wilson (37:32)
Yeah.

Yeah. And for me, mean, actually reading this properly, you know, where it's saying it's restricting content discoverability and organization wide search, this already sounds like it's a better option. So, you know, if you have an allow list, you're basically breaking search. If you have a disallow list, you're hiding things from the search and from copilot, which is much better.

Kevin McDonnell (37:59)
Yeah, it'd be interesting. I think it's whether it disallows search within a site. So if you've excluded it, does that mean when you're on that site, you can't search the contents there? be interesting to dig into and hopefully not on that.

Zoe Wilson (38:13)
I'm sure it'll be

fine. mean, it only references all wide search and you know, the insight search should still. Yeah.

Kevin McDonnell (38:19)
I'm sure it will be fine.

How long have you been an MVP? How optimistic are you feeling? Sorry if anyone from Microsoft's listening to that, but sorry.

Zoe Wilson (38:27)
Yeah, maybe

let's not talk about optimism today.

Kevin McDonnell (38:32)
Yeah,

yeah, that's a bad idea. Moving swiftly away from that one. I thought we talked about this in the last one, but maybe it was before we chatted. apologies if this is a repeat, but the Viva Connections cards in Microsoft 365, very excited about this one. So it kind of allows you to bring functionality into into Copilot itself. So really looking forward to that.

Was there any that jumped off? Scroll down a bit so you can see. Were there any jumped out as you as particularly interesting here? I think I love those. Already rolled out apparently.

Zoe Wilson (39:08)
Yeah, I mean,

yeah, so the suggested users license assignment plays an interesting one, isn't it? It's like, here you go, give these people a license. These people will, know, give them a license, give them a license. I think that's quite an interesting one. It will help organizations who are maybe struggling to identify those who have the behavior patterns where they get most benefit from a license, but yeah.

Kevin McDonnell (39:37)
I guess an important thing here is it's suggested. It's not going to start pushing out licenses on this. So I know we've talked to organizations about understanding the value that Copilot can bring and using that to decide who gets a license. This is just another tool in that armory. I don't think it will be the tool, but it's another one that adds into there. be interesting.

Zoe Wilson (40:00)
Yeah

and it's interesting isn't it because I do wonder if this will be adapted to make recommendations for Copilot Chat as well. So I mean I'm assuming it's going to recommend everyone has Copilot Chat but will it have like a two-tier recommendation where it says you know these are the people that we think need the premium license and this is the button that you press to give it to everyone to give the to activate the free version for everyone else if they haven't done that already.

Kevin McDonnell (40:10)
Yeah.

you

Yeah, I can't see this recommending people downscaling licenses, but let's let's move on quickly. And another nice one, I like this, the Copilot prompts gallery. I think this is finally catching up to what a lot of people are hoping for it. So being able to see what a useful prompts and things like that. I know there's there's been lots of kind of open source and custom built tools to share prompts and things in there. I think the prompt gallery.

as of March will really have so much usefulness on this so you can actually see what's popular and kind of work towards having a central area to pull these together. So I'm really liking that one as well.

And we've skipped... no, we haven't skipped over... I do get frustrated with the roadmap. Preview available September, rollout start June. June! That's... So, yeah.

Zoe Wilson (41:21)
Yeah.

Yeah, I mean,

I guess there's a level of complexity into making sure that this works before they get it in the hands of all of the noisy developers.

Kevin McDonnell (41:35)
Sorry, I realized I didn't say what this was. So this is around the having graph able to access the Copilot for M365 usage. I know it's one of Lauren's faces, faces favorites.

Zoe Wilson (41:49)
Yeah. So, so I think, I think this will be a powerful one when it's available for everybody. And the other one that I think is interesting is the one, couple, a couple down Kevin, which is the usage reports for integrated apps and copilot extensions.

Kevin McDonnell (42:01)
yeah.

that is interesting. Thank you. I was speaking to someone about this the other day. They were asking me questions and I couldn't find it and I'd missed that was in the road map. I forgot to check there. Other Kevin, if you're listening, here's the answer.

Zoe Wilson (42:16)
Yeah, and available March.

Available March, allegedly.

Kevin McDonnell (42:23)
Yeah. Yeah. So that's quite nice. Just going back to the usage one, I know that says preview. Because that's graph, I think that is available to everyone, but it's on the beta endpoint at the moment. And as you say, it's then available for the developers to work on and test what it means by being in the beta endpoint. They could make changes that could break it with a kind of shorter lifespan for that. So you can use it, but shouldn't use it as a production item until June.

Zoe Wilson (42:24)
So.

Kevin McDonnell (42:52)
when it moves into the main endpoints. So that is, I think, available to everyone who wants to take a look at that as well. yeah, integrated apps and Copilot extensions usage reports will be very interesting as well.

Now, should we move on to the next set on there and try not to say anything too silly because the next set is really around purview and the security side, which I'm not going to speak for you too much. It's not my deepest area of knowledge. I've got a kind of broad overview of the purview items and really like a lot of what's coming through from there. But we may put our foot in it and always love to hear from other people if they have a different take on this.

that they'd love to share with us, do reach out on there. But I think there is a lot coming and I think it's really important that this kind of back-end management of things with Purview is getting more effective within there and there's more coming with this as well. some interesting items in there. Before I jump, is there any you wanted to pick up on first?

Zoe Wilson (43:58)
Let's have a look at the second one down, Microsoft Purview capabilities for M365 copilots.

So what's this? So this is launching several capabilities in government cloud environments. So I guess nothing too exciting here. Yeah. No, no.

Kevin McDonnell (44:07)
Yeah.

That's interesting. Whoa, whoa, whoa, So

unless you're looking after government, Sorry.

Zoe Wilson (44:20)
Let me finish before you jump in. Nothing too exciting here

in terms of new capabilities that we haven't yet seen. But for those who are working with the government cloud, this is a sign that things are starting to be deployed and are being released at an acceptable level, which means they pass the increased security to get them into the government cloud.

Kevin McDonnell (44:41)
Very true, very true from there as well. So yeah, really, the thing I find about this one is usually with the government cloud, they kind of put some comments in the actual title itself. It's interesting. They've only mentioned it in the details there.

Zoe Wilson (44:42)
Hahaha

haha

Yeah, definitely interesting. Okay, so we've got another one that's got a very long preview from November 24 with rollout starting in June 25, which is the data loss prevention. So using DLP to restrict M365 copilot processing on content with sensitivity labels. Now it's interesting to me that this is still showing rollout June 25 because I, and this is showing my...

lack of in-depth knowledge of some of the security capabilities probably, but I was under the impression that I thought this was already meant to work like this.

Kevin McDonnell (45:37)
Yeah, I thought that. We're both looking slightly bemused by this one. So I think what it is, I think it restricts the content that comes to copilot. So sensitivity labels do get flagged and are shown within the copilot results. I'm guessing that this is restricting access. So once you've got those results out to make sure you can't share that further.

within there, so it kind of flags it, but maybe doesn't prevent, especially with things like copilot pages, maybe it's related more to that and the kind of output there to make sure that can't be copied and pasted, but maybe something to dig into. I'm scribbling some notes, see if we can find some links on that.

Zoe Wilson (46:25)
Yeah.

I mean, maybe Kevin, we just need to find some of our security friends who know this better than us and get them on for a session. just, I mean, it's been a while since we've last covered some of the security stuff in detail. And to be honest, that was more copilot for security, wasn't it? Rather than specifically Purview. So maybe we phone a friend and actually do a bit of a deep dive into some of this.

Kevin McDonnell (46:44)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

No,

that's a great idea. If only we knew a Sarah, someone who digs into purview and I'll follow. So I don't want to call out all of these. I think, you know, you can see quite a few around data loss prevention. So that content explorer where you can go and take a look at that content and the sensitive information which is present in those conversations.

really powerful there. Again, another one on DLP there, Policy Insights with Copilot. So can... Copilot for security in DLP can summarize DLP policies. So extending more of the Copilot security. I'm getting distracted because it looks like, again, that's a DOD one. So something's already there that's rolling out wider into the defense capabilities.

I think, Cobra, again, that's Purview for DoD. I should put a filter on those because we're seeing a lot of that as well. eDiscovery, quick summarisation in eDiscovery. So this one, that's the one I saw that I was thinking of. It's really nice. So if you've used eDiscovery, you want to kind of identify where someone's been mentioned. You've got a legal hold and things on there.

But it can take a long time to take all those outputs. So what they're saying here is a way to summarize that for your kind of cases, holds, your searches to be able to give that summary. Now, I think this will be a very interesting one to see how people use it, because you could take that summary, I'm guessing there is still the good chance that it hallucinates or misses things within that. So it's trying to take a view of does this pick up a quick summary from it? Do you still?

need to go through this in detail? Yes, absolutely. Within there, but I think there's probably also a nice way of summarizing here's the key points that you can give to someone to reflect on, as well as deep diving into the actual details itself. So a nice way to kind of pick up things there.

Zoe Wilson (49:01)
Yeah, I'd agree with that. I'd agree with that. And then, I mean, if you look at the rollout date, that rollout start December 2024. Lovely, lovely record keeping again from the people who maintain the roadmap.

Kevin McDonnell (49:10)
yes, missed that one. it's already live.

Yes, I'm glad there aren't other ones. hang on. That's January. data lifecycle separate retention policies for copilot and AI apps within there. So that's nice. You can sort of set different retention policies for the comments on there. And that should be should be live already, according to this. Just trying to see if there were any other ones. This one I really like. I've been having some conversations.

good to see that this is starting to roll out, but this is identifying risky AI usage. And obviously we talk about responsible AI a lot. They're bringing in this ability to detect intentional and unintentional insider risk activity on generative AI. not only, especially we were talking about the restricted site search, you want to make sure that people cannot access things they shouldn't. But if you have, maybe you haven't got full confidence you've got that in place.

You've got another layer within this of the insider risk management to look where people are hunting, actively hunting for things they possibly shouldn't be looking for. So I'm guessing things like searching for passwords, searching for salary information that could be in there, searching for contacts. Yeah, really useful. And what I love and I've seen about this is it's not just about copilot, it's also third party Gen.A.I. apps. So you can connect in with things you built in as your open AI.

Zoe Wilson (50:28)
bank details, that kind of thing.

Kevin McDonnell (50:44)
other APIs that you've got within there. So it also goes on to OpenAI, Claude, even DeepSeq, if you're using that as a model, that we sneak to DeepSeq reference into the show, just really subtly there. I hope no one notices. But yeah, really, really powerful way to kind of bring that other information all into Purview in one place and kind of flag those items up.

Zoe Wilson (50:58)
Hahaha!

Yeah, I was talking to a friend the other day who works in IT for a relatively small company and they had someone who left and in the last 24 hours before they finished, I think they sent like 600 emails with client info to themselves.

And then the levers processes must have failed or something because the laptop was, this was on the Friday, the laptop was still working over the weekend. And I was just chatting to them about some of the insider risk management stuff that you can get in Microsoft tech anyway. And the fact that, if you've got someone who's leaving, who's got access to client data, you should be putting them on this kind of insider risk watch list. But I hadn't thought about, you know,

not just looking at kind of, you know, the files they're accessing and are they downloading tons of stuff and are they emailing things to themselves, but actually what are they doing with that kind of AI lens as well? And yeah, I think, I think that's a really, a really important and valid feature.

Kevin McDonnell (52:06)
Yeah.

Yeah, and be interested in the false positives. Someone we both know, and I'll tell you about this after we finish recording, did get flagged on that because he was looking through his old content, seeing if there was anything useful. And the searches and the number of documents he was looking at got flagged up within this. He was going, whoops, on that one. So really useful and powerful tools on that.

Yeah, lots of interest. And I think we'll probably wrap up looking at a roadmap on those items before we expose our own knowledge of security too much further from there. But if there is an area there and you want to come speak to us, drop us both a line. And I think we do definitely need to delve a little bit further into some of those capabilities and what can be done because we talked about what's coming. I think it's probably a lot of things we could talk about that's already there that will really help people with their copilot rollouts as well.

Zoe Wilson (53:09)
Yeah, absolutely. And I know we've got a few people that we can tap on the shoulder to come and talk about that. The other thing that I'd really like to deep dive into in a future episode, Kevin, I think is more now the extensibility journey is maturing a little bit. Instead of talking about kind of extensibility in agents at a theoretical level, it would actually be great, I think, to start to get into something more real with agents and

I don't know if, you know, if you, if you want to teach me the technical stuff, soon as I don't get time to be technically hands on these days, or if we phone a friend for that and you can both tag team.

Kevin McDonnell (53:44)
Hehehe.

Yeah, I guess I think it's worth digging into and I think it's worth. I think what I'd really love to see from the agent story is we're seeing lots of pretty demos that are not together in an hour or two. I think it would be lovely to sort of see someone who's taken it a little further and are kind of looking at it as an active use. I mean, I know I can't know if we've mentioned on the show, but Tom Morgan and his clothes pilot, I think is a lovely example.

Zoe Wilson (54:17)
Hahaha

Kevin McDonnell (54:17)
Maybe not

an enterprise one, but he's using that for those who haven't seen. I'll put it into the show notes. He's got an agent that takes his calendar, takes the weather. He's got a spreadsheet, I think, of all his clothes that he's written down and he gets copilot to recommend him what to wear and gets the image generator to give an image of that. Tom doesn't know this.

Zoe Wilson (54:40)
You

Kevin McDonnell (54:41)
But he was I was on a call with him yesterday and I noticed he was literally wearing the clothes He'd selected on this way I sent Zoe a picture of of the kind of regenerated one plus what he was actually wearing Because it amused me greatly on there

Zoe Wilson (54:53)
Yeah, I

love it. mean, I know it's quite a tongue in cheek use case of the technology, but I think it's a lot of fun. I love the fact that Tom's really getting into this as well and that he's actually trying to replicate the pose that the image generator is giving him as well as the outfits.

Kevin McDonnell (55:11)
Yes.

Zoe Wilson (55:14)
And

where the, where the clothes pilot is recommending something that is just nonsensical, he's actually challenging it and getting it to give him other suggestions as well. And I also love the trend.

Kevin McDonnell (55:23)
Yeah, and that's a nice example

of the kind of people understanding what works and what doesn't work that goes beyond a kind of quick demo from there as well.

Zoe Wilson (55:32)
Yeah, I also love the fact that the clothespilots seem to follow the behaviour of humans in the sense that like you might have a hundred outfits in your wardrobe, but you tend to rotate through the same five.

Kevin McDonnell (55:43)
Yeah.

Yes, yes, absolutely. So, yeah, I think that would be a good session to kind of pick up some real life use cases. And again, a plea to people, if you do want to come and talk about agents, especially if you've got something active that is being used. I was listening to the Everyday AI podcast and they had someone there talking about agents in the retail space on there and supporting things that and I think there's

There's a lot of interesting possibilities with that. I think it's, it's what I see is interesting is trying to get the reality to those of what actually is working and what still needs a a bit more work as well.

Zoe Wilson (56:28)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So we're in February now. It feels like the first month of the year has just vanished. can already see, mean, but Microsoft build dates were announced, I think, since the last episode went out. And to be honest, they were kind of when I expected anyway, but it feels like it just in terms of news and announcements and the evolution of all this tech, it's gonna start ramping up as we follow that.

that path to build. I think we'll be in for an interesting few weeks.

Kevin McDonnell (57:01)
Yeah, absolutely. And as we've seen, the number of those roadmap items that landing in February and March says a lot. So I think we will see a lot of things. think we'll see... Right, be careful here, Kev. We'll see a lot of interesting things being hinted at as we come to March and the MVP Summit, and then build May 19th to 22nd. I just trying to find that in Seattle. So...

don't think tickets are available yet. I was just having a look on the site. It says get notified. So I think they've announced where and when, but people can't quite book tickets. And now is the time to kind of get your approvals in, get your conversations, get that time booked out, even if you are just following it remotely to pick up on that. But we're going to see we can see another cycle of more news coming out that people will have to catch up on.

And I think we know that people are feeling a bit tired from this. I think the difference is that we are seeing, we are starting to see the reality of this come through and how people are applying it. And I think that will be as much of the information as well as the kind of pace of new capabilities coming to, which will be good.

Zoe Wilson (58:14)
Yeah, 100%. And then I think we've got, is it just under four weeks, we've got the Microsoft AI Tour in London. So if any of you who are listening are London based and you're going to be at that event, please reach out and let us know and it would be really great to connect with you there in person.

Kevin McDonnell (58:31)
Yeah, absolutely. That should be fantastic. And I know this. Do check the AI TOR site if you're not in London, because there's one around the world happening. think, was it Amsterdam? I think it's coming up soon, isn't it? It's off the top of my head. I know they've just had one in Budapest. So check out there. They are literally going all around the world to keep an eye out for that. I'll put a link in the show notes for that one as well.

Zoe Wilson (58:56)
Yeah, I think they've just had one in India as well. I was talking to someone from Microsoft last night who said that Sachi's keynote from the India AI tour is available on YouTube and recommended that we go and listen to it because it would ensure that we're up to date in how Sachi is thinking about and talking about this AI journey. So I haven't actually had a chance to go and listen to it yet. That was quite late last night, but that's on my list of things to listen to this week.

Kevin McDonnell (59:00)
Yes. Yeah.

is it?

Zoe Wilson (59:25)
We'll find that link and put that in the show notes for you as well.

Kevin McDonnell (59:29)
Yeah, absolutely. And of course, if you want to hear even more from us, as we mentioned at the start of show, copilot Fireside Chat with Abram Jackson, he will certainly be talking about the agentic and multi-agentic view and the power that's coming. So really, really looking forward to it. He's like a kid with candy at the moment with all the kind of announcements coming out. I think by February, you will see even more, sorry, by the February.

Zoe Wilson (59:49)
Hahaha

Kevin McDonnell (59:58)
Copilot Farsight Chat, I'm hoping we'll see a few more announcements come out. I think the custom engine copilot is due to go into preview in February, so I think we'll hopefully see some exciting things about that and the capabilities can happen. yeah, exciting times.

Zoe Wilson (1:00:13)
Yeah, we've got three and a half weeks haven't

we? It's Wednesday the 26th, so three and a half weeks and I can't wait. I think it's going to be a really great conversation with Abram.

Kevin McDonnell (1:00:24)
I think the only thing is please come along, please ask questions, because if not, we will dominate and go, really? and things like that. So please come along with your own questions as well.

Zoe Wilson (1:00:35)
Really?

Kevin McDonnell (1:00:36)
Right, well, thank you very much, everyone, for joining us today. Don't forget to tell everyone about Copilot Connection if you enjoyed today. I've chatted with a few people this week who have mentioned how much they're enjoying it. So do share people, give us a review, whichever podcast app you're using, subscribe to us, tell your friends, tell your clients, tell your family, tell your gran she needs to know about Copilot as well, because she can get onto it as well.

Zoe Wilson (1:01:04)
I'm not well, tell your gran that's a new one, Kevin. Yeah, and I know that kind of the AI conversation has gone far and wide. But yeah, I'm not sure I'm not sure I've had the that level yet. But yeah, tell everybody do encourage everyone to subscribe. And thank you very much for listening. And we look forward to talking more soon.

Kevin McDonnell (1:01:07)
Yeah.

Bye bye.

Zoe Wilson (1:01:27)
Bye.