My thoughts about Microsoft Ignite 2025 - a lot of Copilot 🤖🤖

It's been many weeks since Microsoft Ignite 2025 but it wouldn't be a proper Ignite without my yearly take on the news 😇.  This year I attended from home, even though I missed the vibrant feeling of being there live it was relaxing at home. Here are some of the news I enjoyed!

And as always for a better understanding of the news the book of news is the place to be - read it here: Microsoft Ignite 2025 Book of News

Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot

As can you imagine there was a lot of news centering around Copilot, here are some of the news I found interesting but there are so many more for you to explore.

Copilot Chat becomes better for those without a license

Copilot Chat is the place for everyone to use gen AI in a secure manner. Earlier this autumn Microsoft announced that Copilot Chat soon will be available for everyone with or without the extra license in Outlook, Word, PowerPoint and Excel. At Ignite Microsoft also announced that soon Copilot Chat will be able to understand and reason over all of your inbox and calendar - AT NO ADDITIONAL COST!

Read more here, will come to preview early 2026

Better integrations for the channel agent

The Microsoft Teams channel agent will be able to work with third-party apps and agents, for example GitHub, Asana and Atlassian. Making the AI collaboration even better.

Read more here, in preview now.

More out of the box agents

Microsoft is continuously adding more out of the box agents to make our lives easier. Three agents were announced:

Workforce Insights Agent: An agent to help leaders with an overview of their organization and the roles, locations and other relevant attributes. The aim? To be able to make faster data-driven workforce decisions.

People Agent: Make it easier to find people in an organization based on role, function and skillset. Will also support creating connections to colleagues that might be relevant for your.

Learning Agent: An agent to help with microlearning.

Read more here, in preview now.

Updates to the facilitator agent

One of the first out of the box agents we got - the facilitator - is getting updates!

The updates include the facilitator being able to recognize an agenda shared in the chat. Once an agenda is detected, it will be added in the top of the meeting with a progress tracker making sure we stay on point. The facilitator will soon also be able to nudge people to join the meeting if they were invited and have been mentioned at least twice in the conversation. The facilitator will also be able to turn your meeting notes into any kind if output. The last new fun thing for the facilitator is being better at capturing and assigning tasks.

Read more here, rolling out to general availability now.

Work IQ

This was a term coined at Ignite to make it easier to understand the power of Copilot and Microsoft 365. Work IQ is explained as the intelligence layer between Copilot and Microsoft 365 that makes sure Copilot knows you, your job, your company and how you work.

It combines your work data, memory about you, and your style and inference, which is the combination of data and memory. With Work IQ Copilot upstands, you and everything about you unlocking insights and connections.

It's a part of everything you do.

Meeting recap templates

I love how Copilot makes meeting notes for me, but often I must remake them anyway. Now you will be able to choose different meeting notes templates, both out of the boxes ones but also possibility to create your own.

Read more here, in public preview now.

Microsoft Agent 365

Last Ignite it was all about building an agentic world (see Ignite post 2024) and ofc this year was all about the evolution of that. Microsoft Agent 365 was announced (did we finally get A365 aka Amanda 365?!). Something we can expect with new and cool things (which agents certainly are) are sprawl and chaos. With Agent 365 it will be easier to keep track and control of the agents at our company.

It consists of a few key components:

Registry: Get a complete list of all agents in your tenant.

Access control: Make sure agents only use the data they should.

Visualization: See how agents are connected and monitor their behavior in real time.

Interoperability: Equip agents with apps and data.

Security: Make sure your agents are safe from threats and vulnerabilities

And not it's not a new place to go, A365 lives within the M365 admin center.

Read more here and here, in preview now for frontiers.

Microsoft Teams

To be honest there aren't many news I find interesting in relationship to Microsoft Teams that does not involve Copilot. The most exciting it gets is the possibility to add your own branded reactions 🫠. Make meetings even more personalized and company branded with your own meeting reactions.

Read more here, in private preview now.

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In summary lots of Copilot!

All images are borrowed from Microsoft.