News

Microsoft Boosts Copilot with Intelligent Agents, Added Security Integrations

• By Chris Paoli
• November 18, 2025

At Ignite 2025, Microsoft unveiled a sweeping evolution of its Copilot platform, embedding more proactive AI agents into the Microsoft 365 suite and enhancing its role across Office apps, Outlook and enterprise security tools. The upgrades aim to enhance automation and workflows in Microsoft 365.

The most significant changes arrive in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, where the new agents now handle everything from content generation and research to presentation formatting and document structuring—while still letting users steer the outcomes. These enhancements are powered by Microsoft’s new Work IQ system, which understands user behavior across apps and retains contextual memory to personalize interactions.

Ryan Roslansky, CEO of LinkedIn and EVP of Office, said that Work IQ extends far beyond the capabilities of traditional connectors or agents, during Tuesday's Ignite Keynote speech. "Work IQ works across all your data real time and has full context which allow to find patters and insights, while connectors pull fragments with no  real understanding of the context. "

SharePoint also benefits from tighter Copilot integration. Copilot can now reason over structured metadata in SharePoint libraries, providing more accurate and relevant answers when content is tagged with fields like category, status or owner. This update gives organizations a stronger return on investments in content management and taxonomy.

Outlook users see expanded Copilot support too. On mobile, Copilot now includes a hands-free voice experience that summarizes emails and guides users through actions like replying, flagging and deleting. Across all platforms, Copilot offers one-tap prompts -- such as "Triage my inbox" or "Summarize and reply" -- to help users take quick action. New features also let users schedule meetings directly through chat, including booking rooms and drafting agendas. In early access, Copilot can even resolve conflicts by automatically rescheduling flexible 1:1 meetings based on user preferences.

Microsoft also announced that Security Copilot is now included with Microsoft 365 E5 and is integrated directly into key security products including Microsoft Defender, Entra, Intune and Purview. This update introduces a range of prebuilt agents that operate within these tools to support specific security workflows.

The new agents in Security Copilot are built to help security teams handle routine work like sorting through alerts, managing access policies and automating common tasks tied to devices and user identities. According to Microsoft, these agents can take action on their own but still follow the organization's existing security rules and compliance standards.

Security Copilot pulls in data from across the organization -- such as user behavior, system settings and policies -- to make decisions and suggest next steps. All agent activity is tied into Microsoft's auditing and reporting tools, so teams can see what actions were taken and review them if needed.

By building these agents directly into the tools security teams already use, like Defender, Entra and Intune, Microsoft is treating Security Copilot as a core part of the platform, not an add-on. These features are now generally available to customers with Microsoft 365 E5 licenses.