News
Microsoft's Expanded Copilot Capabilities Inside Office Apps Adds New Certification for Builders
- By Chris Paoli
- April 23, 2026
Microsoft announced the general availability of new Copilot capabilities within its core productivity suite, designed to take more initiative inside Word, Excel and PowerPoint. The move reflects the company’s broader effort to evolve Copilot from a reactive assistant into a system that can execute multi-step tasks directly within everyday enterprise workflows.
The updates let Copilot take multi-step actions directly inside documents, spreadsheets and presentations instead of simply responding to prompts or suggesting next steps. Microsoft said the features are now generally available for Microsoft 365 Copilot, Microsoft 365 Premium and Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscribers.
"Copilot can take multi-step, app-native actions directly in your documents, worksheets and presentations -- helping you move from first draft to final output faster, while you stay in control," wrote Sumit Chauhan, president of Microsoft's Office Product Group, in a blog post.
The launch signals another step in Microsoft's effort to position Copilot as more than a chatbot. With its new capabilities, the assistant is now better equipped to handle more involved editing and creation tasks within the flow of work in Word, Excel and PowerPoint, shifting from a passive partner that answers questions to an active actionable task assistant.
The company tied the update to improvements in its underlying foundation models over the past year, and those advances have made Copilot more reliable at handling multi-step tasks, including work tied to citation formatting in Word, pivot tables in Excel and animations in PowerPoint.
"Taking action matters," Chauhan wrote. "Copilot creates the most value when it performs the work -- formatting, restructuring, building visuals and transforming data -- rather than just suggesting steps."
Microsoft also shared internal usage figures tied to early adoption of the new capabilities. The company said Word saw a 52 percent increase in tries per user per week, while Excel rose 67 percent and PowerPoint increased 11 percent. Microsoft also reported gains in new-user retention and thumbs-up satisfaction scores across all three apps.
The company said part of the improvement comes from Work IQ, a feature designed to ground Copilot in user work signals so it can better understand context and produce more relevant results.
Microsoft Announces AI Agent Cert
In a separate announcement this week,
Microsoft introduced a new certification aimed at AI agent development. The Microsoft Certified: AI Agent Builder Associate certification is intended for pros building production-ready agents with Copilot Studio.
The cert requires candidates to pass Exam AB-620, which is currently in beta. Microsoft said the exam is designed to validate skills in designing, building and managing advanced agent solutions, including workflow automation, enterprise integrations, multi-agent design patterns and connections to Azure and Microsoft Foundry.
The company said likely candidates include IT application developers, consultants and independent software vendors working on scalable AI solutions. The exam also covers tools and concepts including Power Fx, Microsoft Dataverse, Power Platform environments, Microsoft 365 Copilot and generative AI approaches such as retrieval-augmented generation, Model Context Protocol and Agent2Agent.
Microsoft is offering the first 300 people who take Exam AB-620 on or before May 12 an 80 percent discount with the code "AB620Sunny26." The company said final certification results will be released about 10 days after the exam becomes generally available, which it expects in June.