Copilot Weekly27 July to 7 August 2026

When drafting content using the inline canvas Copilot experience that's based on referenced sources, Copilot includes citations in the text it generates, indicating references to information in the content.

Microsoft is moving the pipeline that assigns topics to survey comments onto Copilot, and says the change improves categorisation accuracy. (Status change: unknown -> generally available.)

Users will be able to search for and select SharePoint Lists through the Context IQ menu to ground their prompts in Copilot Chat. Previously users could not reach SharePoint Lists from Context IQ when composing prompts. The entry states the integration supports Microsoft 365 security and compliance policies for data access.

Copilot Answers in Copilot Search (in the M365 Copilot App on web and desktop) will provide more concise responses and more prominently highlight the ability to continue in the conversation in Copilot chat on the right-hand sidebar.

Copilot now displays rich images from files and meetings directly within responses. Previously Copilot responses included text only; relevant images now surface inline from files and meetings to provide visual context. The entry states this supports richer content formats while maintaining data security and compliance with Microsoft 365 policies.

Rolled out in July: a brand kit skill that applies Brand Center colors, fonts and logo.

Microsoft lists three changes to cost management for usage-based billing services: spending alerts, policy logic in which the highest per-user limit wins, and overage handling that lets an in-progress task finish without billable charges. The same update covers Copilot Credits visibility.

This feature enables IT admins to customize a portion of the user notification messages for recording and transcription during Teams calls. (Status change: in development -> rolling out.)

While Word reads a document aloud, a user can ask questions by voice, such as what a passage means or for a summary of a section, and get an answer without pausing the playback to search. (Status change: unknown -> generally available.)

The voice tethering feature builds on the recent introduction of Sign Language Mode. It ensures that when an interpreter voices for a D/HH signer, captions and transcripts attribute the spoken content to the signer rather than the interpreter. This provides accurate representation in meetings and makes it clear who is contributing to the conversation.

The file previewer in OneDrive and SharePoint now shows a floating Copilot button at the bottom right corner instead of in the command bar. The button surfaces contextual prompts tailored to the file type and opens Copilot chat from inside the preview. Previously users opened Copilot separately to get insights on a file.

Users will be able to list the file attachments they received or sent over email from Microsoft 365 Copilot chat. The entry says Copilot now provides a list of email file attachments from messages sent or received, where previously users had to search emails manually. Example usage given: ask Copilot to list email attachments from a specific sender or date.

Copilot in SharePoint now supports planning and building SharePoint solutions from natural language commands. Path given: the Build node of the SharePoint start page, where a text box asks what you would like to build; enter a natural language request to plan or build a solution, then review and customize the generated SharePoint site. No roadmap ID given.

The Copilot Notebooks Overview has been redesigned with a new layout, crisper AI-generated summaries, key insights, and direct visibility of one-click artifacts users can create in the notebook. The entry describes opening a Copilot Notebook, going to the Overview page, reviewing the generated summary and key insights, then using one-click artifact creation. Platforms listed: Windows, Mac, Web.

Copilot now includes a built-in screenshot capture tool that lets users capture a screen area and add the image directly to a prompt. Previously users captured and uploaded screenshots manually outside Copilot. The entry states this improves prompt clarity and response relevance without exposing sensitive data externally.

Agent Access Insights gives a heatmap of agent activity in SharePoint and OneDrive, which the roundup says rolled out in July.

Four changes the roundup lists as rolled out in July: OpenAI GPT-5.6, described as optimized for knowledge work in Microsoft 365 with stronger multi-step reasoning; Anthropic Claude Sonnet 5, aimed at agentic multi-step work, in PowerPoint, Word and Cowork; shorter Copilot answers in Copilot Search with a clearer handoff to sidebar chat; and mobile push notifications on iOS and Android.

Listed as rolled out in July: branded assets from the Microsoft 365 Brand kit; writing, replying to and resolving comments; and iOS and iPad capabilities covering multi-step planning, implicit and explicit grounding, and background work. Listed as rolling out in August: custom user skills stored in OneDrive, and assigning tasks and notifying stakeholders in comments.

Copilot Notebooks adds support for Markdown (.md), TXT (.txt) and RTF (.rtf) files as notebook references, which the roundup ties to software documentation, transcripts and rich-text notes. Availability wording: reference support for TXT and RTF files rolled out in July, and support for Markdown files will roll out in August.

Anthropic Claude Fable 5 comes to Cowork for longer, more complex work with sustained reasoning and multi-stage planning; the roundup says this model is off by default and rolled out in July.

Review workflows in Word handle Track Changes plus comment management, which the roundup says rolled out in June. Drafting workflows handle tables of contents, headers, footers, page numbers, dates and footnotes, which the roundup says rolled out in July.

New Copilot connectors listed as rolled out in July, grouped by industry: financial services (Daloopa, FactSet, Fitch Solutions, Morningstar, PitchBook, S&P Global), professional services (Dice, Forrester, HG Insights), industrial and manufacturing (Infor Nexus, Sight Machine), software (Granola), healthcare and life sciences (Article Galaxy, Nyquist AI), retail (Passby Pulse, Polar Analytics) and cross-industry (CB Insights, Sprouts.ai).

A meeting recaps app in Teams can be pinned to the sidebar, offers filters, holds 30 days of recaps and provides an audio recap. The roundup says this rolled out in July.

The Copilot Chat usage report is now in the admin center for GCC, GCC High and DOD, described as helping customers understand and drive Copilot Chat adoption. It includes total active users, a per-app breakout, and user-level activity insights that are anonymized by default.

Copilot Notebooks can take Outlook emails as references, so a notebook grounds on email threads as well as files. Microsoft says adding emails as knowledge sources improves downstream outputs such as presentations and briefs. (Status change: unknown -> preview.)

Change leaders can launch a Copilot Pulse survey from the Copilot dashboard to all licensed or active users. The audience updates automatically from Insights data and respects existing dashboard filters such as organisation and job function, and reporting is population-level only.

Microsoft is redesigning the Microsoft 365 Copilot web and desktop app, with changes to the chat home screen, the chat response layout and the navigation pane. Microsoft describes the goal as a simpler experience that drives more Copilot use.

Planner Agent generates a status report on request, pulling task data into a narrative that covers overall status, progress, risks and what comes next.

Users can add the Word, Excel, and PowerPoint agents directly into a Copilot Chat prompt by mentioning them, so files can be created without leaving Copilot Chat. The roundup states this feature rolled out in July.

Responses are generated by GPT and Claude in sequence, with GPT drafting and Claude reviewing the draft. Microsoft says the review step targets response accuracy, completeness and citation integrity.

Council in Researcher runs several leading AI models from different providers in parallel in one place, so a user can compare their outputs and see where they agree and where they conflict before making a high-stakes decision, without switching tools.

The Workforce Insights Agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot answers questions about an organisation's workforce data for leaders, managers and their delegates.

Researcher carries context forward from a user's earlier interactions. Microsoft says this grounds insights, personalises outputs and cuts repeated setup on a long-running topic.

When creating a presentation with Copilot in PowerPoint using Agent Mode, you can reference an existing PowerPoint file, so Copilot applies its theme and styles to the new deck, keeping formatting consistent.

Users in GCC-H will be able to use custom engine agents.

Users in GCC-M will be able to use custom engine agents.

When an environment has no allocated Copilot Credits, or has consumed all of them, any experience that requires credits stops working until more capacity is available. End users see agents stop responding to requests.

Agents and workflows powered by the GitHub Copilot harness use a usage-based billing structure measured in Copilot Credits. Credits are charged for LLM tokens, for tools including knowledge and MCP, and for the harness itself.

Agent Readiness gives makers a real-time, always-visible health check for their Copilot Studio agents. A single "Review" indicator in the build experience surfaces anything blocking or at risk, from policy restrictions to missing evaluations, before it derails a publish.

Copilot Studio documents three harnesses, the runtime layer between the agent you design and the model that reasons: the GitHub Copilot harness, the standard harness, and the Copilot chat harness.

Microsoft is introducing a new dedicated License Requests page in the Microsoft 365 Admin Center to help admins more easily discover, review, and manage Microsoft 365 Copilot license requests submitted by users.

Microsoft says the feature described in its earlier announcement has been rolled back at this time, and that it is evaluating next steps. Admins who planned a web-grounding block list on this control need another mechanism until Microsoft says more. (Reverses our 2026-W30 edition, which called the control generally available on roadmap 503144. That entry was still marked Launched, rollout start June 2026, when we checked it on 7 August 2026.)

Microsoft is extending Purview DLP for Microsoft 365 Copilot to external web search, so a policy can stop Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Chat from putting sensitive data into a web query. Microsoft describes the control as operating in real time. The entry lists its cloud instances as GCC, GCC High and DoD, so it is a US government cloud rollout rather than a worldwide one. (Status change: in development -> rolling out.)

Security Copilot generates a plain-language explanation of what changed in a Purview DLP policy after each update. Microsoft says it compares the policy version before and after the change and reports what changed, where, the impact, and the enforcement implications.

An Agent 365 Dashboard in Insights helps business leaders track agent usage and adoption for their teams. It unifies Agent 365 data, supports organization-wide reporting with filtering, shows adoption by group, retention and top agents, and offers a toggle for Copilot Studio historical reporting. The roundup says this feature rolled out in July.

Microsoft is introducing a new guided diagnostics experience to help users understand why their DLP policies may not be behaving as expected. This experience provides a clear summary of why a DLP action was taken on a document, including which policies were triggered, the order of evaluation, and detailed insights into which conditions evaluated as true or false.

Intelligent recap can now be generated without retaining a transcript after the meeting. Meeting organizers can choose this setting from the meeting options before the meeting, or organizers and eligible participants can enable it during the meeting. (Status change: unknown -> in development.)

With the introduction of file archiving support in SharePoint Online, administrators are looking to directly include archiving actions within their existing data retention policies. (Government-cloud entry, GCC, GCC High and DoD. The worldwide entry for the same capability, roadmap 561208, was covered in our 2026-W30 edition.)

AI and IT admins get visibility into oversharing risks in the Microsoft admin center and can drive remediation from there. The same view shows how much of their sensitive Copilot interaction volume is protected, and Purview DLP for Microsoft 365 Copilot can be turned on in place.

Admins can enable a tenant-wide policy that allows Copilot (and Facilitator) to retain key insights from meetings beyond transcript retention periods. This enables Copilot to continue answering questions about past meetings even after transcripts expire. (Status change: unknown -> in development.)

A Copilot-powered assistant in the Viva Glint admin experience answers configuration and how-to questions with step-by-step guidance. Responses include deep links to the relevant configuration pages.

Declarative agents gain flexible layouts and rich UX components. Microsoft frames the change as letting makers build more expressive agents and raising user engagement.

Surface new model-driven, dynamically placed Answer Cards across top 7 segments: weather, sports, finance, images, video, places and news for Entra & MSA users across all surfaces.

Copilot Chat remains accessible within an Outlook app window but now can also be popped out to float over the main Outlook app window.

When users open links from Outlook, Microsoft Edge can automatically open the Copilot side pane to provide contextual insights and actionable suggestion chips based on email and destination content - such as highlighting key points, and recommending next actions - without disrupting the browsing flow.

Capture on Windows helps you bring conversations and ideas from meetings, brainstorming sessions, and everyday work into Copilot Notebooks.

Highlight a sentence, paragraph, or table from the response and ask Copilot to work only on that selection. Get focused explanations, concise summaries, quick translations, or next steps for the exact passage you're reviewing, no more over broad answers.

Get answers to queries quickly with Copilot's concise AI summaries at the top of Outlook search results. Users can dig deeper by opening Copilot chat directly from the Copilot summary card.

Microsoft will support creating Planner tasks and plans querying Planner information in M365 Copilot chat, allowing users to manage their tasks and plans between Copilot and Planner directly.

After a recorded call ends, Copilot in the Queues app answers questions about it from the unified call history, so an agent does not have to read the transcript or replay the recording.

Microsoft has decided not to move forward with this change at this time. (Cancelled. We reported this as in development in our 2026-W28 edition; the roadmap entry now says Microsoft has decided not to move forward with the change at this time.)