Copilot Weekly27 August to 4 September 2026

Copilot and Agent 365 Dashboards add export of de-identified, row-level metrics for custom reporting (rolls out in September). The Consumption Dashboard tracks GitHub Copilot AI Credit usage so admins can compare spending against budgets (rolled out in July).

The roadmap entry for federated Copilot connectors was updated on 2 September 2026. Its description announces general availability, and the roadmap has listed GA since April CY2026, so the update itself may not be new availability. The connectors link Copilot to third-party sources over the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and retrieve data in real time without storing or indexing customer data in Microsoft services; admins retain governance through the Microsoft 365 admin center. Supported in Researcher, Microsoft 365 Chat, and Agent Mode in Excel.

Copilot in Teams adds a translation button that changes a meeting recap's language after the recap has been generated. Rolling out during August.

Copilot in Excel adds a change history skill that summarizes workbook changes, identifies editors (human and AI), and can undo edits or restore prior states, plus chat history that preserves past conversations, reopenable from the pane's menu. Rolling out during August.

Copilot in Word inserts and formats linked text on request (hyperlinks), uses text and visuals from reference documents when drafting (image understanding), and highlights the exact edited words instead of whole paragraphs (edit highlights, rolling out worldwide in August). Hyperlinks and image understanding rolled out in August.

Cowork adds effort-level controls (Light, Medium, High, Extra High, Max) so users balance quality, speed, and credit usage, with model and effort controls together in the compose box. The /cost skill now shows percent of monthly credit limit remaining, credits used month to date, and reset timing.

Copilot in PowerPoint adds task assignment in comment threads with stakeholder notifications, strict brand adherence restricting Copilot to approved templates and slide masters, per-slide note steering when building from a template, user-managed custom skills (upload, create, edit, delete), and translation relocated from the ribbon into Copilot with dynamic text-box resizing.

Copilot Notebooks becomes two connected experiences: a lightweight Copilot app experience plus a OneNote workspace, kept in sync. Recommended artifacts use WorkIQ and notebook content to generate Word, Excel, and PowerPoint artifacts. Multimodal capture on Android (audio, images, and notes generating structured notes, also in OneNote on iOS/iPad) rolls out in September; the rest rolled out in August.

Copilot Chat adds text selection (act on a selected sentence, paragraph, or table in a response), session sharing via read-only link that recipients can continue, Power BI reasoning grounded in reports and semantic models (Public Preview in June, worldwide in August), model-driven answer cards for weather, sports, finance, images, video, places, and news, and a Try again option to regenerate.

Admins can specify a limited set of sites to exclude from web grounding in Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Chat as the rollout proceeds. Target GA per the roadmap: September CY2026. (Status change: generally available -> rolling out.)

The roadmap entry was updated on 1 September 2026; the rollout has been listed since December CY2025. Copilot uses chat history to give more relevant, contextual responses, and updated settings let users view and manage what Copilot remembers and their personalization preferences.

For recorded call queue calls, the Queues app adds intelligent call recaps: AI-generated summary notes, key discussion points, and follow-up actions, available from the Recap tab on the call record. (Status change: in development -> rolling out.)

After a recorded call completes, Copilot in the Queues app summarizes key details and answers questions about the call, without manually searching the transcript or listening back to the recording. The Copilot Chat sidecar launches from the Recap tab on the call record. (Status change: in development -> rolling out.)

The roadmap entry was updated on 2 September 2026; the feature has been GA per the roadmap since February CY2026. Outlook mobile surfaces reminders to prepare for meetings with Copilot: the Up Next card adds a Prepare option that opens meeting preparation with one tap.

Microsoft describes the improved Copilot file capabilities in OneDrive Web as letting users go from files to finished work directly from chat: locating content, analyzing files and data, producing summaries, dashboards, and presentations, then saving or sharing from OneDrive. Public Preview since August; GA target per the roadmap: December CY2026. (Status change: in development -> preview.)

Copilot in OneDrive finds and analyzes files and turns them into summaries, dashboards, and presentations directly from chat. Rolled out to Public Preview in August; worldwide rollout comes in December.

Copilot in SharePoint adds personal skills: user-owned skills saved as markdown in OneDrive and reusable across sites. Rolled out to Public Preview in August; worldwide rollout comes in December.

Planner Agent status reports turn plan data into reports for stakeholders, with configurable audience, tone, length, and sections (rolled out to Frontier in August). Copilot task creation and task querying rolls out in September.

New Copilot connectors across industries: Financial (Mercury, Xero); Legal (iManage Work, Boardwise, Harvey, Descrybe Legal Engine, Relativity, Everlaw); Professional/Business (Statista, Crossbeam, ZoomInfo, IDC); Energy (S&P Global Energy); Healthcare (Scite, Consensus); Software (Adobe Journey Optimizer, GoDaddy, Asana).

Microsoft's monthly roundup collects the August 2026 Copilot updates: Cowork effort and cost controls, Copilot Chat text selections and session sharing, Copilot Notebooks changes, Teams meeting recap languages, and Word drafting improvements. The individual updates appear as separate items in this edition.

Admins apply app and agent installation changes once, in either the Microsoft 365 admin center or the Teams admin center, and the changes are enforced consistently across Teams, Outlook, and Microsoft 365 Copilot. Target GA per the roadmap: August CY2026. (Status change: in development -> rolling out.)

The roadmap entry for the Employee Self-Service Agent was updated on 1 September 2026; the agent has been rolling out since November 2025 with GA per the roadmap, and the update does not state what changed. The agent answers common workplace policy questions and takes action on HR and IT tasks, connecting employees to authorized knowledge bases and HR/IT systems of record. GA per the roadmap: November CY2025.

Custom engine agents are accessible directly inside Outlook, and natural-language mail and calendar management lets users organize messages, apply categories, create folders, manage rules, and act on meetings from chat. Rolling out during August.

Viva Insights is creating an Agent Dashboard as a central place for leaders, delegates, and analysts to understand how the organization is adopting agents. Target GA per the roadmap: October CY2026.

Anthropic Claude Fable 5.1 joins the frontier models in Copilot Cowork and Copilot Studio. The rollout to eligible users began 1 September 2026; availability varies by region and organization, and admins manage access through the Microsoft 365 admin center. Work IQ grounds responses in files, meetings, chats, and business data within existing permissions.

The GitHub Copilot harness, Copilot Studio's new foundation for building reasoning-heavy agents and workflows, is generally available. Workflows, MCP servers as agent tools, and the Windows 365 for Agents MCP server are also GA; Claude Sonnet 5 and GPT-5.5 Chat are generally available as primary models. Skills package modular, reusable instructions across agents.

Copilot Studio is adding a per-tool, per-agent toggle so makers can require human approval before an agent runs specific tools: a gated call pauses with a request describing the intended action, and a person approves, approves for the session, or denies. Approval requests appear inline in Teams and Microsoft 365 Copilot. Target GA: September CY2026.

Agent responses in Copilot Chat will look, feel, and behave like Copilot Chat's own: similar formatting, compressed chain of thought, smoother streaming, resume and retry, voice dictation, clickable citations, and tool execution traces. Target GA per the roadmap: September CY2026.

Microsoft positions Fable 5.1 for long-running work, financial analysis, and front-end visual coding, planning more tightly up front and summarizing more concisely at the end. The announcement frames the model as a choice for customers delegating longer, more complex tasks to AI in Copilot Cowork and Copilot Studio.

Copilot Studio agents will render interactive app experiences inline using MCP Apps, an extension of the Model Context Protocol: when an agent calls a UI-enabled tool from a compatible MCP server, experiences such as sortable tables and drilldowns appear in the conversation, with a plain-text fallback elsewhere. Preview target: October CY2026; GA target: November CY2026.

Copilot Studio is evolving toward an app-first agent creation experience: makers will start with the application their agent works with and configure the capabilities it needs, bringing tools and knowledge into one place. Target GA per the roadmap: October CY2026.

Microsoft cancelled this planned feature: for google.com searches from a work profile, Edge would have detected whether organization-specific work results exist and shown a banner linking to them in Microsoft 365 Copilot, extending the existing Bing experience, with admin control via the EdgeWorkSearchBannerEnabled policy. (Status change: in development -> cancelled.)

Microsoft cancelled this planned feature; it is not moving forward at this time. It would have given admins in the Microsoft admin center visibility into oversharing risks and remediation, shown how much sensitive Copilot interaction is protected, and offered a direct switch for Purview DLP for Microsoft 365 Copilot. Planned clouds: GCC, GCC High, and DoD. (Status change: in development -> cancelled.)

The roadmap entry, updated 31 August 2026, lists this feature as cancelled; the entry does not state when the cancellation was made. The feature would have scoped chat history to the user's current Copilot Chat endpoint with an option to see an 'All chats' view.

A planned update adds Site Skills management to Copilot in SharePoint: skill editing, version control, publishing, restoration, and cross-site duplication, so organizations can govern and reuse skills across SharePoint sites. Target GA per the roadmap: September CY2026.

Excel is developing a Copilot-generated canvas that turns workbook data into an interactive view of key visualizations, metrics, and insights, updating automatically as workbook data changes; users can modify the canvas by chatting with Copilot. Target GA per the roadmap: September CY2026.

Microsoft 365 Organizational Data Service ingests organizational and HR data from multiple HRIS systems through a single unified point, for use across Microsoft Copilot and Microsoft 365 apps. The roadmap description announces availability in GCC High while the entry itself remains listed as in development, with target GA September CY2026.

A new Power Automate action, Generate document from form (Preview), creates documents from a template by mapping data inputs to predefined fields in SharePoint document generation (DocGen) forms; generated documents are stored in SharePoint. It supports scenarios such as contracts, invoices, letters, and reports. Target GA per the roadmap: October CY2026.

Microsoft Viva Insights and Copilot Analytics are coming to GCC High, giving eligible organizations privacy-protected, role-based analytics on Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption, usage, and impact, plus behavioral insights into collaboration patterns. Target GA per the roadmap: September CY2026.

Copilot Chat is coming to chats, channels, calls, and meetings in Microsoft Teams for the GCC, GCC High, and DoD clouds. Target GA per the roadmap: October CY2026.