Microsoft Copilot is a general-purpose AI assistant and platform that brings large-language-model capabilities into Microsoft 365 apps (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams and more), Windows, and standalone Copilot apps/web experiences. It offers conversational chat that is grounded in the web and a user’s connected data sources, provides rich visual answer cards, and supports uploading files (PDFs, Word, spreadsheets) for direct analysis. Copilot also includes creative features (drafting documents, generating slides, producing summaries), productivity helpers (email triage, calendar planning, data extraction from spreadsheets), and multimodal responses (images, audio/podcasts and visual cards).

A major part of the Copilot ecosystem is Copilot Studio and agent capabilities: organizations and power users can build, configure, and deploy custom agents (workflows) that integrate with Microsoft services, connectors (OneDrive, Gmail, Google Drive, Outlook, Dataverse, Power Platform), and Azure AI. These agents can be published inside Microsoft 365, embedded in external apps, or exposed to customers, and may run in controlled/ auditable workspaces to safely operate on local files and applications. Copilot is positioned for a broad audience — individual consumers seeking a conversational assistant, knowledge workers and business users who want grounded, work-context-aware help, and IT/DevOps teams who build and manage enterprise agents via Copilot Studio and Azure.

Key use cases include rapid document and slide creation, data analysis and formula generation in Excel, email summarization and reply drafting in Outlook, meeting notes and action extraction in Teams, automated task execution through agents (e.g., file organization, PDF data extraction, multi-step workflows), and creating content like short podcasts. The service emphasizes enterprise security, compliance, and admin controls for organizations. While consumer-facing Copilot Chat and some features may be available at no additional charge for eligible Microsoft accounts, advanced Copilot capabilities, Copilot Studio, and tenant-wide Copilot for Microsoft 365 offerings are licensed and/or metered for commercial use.