Ep 639: Microsoft’s surprise AI updates: 5 categories of new AI tools and features

This is the Everyday AI Show, the everyday podcast where we simplify AI and bring its power to your fingertips. Listen daily for practical advice to boost your career, business, and everyday life. No, this isn't a repeat. We're talking about agentic browsers for the third time in a row on Everyday AI. But luckily, Microsoft at their Copilot fall release event unleashed a whole lot more aside from just some new agentic features inside of their Edge browser. So many new AI features that we're actually going to have to break them down by category. That's because Microsoft released dozens of new AI updates from personalization to group chat to vision to, well, you guessed it, new agentic capabilities inside of their Edge browser. So today we're going to be going over Microsoft's kind of surprise AI updates, breaking them down into 5 categories of new AI tools, features, and uses. All right, let's get straight into it. Welcome to Everyday AI. My name is Jordan Wilson, and this is for you. If you're new here, Everyday AI is a daily livestream, podcast, and free daily newsletter helping everyday business leaders like you and me not just keep up with AI because it's a lot, but how we can make sense of it. To grow our companies and to grow our careers. So if that's what you're trying to do, it starts here, the unedited livestream podcast newsletter. But if you want to take it to the next level, go to our website, youreverydayai.com. There, make sure to sign up for the free daily newsletter. We're going to be recapping the highlights from today's show. So maybe you're running on the treadmill and you missed update number 13 or whatever I'm going to be rattling off. Don't worry, it's going to be in the newsletter as well as all of today's AI breaking news. Yeah, you want to be the smartest person in AI in your company, right? Well, Everyday AI, that's your cheat code. So by the end of today's show, you're going to get the too long, didn't read or didn't watch version of Microsoft's announcement because they were long and there was a lot of them. I'm going to— you'll see how Microsoft is safely playing follow the leader with AI. And I don't think that's a bad strategy necessarily. And you'll understand the most impactful new AI features. And most importantly, how to actually use them. So I'm just going to go through the features right now. All right, very quick. And then we're going to break them down and kind of going over these by categories. So we have our core AI companion features. That is the new Miko, Copilot Groups, and Imagine. Then we have memory and personalization. And these, FYI, these are my categories. So if you're, you know, trying to look these categories up, I just put them in these categories. So then we have our memory and personalization updates. That's persistent, long-term memory, past conversations reference and forget controls, and the new Real Talk mode, which I'm kind of looking forward to that one. Then our next category, we have connectivity and integration. So connectors and proactive actions. Then we have Microsoft Edge, the new Copilot mode. Kind of new. Some things are new, some things are technically old and getting repackaged, but a lot of new agentic features in Copilot mode, including Copilot Actions in limited preview. Journeys, and voice-only navigation and tab reasoning. Then we have our Windows 11 integration features, including Hey Copilot wake word, the Copilot Vision, and the new Copilot Home and direct file opening and summarization. All right, that was a lot. And do some of these things sound familiar? Yes. Well, if you read our newsletter every day, you'll know that some of these things have been rolling out over the past few days or a few weeks. sometimes I am lucky enough to get early access, to some of these features, so I always share them when I can. Um, so you may have already heard me talk about these, but, yes, some have been released over the past couple of days, couple of weeks, but some of them are brand new. But if the concepts sound familiar, that's because Microsoft has taken kind of a follow-the-leaders AI approach, which when you think about their positioning, I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing, right? For the most part, Microsoft uses OpenAI's models. They just started recently using Anthropic's Claude models with some of their new agent features that they rolled out about a month ago. Yet they're not really innovating, right? Even though they probably have the most enterprise customers of any company out there, although I do think Google and OpenAI are giving them a run for their money. But I think Microsoft has just safely been kind of copying other popular features in AI modes, which again, I don't think is a bad thing. So things like connectors, some of these agentic browsing features that they just announced this week, long-term memory personalization, vision actions, or agentic actions. So many of these aren't new, right? Which is what Microsoft has actually done a lot, right? They kind of copied some features from Google's Notebook LM. But there are a couple of things we're going to be going over today that I think are actually unique, right? Some of these last couple of, you know, Microsoft events where they announced some of these AI features, a lot of it just seems like replays. But there are 2 or 3 that I'm actually really excited about. So I'll tell you those as we get to them. So now let's get into a little bit more detail on these new features sorted by category. So let's start with probably the one that's grabbing headlines, but just in a cheeky way, not anything that I think will ultimately be useful, at least not for, I think, most serious business professionals. And that is Miko. Yeah, they reincarnated Clippy, the AI version. So Miko is an animated avatar that is enabled when you use Copilot voice mode, and it has real-time expression, shape, and color changes. And there is a built-in Clippy Easter egg. So if you click Miko enough, eventually it reveals itself as Clippy. Yay, fun. And this primarily just appears right now in voice sessions and Learn Live, and the rollout began today in the US, and other markets are to follow. So yeah, the rollouts are going to be different, you know. Unfortunately, I think with Microsoft and Google, just because of the technicality and security and layers, right? Sometimes features really get rolled out in weird or kind of extended periods, right? Where, you know, something with OpenAI and Anthropic, because they don't have entire ecosystems and, you know, they didn't have hundreds of millions of users before their AI products, it's a little easier for them to ship all these things. So some of these Microsoft things, if you're hearing them, you're like, oh, this is great. Well, number one, you're probably going to have to go up the IT ladder to figure out how the heck can we get these enabled? Do I have the right security and permissions depending on what some of these are? But for Miko, that one should be a little easier. But utility-wise, meh. All right, here's one of the ones that is actually unique and that I think could actually get people to start liking and using Microsoft Copilot again, right? Let's be honest, Copilot is usually not anyone's favorite AI chatbot. They were one of the first enterprise players. Yet, I think in terms of user satisfaction, you know, even when I'm out at conferences, it doesn't seem like Copilot's at the top. But maybe some of these features could change that. And Copilot Groups is one that I'm looking at. This is actually truly unique. So there are kind of workarounds to do this in other systems. So like, as an example, in ChatGPT, you can have multiple people working in the same chat. However, if, you know, if it started as employee number 1 who shares it with other employees, and then employee number 2 starts talking, it actually forks it and makes a copy. So it's not truly collaborative. But with Copilot Groups, This is actually really cool. So this is a link-based shared Copilot chat where up to 32 participants can join the same AI session. Y'all, if this is anything like my text messages, I don't know if I would want to be a part of this many Copilot groups, but especially for smaller teams, or if you're not in, you know, if you don't get added to, you know, 200 different, you know, Copilot group chats, This is actually some, I would say, groundbreaking utility, right? I think it was kind of like weird timing. The generative AI boom, you know, happened kind of, you know, mid or mid to late kind of pandemic time, right? Where a lot of companies were still, you know, work from home or, you know, transitioning back to, you know, work in the office. So I think so much of work became siloed because you still have so many remote employees, hybrid employees now that maybe 5 years ago didn't exist. But now, you know, so many people are doing their quote unquote AI work by themselves. So this to me, I'm sure there's, there's technical reasons that my friends at Microsoft will tell me why, but I can't believe that no one has done this yet. So I mean, we'll obviously see how well received it is, but I think that people really want this. So right now Copilot facilitates There's thread summarization, poll, vote tallies, and automatic task splitting. And this is designed for real-time group work within Copilot. So everything from planning, co-writing, brainstorming, etc. And also privacy and memory behavior is adjusted in groups. So yeah, we're going to talk a little bit more, but because there's some new long-term memory features in Copilot, so those are not going to show up in these kind of group chats. So I'm excited about this one. This, I think, is enough for those companies that were on the fence about going all in on Copilot or looking at something like ChatGPT. This alone, just because we haven't seen this yet, which I can't believe we haven't seen this in Google Gemini or ChatGPT, this is a great feature. Next, Imagine. This is essentially a gallery that lets teams share different variants that they've created, export chosen assets, You know, it's a, it's essentially a creative hub that lives inside of Copilot for generating, browsing, liking, and remixing AI images. So again, we've seen this in a lot of other places. Nothing truly special, I wouldn't say. Next, let's go to our memory and personalization category. Finally, yeah, I think a lot of people have been waiting for this in Copilot. Again, I hear this so often. Like, organizations need to do a better job. I'm just going to call a spade a spade, y'all. Organizations need to do a better job of learning development and literally having, uh, Copilot teams within their organization that can answer questions. Because I will say 90% of questions that I hear about Copilot, and I hear a lot because I talk AI every single day, is, oh, I saw this feature in Copilot but I don't have access, or, you know, I'm trying to use this mode in Copilot but I don't have that feature. You know, I want to build my own agents, but we don't have that, right? So yeah, there's so many things that in Copilot just aren't clicking because of the user permissions, access, all of these things. And this is one thing I think people are going to want, but let's see if people can actually get it rolled out. Persistent user-controlled long-term memory. This is what turns, you know, chatbots from, oh, fun. To, oh, this is useful, right? When it can actually remember things. Also, side note, Anthropic did just roll this out for Claude users. So Claude and Copilot were super behind ChatGPT and Gemini in this regard. So this stores users' facts, preferences, and project context across sessions, which, let's be honest, depending on how you use Copilot, this might not be helpful. Right? If you just use it for just your job and nothing else, it will be extremely helpful. If you're a power user of most LLMs like me, not so much. But I do think for Copilot, for the most part, people are primarily using Copilot a little bit more for just work-related purposes because they're like, hey, this is the AI that our, you know, company gives us. So maybe there's less mixing between different be, you know, oh, I'm using this for, you know, this client, this job, this personal project. So maybe there's less mixture or less, fewer lines to cross with Copilot. So this also has a user dashboard to view, edit, and delete shared memories, and also memory updates signal when added. And here we go, you do have the enterprise and tenant governance that applies for Microsoft 365 deployments. All right, next we have the past conversation references and the conversational forget controls. So Copilot can reference prior chats and resume context without repeating earlier details. So this is kind of like similar to in ChatGPT, how you can reference past chats, which is technically different than memory, which is also different than context window, right? Technically 3 different things all kind of play into each other. But this is a version of remembering your chat history, but being able to resume. So kind of like a blending of, if you're familiar with the features inside of ChatGPT, kind of a blending of memory and referencing past chats. But this is actually referencing prior chats and resuming the context without repeating earlier details. So I'll be interested to see how this impacts the traditional context window. I think it might eat through it pretty quickly. But you know, we'll wait and see what actually happens once users start leveraging this feature. Users can also instruct Copilot to forget specific items via conversational commands, which is nice, right? So it's similar to managing memory, but just being like, yo, forget that. I didn't mean to say that. Or, oh, that was private. Don't, you know, I don't want this, you know, to even come up in my own chat later. And you do also have session and privacy controls that govern when past references are used, especially in groups. Like I said, that's not going to follow in. All right, next. This is a nice one, right? So this is similar to ChatGPT rolled out these different kind of personalities. So I would say this is more of a personality that Microsoft is rolling out called Real Talk, something to kind of challenge you. So this is more of a conversational style that you can enable inside of Copilot that respectfully pushes you back. So no more, you're absolutely right, right? Yeah, If you use any large language model, and especially if you look at the chain of thought summaries, you know, you're absolutely right is the most annoying thing. And just large language models in general are so, you know, just they're yes men, you know, they just sycophantic, just always, you know, pumping you up. So this mode is specifically to fight against that. And this is a user-selectable mode. So this isn't on by default. You select this mode and it's intended to reduce sycophantic responses and encourage critical thinking. And it's available as an opt-in conversational setting. So right now it's starting in the US first. All right. Before we get going, we still have a couple more categories, a lot more features. We're going to go through them quick. Don't worry. But first, a quick word from our sponsor. Sponsors. This podcast is supported by Google. Hey folks, Steven Johnson here, co-founder of NotebookLM. As an author, I've always been obsessed with how software could help organize ideas and make connections. So we built NotebookLM as an AI-first tool for anyone trying to make sense of complex information. Upload your documents and NotebookLM instantly becomes your personal expert, uncovering insights and helping you brainstorm. Try it at notebooklm.google.com. All right, speaking of connections, our next group of kind of new features is connectivity and integration. All right, so let's talk about what we have here. Well, connectors in general. Yes, if you follow me on Twitter, I saw this pop up in my Copilot account 2 days ago with no announcement. At all from Microsoft, and I shared about it, and we did put it in our newsletter. And I think it's actually pretty noteworthy that Microsoft is bringing these connectors into OneDrive, Outlook, Gmail, Google Drive, and Google Calendar. And you know what? I probably should have started the show like this, because if you're halfway through and you're trying to find all these things and you're like, wait, right, there's a difference between Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft Copilot. So, so many of these new features, as far as I know, until I get to more of the Windows-based, a lot of them, I believe, are going to be rolling out in Microsoft Copilot. So you might not be getting all of these within your organization. Again, these updates are fresh, so we will be checking back in the next couple of days to see kind of where these rollouts are or aren't headed. But connectors, super, super helpful. I already have this in my Copilot account. And what I like and what I was kind of surprised by, all these companies are playing nice with each other when it comes to connectors because Microsoft has connectors for Google with Gmail, Google Drive, Google Calendar. So I already connected all of my Google accounts in my Copilot account, which is really nice. So this is OAuth-based opt-in. So like you would opt in for just about anything, you sign in once and then Copilot is going to have access to all that, um, and essentially you can dynamically grab that information in your connectors. Obviously they have the Microsoft versions as well— OneDrive, Outlook, etc. So this enables unified natural language query spanning across Microsoft and Google ecosystems, and right now the availability is staged by market and platform per their rollout notes. So Yeah, like I said, I got access to this a couple of days ago, even before there was an announcement. So it was kind of like a pre-rollout, it looks like. And it might still be a couple of weeks until most people see these new connectors inside Copilot Online. All right, next, proactive actions. So this is going to be rolling out in preview and the deep research on the Microsoft 365 side. So Copilot will suggest next steps and timely insights during extended research research sessions, which is really helpful, right? Because sometimes after you do these deep research, it's just like, okay, well, now I'm staring at this giant, you know, hopefully helpful, you know, 10-15 page document. Uh, so these, uh, proactive actions, uh, if they are, uh, helpful, will be, uh, I think, a much needed insight. Because sometimes when you're staring at these like deep research reports, you almost get like, ah, right? Uh, hey, hey, big AI labs, um, I know there's a couple of you listening right now, um, give people an option with deep research, right? Even with prompting, right? You can say, hey, be short, you know, yeah, I need you to research something for 5, 10, 15 minutes. But so often you're just left with this huge wall of text, even when you're trying to prompt around it and just say, hey, give me bullet points, or I only need one page. So I like this proactive actions in Copilot that come up after to hopefully encourage you to take action on all of this hopefully helpful information. So this functions as a proactive assistant. It proposes follow-ups, reading lists, or draft outputs. And this is being released as a preview feature for Microsoft 365 subscribers. All right, here we go. We finally got to Microsoft Edge, agentic browsing. Yay, y'all. I don't, I don't know what happened. I don't know how this week became agentic browser week, right? Technically, Perplexity's Comet became generally available and free to everyone a couple of weeks ago, but then it's been everyone. Okay, so DIA just came out with some new features in their agentic browser, in the DIA browser. Obviously, the big agentic headline of the week was OpenAI releasing their Atlas browser, agentic for everyone, for free. Google actually slid via some release notes that hardly no one saw, slid some new updates to Chrome, some agentic ones, nothing big. But a couple. And then we got a ton of new Microsoft Edge, uh, agentic updates inside of Copilot Mode. So, uh, the UI/UX— let me, let me be honest with Copilot Mode— I'm not a fan. Um, it's like, not because it's not the correct way, just because it's the exact opposite of everyone else. So the way that Copilot Mode is rolling it out is the way that it should. Essentially, if you enable actions and if you enable all of these AI features, you don't always have to enable them on the chat side, right? So you essentially have settings in Copilot mode. So, you know, hey, do you want vision? Do you want these other AI features in Copilot mode? And you can toggle them on yes or no, like actions, right? But you can run the same exact prompt twice. There's no actions button. And sometimes it will take the actions and sometimes it won't. Whereas with other agentic browsers, well, you're going to usually click a button. Like in, like in the new Atlas, you click agent mode inside OpenAI. So not a fan with the, the implementation of some of these more agentic features in Copilot. However, the actual utility I love. So let's talk about some of the newer features. And some of these are a little older. Some of these have been rolled out actually for months. I did get early access to Vision and some of these other agentic features, but they're much wider rollout, and there's some new, new features that were just announced. So let's talk about what we have. So we have agentic browsing tasks that can execute multi-step web actions. So that's booking, you know, unsubscribing from emails, filling out forms, those things. You can also execute actions locally in Edge with user confirmation for sensitive steps. So right now this is in the US first with a limited preview status with staged availability. So it's going to be tiered out. All right, the next one, which this kind of exists but kind of doesn't, and I might like it, we'll see. So this is Journeys. Okay, so this is kind of grouping together automatically. Copilot will automatically organize different actions, different chats, different tabs, different sessions that you've taken inside Copilot into these topic-based journeys that you can then resume later. So it's almost like a way you know, if you're using a large language model, you know, using some agent features, using some normal features, just, you know, chats. And then it's going to say, hey, you've been doing a lot of vacation planning, or it seems like you're, you know, you're working on a big internal board presentation. So it's automatically going to put those things together just for easier grouping. But then it also provides a summary, suggested next steps, which is helpful. A lot of times I'm using different modes of like ChatGPT or Gemini for the same project. And in some instances, I'm like, wait, where did I end up in that agent mode? Or where did I end up in that canvas? And I know I had a normal chat going as well. And I had another chat where I was flipping between all these modes. Like, where did I end up? Right? So this is nice that it automatically groups them together. And it also gives you suggested next steps based on that. So So technically, this one seems difficult to implement, especially if you're using Copilot for a ton of very related use cases, because I would venture to say that sometimes it's going to automatically group these things together as journeys that you don't want grouped together. That's the— like, I think about the line of work that I do, and I could see how this could actually be very confusing. So maybe it depends on the complexity and the crossover in the type of work that you do. But if your work is very siloed or if there's not a lot of gray area, the type of work, right, if you're not working across a lot of clients, maybe it's great. Also, this does require opt-in and permissioned access to your browsing history because yes, this also pulls in your browsing history inside of Edge. All right, then here's some of the newer features. So hands-free voice browsing commands. Yes, yeah, this is one of those ones, uh, I might end up doing a demo on this because I think it's, it's pretty cool, right? So I have been playing around, uh, they haven't— it hasn't been out long enough yet, uh, and like I said, these Copilot rollouts sometimes are just so tiered, um, and it's like, oh, I had some of these features, you know, 2 weeks ago, some of these features a month ago, and I'm not sure even if I have all of these features, right? So you do have hands-free browsing, which is really cool. Natural voice commands. So Copilot can reason also across multiple tabs, right? So you can have 5 tabs open. Let's say you're, I don't know, looking, trying to find a new CRM and you have, you know, the 5 sales pages open for 5 different CRMs. You can ask Copilot, say, hey, across all different tabs, you know, which one is going to be best for medical sales, right? And it's going to go through and look at all those tabs. Or you can use the key and just talk to 3 of the 5 tabs. So that's really cool. Also, it's designed to turn Edge into a multi-context research workspace. All right. So next we have our Hey Copilot wake word. All right. So this one, they're going after Siri. Siri. They're going after Alexa, right? All these smart AI assistants that we've had for like a decade that are definitely not smart. So we'll see if Hey Copilot can maybe break into that. You know, we've heard, and oh, we're getting a smart Siri on iPhones for like a year. It hasn't happened. All there's been is lawsuits for them promising that, not delivering it. Amazon Alexa has started to roll out their smarter large language model powered version partnered with Anthropic. But I think like 3 people in the world have it. Not actually 3 people, but I literally don't know anyone. So maybe, maybe we'll see. Maybe Microsoft is going to find a niche here with Hey Copilot if it works well. So what this is, it's an on-device wake word and it triggers Copilot voice user interface when the PC is unlocked. There's also a local buffer or processing until it's wake activation for privacy, and that's an opt-in setting. And this enables hands-free queries across web, across apps when enabled. So being able to work with your different apps, pretty cool, right? Hey, like, hey Copilot, check my Outlook calendar. Hey Copilot, can you change, you know, reorder, you know, the slides in this PowerPoint? So Again, newer feature, not sure of all the use cases and capabilities and limitations, but being able to work locally on your PC and being able to work across apps seems to me like this could be something if it works well. And Copilot has a pretty decent voice mode. I won't say it's as good as OpenAI's because it's actually based on their technology. So OpenAI's is a little better. It's not as good as Google Gemini's live, but it's, it's it's close, right? It's not like, you know, in a different stratosphere than those. So I think this could be a very popular feature. Then Copilot Vision. Love this. And this is technically— I do think Copilot was one of the first big AI labs to bring this out. So— or big tech companies, I guess. They're a big AI lab, right? So this is session permissions that allow Copilot to analyze the visible screen content and give step-by-step guidance. I actually like got access to this one pretty early, like 9 months ago, did a couple demos on our YouTube channel. It's super helpful. And the thing that I really like about this is it's not just what's on your screen, right? So it can technically see the entire web page and understand context on the web page as well. There's also visual indicators that show when Vision is active, and it's not persistent across sessions. I do believe it shows a goldish yellow highlight when you're using Vision mode, and this is used for contextual tasks. So as an example, you know, highlighting UI elements, guided workflows, etc. So if you're trying to learn something on a page, Vision is great. If you're trying to shop for something, compare different products, and you're like, hey, which one's best for my business? Here's what my business is about. There's 50 different products on this page. There's 20 different services, right? So much information. You know, maybe you don't even want to scroll through and read it all. Yes, this is where, you know, having, you know, the built-in Copilot chat and it understands and you can type to it, but it's also pretty cool to just be able to speak with it and for it to visually be able to see, understand, and navigate around. Then last but not least, for our PC people, a dedicated, a new Copilot Home and direct file opening and summarization user experience. So this is a dedicated Copilot home screen to resume recent files, apps, and conversations. So this is essentially, think of it like this, a dynamic dashboard or home screen that brings in all of your most recent Copilot conversations, files, apps, etc., but with AI AI at the core. There's also direct file interaction. You can open and summarize documents from this new Copilot Home interface, which is pretty cool, right? So especially if you're someone that's always going into the same 3 folders or always working, you know, with the same couple of files, right? Maybe you're spending a lot of time in the same PowerPoint or a lot of time in the same, uh, you know, Excel sheets. It's, it's going to be great for people like that. Also, the Pages workspace supports multi-file uploads up to 20 files for unified analysis. That was a lot, y'all. Literally dozens of updates. We boiled down, uh, the most important, I think 13 or 14, for you in 5 different categories. But I thought we were only going to talk agentic browsers today, so it was refreshing to see Microsoft just come out with a bevy of new AI tools and features. So is Microsoft playing it kind of safe here? Absolutely. Do I think that's a bad thing? No, because even though they're coming out with greatest hits, it seems like, of in some cases of what OpenAI and Anthropic and Google have maybe already released, what I've seen from Microsoft is, well, when they do this it usually works pretty well and it's a seamless experience. But there were a couple of things, the new Copilot home screen, Hey Copilot, and the group chat. I think we did get a little sprinkle of innovation that I wasn't necessarily expecting at the Copilot fall release. So I hope this show was helpful. If it was, tell someone about it. Don't be a jerk. Don't keep Everyday AI as your own little secret. If you're listening, on LinkedIn, please repost this. If you're listening on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, please subscribe to the show, like, leave us a rating. I'd appreciate that. We put a ton of time to make sure that you don't get the BS. You don't just get the marketing spin and PR. We tell it to you how it really is. 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