Microsoft has announced two groundbreaking AI reasoning agents for its Microsoft 365 Copilot platform: Researcher and Analyst. These new tools combine secure access to an organization's data with advanced web search and analysis capabilities to deliver on-demand assistance in data analysis and general research tasks.

Researcher: Your AI Research Assistant

Researcher integrates OpenAI's deep research model with Microsoft 365 Copilot's orchestration and search capabilities to perform complex, multi-step research workflows. Researcher is highly reminiscent of the new AI-powered research agents being released as part of the recent trend of betting heavily on AI 'agents' as the natural next step towards artificial general intelligence and shares many of their use cases. Some suggested use cases for the Researcher agent include:

  • Building detailed go-to-market strategies informed by internal context and competitive data
  • Identifying whitespace opportunities based on emerging trends and internal data
  • Creating comprehensive quarterly reports that integrate work progress with market analysis

In addition to securely connecting to local data, Researcher also features third-party connectors that allow it to pull data from external sources like Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Confluence. The agent can also connect to other Microsoft agents, such as Sales Chat, to provide more holistic insights.

Analyst: Your AI Data Scientist

Analyst is designed to help turn raw data into actionable insights within minutes. Powered by OpenAI's o3-mini reasoning model, Analyst employs chain-of-thought reasoning to tackle complex data problems iteratively, providing high-quality answers. The Analyst agent can run Python code to process complex data queries, with users able to view the code execution in real-time and verify its work. Applications include:

  • Converting scattered spreadsheet data into demand forecasts
  • Creating visualizations of customer purchasing patterns
  • Generating revenue projections

Both Researcher and Analyst will begin rolling out in April to customers with Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses through a new program called "Frontier", which will provide early access to these agents and other upcoming Copilot features while they are still in development

New deep research and agent workflows for personalized Copilot agents

Microsoft also shared that it has expanded its Copilot Studio platform with deep reasoning and agent flow capabilities. These tools enable organizations to build custom agents that can handle complex business processes and automate tasks. Additionally, Microsoft also announced the general availability of a different set of capabilities that let organizations build autonomous agents that can act independently, initiate events, and automate complex business tasks.