Executive summary
- 2025 has been the year Copilot “grew up”, moving from simple text generation to performing multi-step tasks with deep reasoning.
- Big events of the past year included the rollout of GPT-5 models in September and the arrival of dedicated business agents in October.
- For UK organisations, as we end the year, the focus has moved from asking “what is it?” to deeper questions about how to incorporate AI into core business workflows (and stay competitive).
Introduction
Can you believe it’s only been a year?
Looking back twelve months to January 2025, the world of AI feels almost unrecognisable.
Back then, we were all still getting used to the idea of having a button in Word that could draft an email or a sidebar in Teams that could summarise a meeting. It felt revolutionary at the time, but compared to what we’ve got now, it looks positively quaint.
But 2025 also brought with it a fundamental shift in personality for Microsoft’s AI tool. Copilot stopped being something you had to micro-manage and started becoming something closer to a virtual team-mate.
As we close out the year, we thought it’d be fun to take a look back at the key moments that defined 2025 for Microsoft 365 Copilot – and see just how far we’ve come.
Q1: The “Chatbot” era
The year started with a focus on the basics.
It’s easy to forget that when we rang in the New Year in January, Copilot for Microsoft 365 was still essentially a toddler. It officially launched to business customers in early November 2023, with a wider rollout in January 2024.
So, as we entered 2025, Microsoft was still very much ironing out the kinks. A year isn’t long in big tech.
In the first quarter, we saw improvements to speed and accuracy, and the slow-but-steady integration of Copilot into more of Microsoft’s stable of apps. These were all helpful upgrades, but Copilot definitely still fell firmly into the “chatbot” camp. You asked a question, it gave an answer. If you didn’t ask the right question, you didn’t get the right answer. Pretty straightforward.
We actually covered the major updates from this period in our Microsoft 365 Copilot Release Roundup: Q1 2025, where we looked at how businesses were just starting to find their feet with prompt engineering. Back then, the biggest challenge was just getting staff to remember the button was there.
Today, things are a little different.
Q2: The arrival of the specialists
By the time summer rolled around, things started getting interesting.
Microsoft realised that a “one size fits all” chatbot probably wasn’t enough for really complicated business tasks. So, in June, we saw the arrival of a specialised set of agents – specifically the Researcher and Analyst personas.
This was a big moment. Why? Because, all of a sudden, you weren’t just talking to a generic AI. You were talking to a tool that actually knew how to scrape the web for citations or hunt for anomalies in a spreadsheet. These were the first signs that Copilot was moving away from being a generalist and starting to understand specific job roles.
Q3: Memory and reasoning
The second half of 2025 was a time when Copilot really built out its brainpower.
In late summer, the frustration with Copilot’s “goldfish memory” finally came to an end. The introduction of the long-context model meant the AI could read and remember massive documents without hallucinating (i.e. telling you stuff that wasn’t true).
Then came September, when things took another huge step forward.
OpenAI released its new GPT-5 reasoning models and, as we discussed when GPT-5 arrived in Copilot, this was the moment the AI started to pause and “think” before answering. It meant we could finally trust it with more complicated logic puzzles and even complex financial data without worrying that it’d just make up a number to fill the silence. A reasoning model essentially checks its working, ensuring that it’s abiding by any guardrails you set.
Q4: The shift to autonomy
And that brings us to the last few months.
The roster of agents expanded rapidly in October with the launch of specific tools for certain business departments. We explored these agents on the blog in Microsoft Copilot’s new frontier: Sales, Service, and Finance, looking at how these new agents could handle things like disputes and ledgers autonomously.
But the buzzword for December (and much of the second half of the year) has undoubtedly been “agentic.”
With the launch of Agent Mode and other agentic tools, Copilot stopped waiting for instructions and started actually doing stuff for itself. This is a massive shift, and as we noted here on the blog recently, it raises big questions about how much control we give our computers.
What does 2026 hold?
If 2025 was the year Copilot learned to walk, 2026 is going to be the year it runs.
We expect the agentic trend to explode, with more businesses building their own custom agents to handle specific internal processes. That means the line between “human work” and “AI work” is going to get blurrier and blurrier, and the advantage will go to the companies that can figure out how to manage that mix effectively.
It’s been a wild ride this year, and we’ve loved helping you navigate it. If you want to make sure your business is ready for whatever Microsoft throws at us in January, speak to your Get Support Customer Success Manager or call our friendly team on 01865 594 000.