Microsoft 365 Copilot Release Roundup: Q1 2025 

Introduction 

Generative AI is one of the most ‘blink and you’ll miss it’ technologies to hit the business world in years.  

Microsoft 365 Copilot is no exception, with updates and new features popping up thick and fast almost every week.  

If keeping up with all these updates feels like an Olympic sport, don’t worry. We’ve pulled together the highlights for the first quarter of 2025—January to March—so you can skip the scouring and get straight to the good stuff.  

Copilot updates for January 2025 

• Introducing Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat. Remember BizChat? Well, as expected, that name didn’t last too long. The newly christened Copilot Chat is now the official name for Microsoft’s AI-powered chat tool, including both the Work (formerly BizChat) and Web modes. For any commercial customers still using the free chat experience, they can now get a taste of the agentic future with pay-as-you-go agents which are charged by the message. More info on that here.  
• Use AI to schedule meetings in Outlook. Copilot in Outlook (both Windows and web) can now book appointments for you. Just click into the Copilot chat view from your Outlook browser or web view and Copilot will review your calendar and suggest the best time slots, then actually set up the meeting. It feels like having a virtual assistant who lives in your calendar. 
• Word drafts now begin with example prompts. Stuck staring at a blank page? Copilot in Word now offers one-click example prompts to kickstart your writing. Instead of staring at a blinking cursor, you get suggestions like “Write an executive summary” or “Outline key points”, so even if you’ve got writer’s block, Copilot will give you a nudge in the right direction. 

Copilot updates for February 2025 

• Excel gets Python-powered analysis. Copilot in Excel now speaks Python fluently (on Windows). It’s one of the most powerful and flexible computer languages on the planet, but you don’t have to be a coder to use it. Just ask Copilot to explore your data, and it will run Python analysis under the hood. It can spot trends, generate charts or do advanced number-crunching that would normally require you to hire a data scientist. Definitely worth a try if you haven’t dabbled before. 
• Instant meeting recaps and voice ID in Teams. Teams Premium users get a double win this month. Copilot now generates meeting recaps even for quick, unplanned meetings—breaking them down by speaker and topic, and automatically creating notes, tasks, and action items. On top of that, Copilot can now recognize who’s speaking in any meeting and label transcripts by voice. In practice, this means AI notes and task lists name-drop the right people—so no more “Team Member 1 did this”—which keeps everyone accountable. 
• Pull rich context from the cloud in Microsoft Word. Copilot in Word gets even smarter this month with the ability to pull information from the Microsoft Cloud and use it as the basis of a new draft. For example, you could tell Copilot to create a new document based on “/[email name]” and to include any additional information found it “/[meeting name]” and use the formatting styles in “/[document name]”. Very cool and potentially a big time-saver.  

Copilot updates for March 2025 

• Prompt suggestions for Copilot Chat. Copilot Chat now helps you start conversations with AI-generated prompts based on your context (i.e. your secure business data and the interactions you’ve had in the past). Think of it as a copilot… for Copilot. It gives you a nudge with relevant question ideas so you can get down to business faster. 
• PowerPoint speaker notes in a flash. Is there anything quite as tedious as typing speaker notes one slide at a time? Good news: Copilot can now automatically add draft notes to every slide in your deck with a single command. It’s as simple as popping out Copilot in PowerPoint and typing “Add speaker notes to all slides”.  
• Share winning prompts instantly in Teams. Did you know that you can hover over any prompt you’ve sent to Copilot Chat and click “Save prompt?” Doing so will add it to the ‘Your prompts’ section of Copilot Prompt Gallery. Once there, you can view your prompts and select the ‘share’ button to share it instantly to your teams in Microsoft Teams. It’s an easy way to build a prompt library for your whole team to share.  

That’s all of the biggest and best for Q1, but you can see every single update yourself on Microsoft’s site here.  

We’ll be back next quarter with the latest and greatest, but in meantime, if you have a question about Microsoft 365 Copilot or getting started with generative AI, just ask your Get Support Customer Success Manager or call the team on 01865 594000.