Microsoft 365 Copilot and Azure AI Foundry Agents

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Microsoft 365 Copilot and Azure AI Foundry Agents

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Microsoft 365 Copilot Cowork is a new AI-powered work execution layer integrated across the Microsoft 365 ecosystem that transforms intent into action across Outlook, Teams, Excel, and other productivity applications. Unlike traditional AI assistants that only generate answers or draft content, Cowork operates as an autonomous agent that plans, coordinates, and completes multi-step work tasks on behalf of users. The system leverages Work IQ signals from across emails, meetings, documents, and communications to understand context and act with the same understanding a professional brings to their job. Cowork handles tasks like calendar triage and rescheduling, meeting preparation by generating briefing documents and decks, and deep company research by gathering earnings reports, SEC filings, analyst commentary, and news with citations. When handing off tasks, Cowork turns requests into executable plans that continue in the background with clear checkpoints for human approval before changes are applied. The system can manage multiple tasks in parallel, each moving forward autonomously while users focus on work that requires human judgment. Microsoft Azure AI Foundry provides the underlying agent development platform with Foundry Agent Service for building and deploying multi-agent workflows at enterprise scale.

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