September 2026 Update: Microsoft Copilot's Evolution Across 12 Key Business Areas

During August 2026, Microsoft Copilot changed significantly.

In this article, we will organize not just the names of the new features, but also how your work will change. By the time you finish reading, you will be able to determine which features to try first and which ones to wait for.

"There are too many updates; I don't know which ones are actually important."

Cowork, Chat, Notebooks, Teams, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, SharePoint, Outlook, OneDrive, Planner. The screens and release dates are all over the place, and it's difficult to choose the features you need just by reading official articles from top to bottom.

The reason I wrote this article is that I don't want it to end as just a news piece listing feature names. Copilot doesn't change work just by being introduced. It becomes a tool you can use only when you know which screen to use and what to delegate.

After reading, try selecting a part of a response in Copilot Chat and asking a question about just that range. This is the easiest way to experience the changes from August.

Conclusion First | The 4 Essences of the August Update

To summarize this update in one sentence: Copilot has moved from an "AI that generates answers" to an "AI that understands the state of work and advances tasks."

The four key changes are:

① You can adjust the AI's thinking process and consumption yourself

In Cowork, you can now choose the depth of reasoning and check your remaining credit balance.

② Instead of recreating answers, you can reuse only the parts you need

Range selection in Chat, sharing by response unit, and regeneration with different models have been added.

③ You can move from confirmation to execution within Office apps

Copilot is stepping beyond "explanation" into "operation," such as email organization in Outlook, change history in Excel, brand control in PowerPoint, and status reporting in Planner.

④ Individual tips can be turned into reusable systems

With personal skills in PowerPoint and SharePoint, the scope for saving and using repeated instructions has expanded.

From here, we will look at them in order of their practical impact.

1 | Cowork: Choose Between "Deep Thinking" and "Saving"

In Cowork, you can now choose the depth of reasoning along with the model selection.

• Light: For simple organization or short drafts
• Medium: The standard for daily operations. Default setting
• High: For comparing multiple conditions or deep analysis
• Extra High: For when you want to proceed with complex reasoning even more carefully
• Max: For the most difficult tasks. Uses a lot of time and credits

Until now, it often seemed like the choice between "fast but shallow" and "thorough but slow" was left up to the model. From now on, you can explicitly choose according to the weight of the task.

Use Medium for daily summaries or text corrections.

Use High or above for organizing points in proposals for executives or research across multiple documents.

This distinction will be the basic approach.

Furthermore, with the "/cost" skill, you can check not only the estimated consumption of the current session but also the monthly credit usage, remaining percentage, and reset date.

Also, the previous "Scheduled" tab has been renamed to Automations. You can manage tasks specified by date and time and tasks triggered by events in the same place.

Instruction to try first

"Is Medium or High more appropriate for this task? Please propose the reasoning for your judgment and a way to proceed that saves credits."

2 | Copilot Chat: Graduating from "Redoing Everything"

The most immediately useful update in Chat is range selection within responses.

From a Copilot response, you can select a single sentence, a paragraph, or just a table, and give additional instructions limited to that part.

For example, from a long draft proposal, you can select just the cost paragraph and ask:

"Shorten just this part to half the length for executives."

Because it doesn't regenerate the entire text, the parts that were already good are less likely to be disrupted.

Sharing has also been improved.

• Share the entire chat: When you want to pass along the flow of consideration and premises
• Share only the response: When you want to pass along only the completed conclusion

The recipient can check the content in read-only mode and continue that conversation as their own chat. This makes it easier to hand over research or drafts to a team without breaking the original conversation.

Other updates in Chat include:

Ask questions about Power BI business data

Analyze Power BI reports and semantic models you have access to using natural language from Chat and Cowork. Public preview was in June, global rollout in August.

Enhanced response cards

Displays weather, sports, finance, images, videos, locations, news, etc., in a card format tailored to the content.

Enhanced "Try Again"

You can re-execute the same prompt with the same model or a different model. You can compare response quality without recreating the conversation.

Create Outlook drafts from mobile

When you convey email requirements in Chat, it creates an Outlook draft in an embedded format. You can open it in Outlook Mobile, edit, and send it.

The important thing here is that Chat has changed from a "place to get the right answer in one shot" to a place to select, fix, compare, and pass on.

3 | Copilot Notebooks and OneNote are Connected

Copilot Notebooks is now split into two ways of use.

Copilot App Side

A lightweight workspace for gathering reference materials, chatting, and quickly creating deliverables.

OneNote Side

A place to dig deeper into projects, increase deliverables, and collaborate as a team.

Since the two are synchronized, you can take research started in the Copilot app and continue it by selecting "Open in OneNote."

Furthermore, based on the content of the Notebook and Work IQ, it suggests Word, Excel, and PowerPoint deliverables that would be good to create next.

For example, after gathering sales strategy materials in a Notebook, an image of a candidate like "Create a sales opportunity matrix in Excel" appears.

On Android, multimodal capture, which captures audio, images, and notes together to create structured notes, was also announced. This is scheduled for rollout in September. The iOS/iPad version of OneNote also has multimodal capture.

The recommended way to use it is to create a Notebook for each project and aggregate meeting notes, proposals, past emails, and analysis tables. It changes from a one-off chat to a way of nurturing the context of a project.

4 | Teams and Word: Reducing "Manual Finishing Work"

Teams | Translate Meeting Summaries into Other Languages Later

Even after generating an intelligent meeting summary, you can change the language via the translate button.

In a meeting with an overseas base, recreate a Japanese summary into English. Conversely, check an English meeting summary in Japanese. It has become easier to create summaries according to the person you are sharing with after the meeting.

Word | Understand Links, Images, and Changes

There are three improvements in Word.

Insert Links

If you ask to "add links to related official pages," it will insert and format text with links within the document.

Understand Images in Reference Documents

It reads not only the text but also the images within reference files and can incorporate related visuals into the document being created.

Highlight Only Changed Words

When rewriting text, it highlights the actually edited words in detail rather than the entire paragraph. It has become easier to check exactly what has changed.

Word's updates are not flashy. However, they are aimed at reducing tasks that take time before submission, such as adding links, re-picking images, and checking revision differences.

5 | PowerPoint: From "Making it Pretty" to "Making it by the Rules"

Among the August updates, I felt PowerPoint was particularly important.

There are six main features added:

① Assign owners and tasks from comments

By asking Copilot, you can add relevant stakeholders to comments for review and assign follow-ups.

② Strict Brand Compliance

Forces the use of only approved templates and slide master layouts. It restricts adding or removing placeholders arbitrarily or creating non-existent layouts.

③ Instructions via Notes

You can write rules in natural language in the slide notes and have them read every time during generation. You don't need to rewrite expressions, structures, or prohibitions for each slide in the prompt every time.

④ Custom Skills

You can upload, create, edit, and delete your own skills. Go to "+" -> "Select Skill" in the Copilot input field, and then to "Manage Skills" from the settings menu.

⑤ Integration of Translation into Copilot

The translation function has moved from the ribbon to the Copilot side. Even if the amount of text changes depending on the language, it dynamically adjusts the text boxes.

⑥ SmartArt Editing while Maintaining Brand

Edit shapes and diagrams on the canvas. However, as of August, this is provided in Frontier.

What you should set first in PowerPoint is not a fancy prompt.

1. Register the correct template
2. Decide whether to use strict brand compliance
3. Write slide-level instructions in the notes
4. Turn repeated instructions into skills

This is the order.

The more you increase Copilot's freedom, the more the visual consistency fluctuates. Use strict mode for external materials, formal proposals, and materials for regulated industries. Use flexible mode for brainstorming and rough drafts. This distinction is practical.

6 | Excel: Track "Who Changed What" via Conversation

Change History Skill and Chat History have been added to Excel.

With the Change History skill, you can check things like:

• Which sheets changed recently
• Who changed cells or formulas
• What humans and AI edited respectively
• Whether specific changes can be undone
• Whether broken formulas can be returned to a previous state

In Microsoft support information, the underlying history can also be checked from "Review" -> "Show Changes" in Excel. Copilot's role is to search that history through conversation and explain the key points.

For Chat History, open past conversations from the menu at the top left of the Copilot pane. Even if you interrupt your work, you can resume from where you left off last time.

It's useful in shared workbooks, but it's dangerous to undo AI suggestions unconditionally. Please check the target cells, affected formulas, and the intentions of co-editors before executing.

7 | SharePoint, Outlook, OneDrive, Planner also Move to "Operations"

SharePoint | Use Personal Skills Across Sites

Personal skills created in SharePoint are saved as Markdown files to OneDrive. You can use the same skill across SharePoint sites and OneDrive without recreating it for each site.

August is Public Preview, and global rollout is scheduled for December.

Outlook | Manage Emails and Schedules with Natural Language

You can now call custom engine agents from within Outlook.

Furthermore, from Copilot Chat, you can proceed with moving emails, categorizing, creating folders, managing inbox rules, and responding to meetings and schedules using natural language.

For example, you can organize things like:

"Move unread emails for Project XX to the 'Action Required' category and move them to the dedicated folder."

However, Copilot in Outlook primarily targets the user's primary mailbox. There are scenarios where it cannot be used in archives, groups, shared/delegate mailboxes, or mailboxes other than Exchange Online.

OneDrive | From Files to Finished Products via Chat

Copilot in OneDrive has been expanded toward creating, saving, and sharing deliverables such as dashboards and presentations, in addition to file search, analysis, and summarization.

August is Public Preview, and global rollout is scheduled for December.

Planner | Create Status Reports from Plan Data

Planner Agent can create reports for stakeholders summarizing progress, risks, overall status, and next actions. You can specify the target audience, tone, length, and chapters.

This feature is in Frontier as of August.

Features to create Planner tasks from Copilot or ask questions about task information are scheduled for rollout in September.

8 | Expansion of Business Data Connection Destinations

New connectors and plugins have also been added.

• Finance: Mercury, Xero
• Legal: iManage Work, Boardwise, Harvey, Descrybe Legal Engine, Relativity, Everlaw
• Professional/Business Information: Statista, Crossbeam, ZoomInfo, IDC
• Energy: S&P Global Energy
• Healthcare/Life Sciences: Scite, Consensus
• Software: Adobe Journey Optimizer, GoDaddy, Asana

The value is not just that "connection destinations have increased."

It opens up the possibility for Copilot to create responses closer to business operations based on professional or business data contracted by the organization, rather than just answering with general web information.

However, being able to connect is different from everyone being able to see the data. Original data permissions, contracts, and administrator settings remain important.

9 | Administrator Updates Continue into September

In the Copilot Dashboard and Agent 365 Dashboard, it will be possible to export row-level metrics and attributes that do not identify individuals to create original reports. This is scheduled for rollout in September.

In the Consumption Dashboard, you can analyze AI credit usage for GitHub Copilot. You can compare spending and budget to judge the introduction status and credit allocation. This feature itself was rolled out in July.

Not just new features for users, but the management side is also moving to a stage of looking at "how it's being used and where credits are being spent" rather than just the "number of people it was distributed to."

Organizing to Avoid Misunderstanding Availability

This official article includes not only features already provided in August but also previews and future plans.

Rolled out in August

Cowork reasoning levels/cost/Automations, Chat range selection/sharing/Power BI integration/response cards/regeneration/mobile email, Notebooks and OneNote integration, Teams summary translation, Word updates, PowerPoint main features, Excel history, Outlook enhancements.

Public Preview in August

SharePoint personal skills, creating deliverables from OneDrive files. Global rollout scheduled for December.

Frontier in August

PowerPoint SmartArt editing, Planner status reporting.

Scheduled for September

Android Notebooks multimodal capture, Planner task operations from Copilot, management dashboard data output.

Rolled out in July

GitHub Copilot AI credit support in Consumption Dashboard.

Even in official articles, it is clearly stated that dates are provisional and subject to change. If you don't see a button, don't assume it's a malfunction; check the license, administrator settings, region, web/desktop version, phased rollout, and whether it's a Frontier target.

I Would Try These 5 First

You don't need to follow everything at once.

1. Select just one paragraph from a Chat response and rewrite it shorter

Select the paragraph you want to rewrite and enter the following:

1"Rewrite only the selected part into a text that the manager can judge in 30 seconds.
2
3- Write the conclusion first
4- Do not change important numbers and proper nouns
5- Order it as Conclusion, Reason, Next Action
6- Within 150 characters
7- Do not change the parts that are not selected."

2. Compare the same research with Cowork's Medium and High

Execute the following prompt in Medium and High respectively:

1"Analyze the attached [proposal/research material] and judge whether [service/measure] should be introduced.
2
3Organize it in the following order:
4
5Conclusion
6Effects to be obtained by introduction
7Assumed risks
8Information missing in the material
9Opposing opinions
10Questions to check before introduction
11Next actions to take
12
13If you have inferred content not written in the material, please separate facts and inferences."

Even with the same instructions, Medium tends to prioritize speed, while High tends to prioritize the depth of points and lack of oversights, so check the difference in responses.

3. Turn one repeated instruction in PowerPoint into a skill

1"When creating or editing this presentation, always apply the following rules:
2
3- One message per slide
4- Make the conclusion understandable from the slide title alone
5- Titles within 30 characters
6- Body text maximum 5 items
7- Emphasize important numbers largely
8- Express through diagrams or comparisons as much as possible, not sentences
9- Do not change company-specified templates, fonts, or color schemes
10- Do not confuse facts, inferences, and proposals
11- Do not add numbers whose basis cannot be confirmed
12- Finally, check for typos, numerical values, and layout collapses."

If you use this every time, save this content as a custom skill.

4. Ask in Excel, "Who changed the formula last week?"

1"Check the changes made to this workbook in the past 7 days.
2
3In particular, organize the following content:
4
5- Cells where formulas were changed
6- Person who changed them
7- Date and time of change
8- Formulas before and after the change
9- Cells that may be affected by the change
10- Parts changed by Copilot
11
12Please list them starting from the most important changes. For content that cannot be confirmed from the change history, please display 'Cannot confirm'. Do not execute the operation to undo formulas until I have confirmed it."

5. Delegate just one operation for email organization in Outlook

1"From emails received in the past 7 days, extract emails that contain '[Project Name]' in the subject or body and have not yet been replied to.
2
3Please list the sender, subject, received date and time, and the reason you judged a reply is necessary.
4
5First, display only the candidates, and do not execute moving emails, categorizing, or marking as read. Apply the 'Action Required' category only to the emails I have confirmed."

It's safer to delegate only one operation after confirming the targets, rather than automatically processing a large number of emails from the start.

Summary

The August 2026 updates are not just a collection of new features.

What they all have in common is that Copilot has begun to change from an "AI that answers" to an "AI that moves work forward."

Select and fix only the necessary parts.

Inherit past context.

Actually operate Word, Excel, and Outlook.

Reuse repeated instructions as skills.

Manage even usage status and costs.

Copilot is not a tool that completes everything with a single instruction.

It is becoming an existence that advances work together with people while connecting work rules, permissions, past interactions, deliverables, and next tasks.

You don't need to use all the new features from the start.

First, try selecting just one paragraph from a Copilot Chat response and asking:

"Fix just this part into a text that my boss can judge in 30 seconds."

Improve only the necessary parts without recreating the entire response.

From this small way of using it, you can experience the essence of the August 2026 update.

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