Microsoft's AI assistant 'Microsoft 365 Copilot' will add inference agents 'Researcher' and 'Analyst', enabling data analysis and literature research based on OpenAI's o3
Microsoft offers
Introducing Researcher and Analyst in Microsoft 365 Copilot | Microsoft 365 Blog
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2025/03/25/introducing-researcher-and-analyst-in-microsoft-365-copilot/
Microsoft's newly announced Researcher is a reasoning agent that helps with multi-step research at work, drawing on a variety of data, web information and more to provide higher quality and more accurate insights than ever before.
To get a better idea of what Researcher can do, check out the video below.
Researcher: A reasoning agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot - YouTube
Ashok Kuppusamy, corporate vice president of Microsoft 365 Copilot, explained that Researcher combines ' Deep research ,' a feature that collects online information based on OpenAI's inference model ' o3 ,' with Microsoft Copilot's automation functions and algorithms to optimize it for work.
Researcher can make inferences based on the context of work data such as emails, meetings, files, and chats used in daily work, as well as a wide range of data on the web.
For example, you could ask them to research areas where their company could expand into the outdoor and adventure market.
Then, like an experienced colleague, Researcher will ask the user questions, understand the task, and create a plan to reach the answer. Researcher also automatically references data stored in cloud services such as Microsoft 365, and makes inferences that integrate the company's product lineup, the contents of recent meetings, and the latest industry information collected from the web.
Researcher took a few minutes to produce detailed answers that were comparable to those obtained by a human researcher. Researcher can pull data from Microsoft cloud services as well as external sources such as Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Confluence via connectors.
'Researcher gives every employee on-demand access to expertise,' Kuppusamy said.
Analyst, announced at the same time as Researcher, is a reasoning agent that functions like a skilled data scientist. It can refine its reasoning using
Below is a video explaining the features of Analyst.
Analyst: A reasoning agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot - YouTube
Analyst is a feature that can get insights from raw data in just minutes, and is built on OpenAI's inference-specialized model, o3-mini .
For example, if you want to identify your most loyal customers, analyzing a huge list of customers and their monthly purchases can be tedious, especially if the list is disorganized, and you usually have to ask for help from a colleague who is knowledgeable in Python or data science.
But with Analyst, even if you're not familiar with Python or data science, you can just upload the files you need, give instructions in natural language, and Analyst will understand the task, reason about how to get to the answer, identify the Python tools needed, and run the analysis automatically.
If you want to know more about the inference process, just click on the item you are interested in and it will show you how the Analyst is progressing with the inference and the Python code it is executing.
Ultimately, Analyst gave me the data I wanted in a visually easy-to-understand format.
'With Analyst, every employee has access to a dedicated data analyst 24/7,' Kuppusamy said.
Researcher and Analyst are expected to be released in April 2025 to Frontier program participants who will have access to new Copilot capabilities as they are developed.
Related Posts:
in Web Service, Video, Posted by log1h_ik