Microsoft 365 Copilot January 2026 Updates | 27 New Features You Must Know

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What's New · · by Susanth Sutheesh · 5 min read

As we kick off 2026, M365 Copilot is rolling out over 27 new updates designed to make your work smarter, faster, and more efficient. These changes are already available or on their way, covering everything from better integrations to more powerful automation.

A special shout-out to Shelly Blackley, whose hard work and persistence are the driving forces behind the creation of this monthly update series.

1. Writing Coaching in Copilot in Word

The Copilot context menu now includes an option for getting AI-generated coaching. Copilot reviews your writing and offers suggestions for high-impact areas such as logical structure, flow, and tone.

📖 Copilot in Word documentation

2. Recent Prompts in Draft with Copilot in Word

Based on what you’re typing into ‘Draft with Copilot’, Copilot in Word now shows your most recent prompts, which you can use as-is or modify.

3. Generate Office Documents from Agents

With Agent Builder inside Microsoft 365 Copilot, you can now empower your agent to use Office skills like generating PowerPoint decks, Excel spreadsheets, and Word documents by chatting with the agent. In the configure tab, toggle on ‘Create documents, charts and code’.

📖 Agent Builder documentation

4. Model Selector in Microsoft 365 Copilot

The Model Selector gives users more control over reasoning depth, enabling automatic reasoning for simple tasks and explicit control when desired. The three modes supported as part of GPT-5 are:

ModeBehaviour
Auto (default)System decides how long to think
Quick responseAnswers right away
Think deeperThinks longer for better answers

5. Updated Navigation Pane

The Copilot Chat navigation pane has been refreshed to simplify the agents list and increase visible chat history beyond your five most recent chats, with a more prominent chat history search.

6. Precise Text Selection in Word

Writing a prompt to draft content based on your selection no longer expands your selection to the entire paragraph, table, or list. You can now prompt based on a single sentence or item.

7. Continue Editing in Outlook from Copilot Chat

When Copilot detects you’re trying to write an email, you’ll see an “Edit in Outlook” button. This opens a draft in Outlook with the subject, message, and recipients filled in, so you can review and send with ease.

8. PowerPoint Grounded on Copilot Pages

You can now create a PowerPoint that is grounded on content in a Copilot Page.

📖 Copilot Pages documentation

9. Video Creation Updates

Quickly generate videos from a prompt, PowerPoint, PDF, or Word document with Create in the Microsoft 365 Copilot app — now with transcript-based editing, custom media from OneDrive, natural voiceovers, brand colour integration, and a redesigned scene structure.

📖 Copilot video creation guide

Find meetings and everything connected to them in seconds. Just type what comes to mind — like “last week’s design review” or “budget sync with marketing” — and Copilot finds the event, attendees, shared files, and follow-ups.

11. Library in the Microsoft 365 Copilot App

Library is a central, visual-first space where you can easily access your Copilot-generated content like images and pages, as well as content shared with you.

12. GPT-5 in Agent Builder

When creating agents using Copilot Studio Lite (Agent Builder inside Microsoft 365 Copilot), it now uses GPT-5. Your agents will be better at reasoning through complex questions, staying on track in longer conversations, and understanding context.

13. Sharing Copilot Notebooks

You can now share a Copilot Notebook with others. All references, instructions, and context in the shared notebook will be accessible to collaborators, while your chats remain private.

14. SharePoint: Sections with Copilot

Sections with Copilot is a new SharePoint authoring tool that allows you to use a prompt to create sections in a SharePoint page. It looks at your page context to offer prompt suggestions.

📖 SharePoint Sections with AI

15. Copilot Dashboard: Updated Meeting Metrics

Copilot Dashboard users can now view metrics reflecting both summarised and recapped meeting activity, offering a more complete view of Copilot’s impact in Teams.

📖 Copilot Dashboard documentation

16. Copilot Dashboard: Chat Adoption Metrics

Insights on M365 Copilot Chat adoption for users not licensed for M365 Copilot are now available in the Copilot Dashboard, including usage trends, adoption by group, and retention.

17. Teams Channels in Context IQ

You can now search for and select Teams Channels in the Context IQ menu to help ground your prompts when using Copilot Chat.

18. Agent Mode in Excel

Instead of just getting responses in the side-panel, Agent Mode lets Copilot make changes directly to your workbook. It uses Excel’s most powerful tools — tables, charts, PivotTables, and formulas.

📖 Agent Mode in Excel

19. New Copilot Chat Entry Point

The Copilot Chat entry point button is moving from the app ribbon to the app canvas in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint to improve discoverability.

20. Search Past Copilot Conversations

You can now retrieve historical Copilot interactions — including chats from notebooks, agents, and main chat — directly in Copilot Search. A new filter called ‘Copilot Chats’ lets you scope specifically to Copilot-generated content.

21. Dynamic Search Filters

When you select a data source (Outlook, SharePoint, Jira, Copilot Chats), the interface dynamically presents tailored filters specific to that source.

22. Customise AI-Generated Meeting Notes

Choose from built-in options like Speaker Summary or Executive Report, or create and save your own custom templates with a simple prompt.

23. Voice Support in Word & PowerPoint

Copilot in Word and PowerPoint now supports voice. Talk and interact verbally to brainstorm ideas, create content, and analyse information.

24. File Preview on Android

When opening Office files in the Microsoft 365 Copilot app on Android, you see a preview experience where you can use Copilot Chat to ask questions about the file.

25. Video Recap in Copilot Chat

Video recaps identify and extract key topics from transcripts, provide AI-generated narration, and pair these with 20–40 second video snippets highlighting impactful moments.

26. Session Persistence

Conversations are now preserved even when you navigate away. An entry is immediately created in the session history as soon as a prompt is submitted.

27. Rich Bing Web Answer Cards

M365 Copilot now shows rich and interactive Bing web answer cards like Weather, Stocks, etc. to relevant queries.

28. Memory and Personalisation Updates

Copilot now uses chat history to provide more relevant, contextual responses. Updated settings make it easier to view and manage what Copilot remembers.

📖 Copilot memory and personalisation

29. Loop Notebooks in Context IQ

When grounding your prompts in Copilot Chat, you can now use ContextIQ to scope to your Loop Notebooks content in the Files tab.

📚 Official Microsoft Resources

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Originally published on LinkedIn. This article accompanies a video tutorial on the A Guide to Cloud & AI YouTube channel.

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