In this month’s newsletter, I'm sharing a comprehensive overview of a number of key announcements from the recent Microsoft Ignite 2025 conference including Copilot for Microsoft 365 updates, Work IQ, and Agent 365. I'll also give a brief round-up of other Microsoft Teams feature updates recently released to general availability, and information on the retirement of Microsoft Publisher in October 2026.
Work IQ - the intelligence layer that enables Microsoft 365 Copilot to know you, your job, and your company inside and out
Work IQ is one of the three components of Microsoft’s unified intelligence layer announced at Ignite, alongside Fabric IQ and Foundry IQ.
Work IQ connects to organisational and personal data such as files, emails, meetings and more while building memory from your preferences, habits, and workflows. Work IQ uses inference to combine data and memory to make more valuable connections and provide deeper insights. Work IQ is built into the M365 apps – Word, Excel, PowerPoint, as well as Teams and Outlook.
Enhancements to Work IQ announced at Ignite 2025 include:
- Conversational memory in Microsoft 365 Copilot will allow Copilot to retain context and specific details across sessions. By combining explicit signals, such as work profile, custom instructions, and saved preferences, with insights from previous chats and contextual awareness based on Work IQ, Copilot will offer more relevant, personalised, and useful responses. Users will have full control over their data and conversational memories can be reviewed, updated, or deleted at any time. This is available via the Frontier programme.
- Reasoning over structured metadata in SharePoint document libraries, now generally available, enables more accurate, context-aware, and precise answers when a prompt is grounded in SharePoint content. Populating SharePoint document libraries with metadata can be done manually or automatically with Knowledge Agent. In addition to the new metadata understanding, Copilot is also able to reason over images embedded in PowerPoint decks, SharePoint intranet site page content and files encrypted with sensitivity labels.
Agent 365 -the control plane for agents, enables you to manage and secure agents with confidence
Available via the Frontier programme, Agent 365 will help organisations securely deploy, organise, and govern their agents, whether they are created using Copilot Studio, Microsoft Foundry, open source, or third-party Microsoft agent partners.
The five key Agent 365 capabilities announced at Ignite 2025 were:
- Agent registry to give you a single source of truth for all the agents in your organisation.
- Access control - authentication and authorisation using Agent ID to manage agents and limit their access to only the resources required to perform specific tasks.
- Visualisation - a unified dashboard and advanced analytics to see connections between agents, people, and data, and monitor agent behaviour and performance in real time.
- Interoperability to equip agents with apps and data to simplify human-agent workflows.
- Security to help protect agents from threats and vulnerabilities and detect, investigate, and remediate attacks that target agents.
Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint agents: A new Copilot experience for content creation
Available via the Frontier programme, the new Word, Excel, and PowerPoint Agents allow you to create high-quality documents, spreadsheets, and presentations in Copilot chat.
These agents assist with creating documents, workbooks, and presentations by using web and enterprise grounding. Each agent supports multi-turn chat, enabling users to refine content through an interactive back-and-forth conversation.
If your organisation is part of the Frontier programme and has enabled Anthropic usage in your tenant, users will be able to access Word, Excel, and PowerPoint agents via the navigation pane in the M365 Copilot app or within the Tools menu in Copilot chat across Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.
- Word agent: Assists with research, formatting, layout, and content refinement for documents such as strategic plans, policy documents, and technical papers.
- Excel agent: Supports data analysis, formula generation, trend identification, and summarisation of insights.
- PowerPoint agent: Helps generate presentations from outlines or documents, suggests layouts, and refines visual storytelling.
Accessing the new Agents for M365 apps: The feature will be ON by default for tenants with Copilot access, Frontier enabled, and for tenants who have opted into Anthropic usage. If Anthropic usage has not been enabled, the agents will not appear in the user experience.
Note: The new agents for M365 apps require Anthropic AI model usage to be enabled. Anthropic’s AI models can help people in your organisation with the following:
-Summarise complex information
-Answer questions using source material
-Synthesise across multiple sources
-Idea generation, drafting and editing
These models are hosted by Anthropic outside of Microsoft. This data is processed outside all Microsoft‑managed environments and audit controls, therefore Microsoft’s customer agreements, including the Microsoft Product Terms and Data Processing Addendum do not apply. It is expected that these agents will in the future use the Anthropic models in Azure AI.
On December 8, Microsoft announced that starting January 7, 2026, Anthropic models will be enabled by default in many Microsoft 365 Copilot experiences under Microsoft’s Product Terms and Data Protection Addendum. Admins can toggle this setting, with default off in EU/EFTA, and the UK. Anthropic is now a Microsoft subprocessor, ensuring contractual and data protection compliance. We believe that it's still Anthropic processing the data rather than being handled in Azure. We hope to have further detail on this in the coming weeks.
Voice in the Microsoft 365 app and beyond
In last month’s Keeping PACE with M365 newsletter, we provided an overview of Voice, real-time chat in the Microsoft 365 Copilot app. We have now had more detail from Microsoft on voice chat coming to the Copilot input box in the M365 apps, starting with Word and PowerPoint.
Also announced – Microsoft are bringing voice to Outlook mobile. Users will be able to tap “Voice catch up” to launch an interactive voice experience that summarises unread emails and guides you through actions like drafting replies, deleting, archiving, and flagging, all hands-free. Early access is available for iOS and Android users via Apple’s TestFlight programme and Google Play’s Beta testing program.
Microsoft also provided an update on access to ‘Hey Copilot’ – which we also covered in last month’s newsletter. The "Hey Copilot" voice chat wake word in Microsoft 365 Copilot on Windows devices lets you start a hands-free, voice conversation with Copilot by simply saying "Hey Copilot”.
Update: This feature will now be first made available to users enrolled into the Frontier programme.
What’s new in Microsoft Teams
Away from Ignite, we’d like to round up some of the other new Microsoft Teams features that have become generally available in November 2025.
New collaborative spaces in chats and channels
New persistent collaborative spaces are now available directly from Teams chat and channels, helping you organise key information, co-create content, and reduce message clutter.
- Pages in channels are flexible collaboration pages. You can add as many pages as you need to your channels. You can also add existing Loop components or pages as their own tabs, making it easy to centralise work and keep everyone aligned.
- Notes in chat is available in 1:1 and group chats and is accessible only to the chat members. Use this editable collaborative space effectively by adding images, formatting text, sharing Loop components, and @mentioning chat members when you require their attention .
Emojis in section names
You can now choose an emoji to accompany custom section names in your chats and channels list, helping you organise content with a splash of personality. Whether it’s a smiley for your “Fun Projects” section or a star for “Priority Tasks,” emojis make navigation easier and more engaging, so your sections stand out at a glance.
Audio-only recording for meetings and calls
Microsoft Teams will introduce audio-only recording for meetings and calls starting early allowing users to record just audio while keeping cameras on.
With this new functionality, users can now keep their cameras on during meetings while opting to record only the audio, offering a more privacy-conscious, comfortable, and convenient meeting recording experience when required.
By default, recordings will continue to capture video and audio. Users can now choose the new Audio-only option from the recording drop-down menu.
And finally….
Microsoft Publisher will no longer be supported after October 13, 2026. Users can continue to use it with its current functionality until then. Support for the perpetual version of Publisher will end in October 2026.
After that time, it will no longer be included in Microsoft 365 and existing on-premises suites will no longer be supported. Until then, support for Publisher will continue and users can expect the same experience as today.
Microsoft have stated they are ‘exploring ways to achieve other common Publisher scenarios across applications like Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Designer.’ Watch this space for further updates on this.
