Microsoft adds AI-powered Researcher and Analyst to Microsoft 365 Copilot

Microsoft has introduced two brand-new reasoning agents for work that are integrated into Microsoft 365 Copilot: Researcher and Analyst.

Jared Spataro, Chief Marketing Officer AI at Work at Microsoft, explains how businesses can use the new AI-powered deep research tools in their day-to-day business in a blog post.

Firstly, there’s Researcher, which helps employers to perform complex, multi-step research at work. It combines OpenAI’s deep research model with Microsoft 365 Copilot’s orchestration and deep research capabilities.

Let’s say your boss orders you to develop a detailed marketing strategy. Researcher can help you with that by using existing company data and simultaneously conducting external research to identify new opportunities.

In addition, Researcher can leverage third-party data via connectors to enhance its capabilities and provide comprehensive insights. This means it can integrate data from external sources, such as Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Confluence directly into Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Analyst, which is built on OpenAI’s o3-mini reasoning model, is optimized to do advanced data analysis. Microsoft says Analyst uses “chain-of-thought reasoning” to progress through problems iteratively, taking as many steps as necessary to refine its reasoning and provide a high-quality answer that “mirrors human analytical thinking”.

For example, you can use Analyst to turn data that’s scattered across multiple spreadsheets into a demand forecast for a new product, a visualization of customer purchasing patterns, or a revenue projection. You can even use Python to tackle complex data queries.

Microsoft will roll out Researcher and Analyst to customers with a Microsoft 365 Copilot license in April. It will be a part of Microsoft’s new ‘Frontier’ program, giving customers early access to new Copilot features while they’re still in development.

Microsoft is new to the party when it comes to integrating deep research tools into Copilot. OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and xAI’s Grok all recently deployed deep research tools into their chatbots.