Microsoft 365 Copilot: 7 Features to Try

Key insights

• Voice Chat: Try speaking to Copilot for quick answers and follow-ups instead of typing.
  Voice chat keeps context across turns, so follow-up questions stay connected to prior replies.
• Chat-based scheduling & drafting: Schedule meetings and draft emails directly from Copilot Chat with simple commands.
  Copilot can pull context from open emails or highlighted text so you don’t need to copy and paste.
• Outlook Copilot button & Pages Shortcuts: Use the new Copilot button in Outlook for one-click summaries, replies, and meeting prep.
  Try Copilot Pages Shortcuts to jump to common tasks faster inside apps.
• New OpenAI models: Microsoft added updated models that improve accuracy and handle longer context.
  Expect clearer summaries, better drafting, and more reliable reasoning across apps.
• Copilot Notebooks (Premium): Notebooks got major updates but require Copilot Premium for advanced features.
  Use them for step-by-step workflows, iterative editing, and richer content organization.
• Agent mode, grounding, and admin tools: Copilot now runs multi-step agents that call other agents, and it can ground answers on SharePoint sites, lists, or emails for accuracy.
  Admins also get dashboards, readiness reports, and adaptive card refresh for real-time content and rollout tracking.

Video at a glance

Mike Tholfsen’s recent YouTube walk-through presents seven new capabilities in Microsoft 365 Copilot that rolled out in early 2026 and shows step-by-step examples of each feature. The video focuses on practical scenarios, including voice chat, meeting scheduling from chat, drafting emails, new model updates, and workspace additions like Copilot Notebook and Copilot Pages. Accordingly, the presentation aims to show when each tool is useful and how it integrates across Outlook, Word, PowerPoint, Teams, and OneDrive. As a result, viewers get a clear sense of real-world workflows rather than abstract feature lists.

Overall, the video is positioned as a personal project by Tholfsen and reflects his judgments about utility and best practice. Therefore, the coverage is practical and example-driven, though viewers should treat recommendations as guidance rather than official policy. Still, the clear demos make it easy to evaluate tradeoffs such as productivity gains versus governance or cost. Consequently, the clips help teams decide which features to pilot next.

Enhanced grounding and agent-led editing

One major theme is improved grounding, which allows Copilot to draw context directly from company sources like SharePoint sites and highlighted emails. Tholfsen demonstrates typing a forward slash to pull a SharePoint list into chat, and he shows how Copilot implicitly uses open emails or highlighted text in Outlook to reduce copy-paste friction. This makes responses more precise by anchoring them in organizational data, and it speeds up common tasks such as report summaries and data lookups. However, increased grounding raises questions about data access, permissions, and how to control which sources the assistant may use.

Additionally, the video highlights a new agent mode for Word, PowerPoint, and Excel that supports guided, iterative editing rather than single-shot generation. As illustrated, the agent can propose edits, apply tracked changes, and continue a multi-step workflow while keeping the user in the loop. This agentic shift boosts productivity for collaborative documents, but it also introduces complexity in review processes and version control. Thus, organizations will need to balance automation with clear review rules and audit trails.

Meeting, email, and conversational features

Tholfsen walks through features that directly impact daily communications, such as scheduling meetings from chat and drafting emails within Copilot Chat. He demonstrates how Copilot surfaces suggested times, drafts full messages, and adds context from current threads, which should reduce busywork for calendar and inbox management. Voice chat also gets attention; the feature keeps conversational context and can reference past meeting notes, improving continuity across sessions. Yet, these capabilities depend on accurate context capture, so teams must evaluate privacy settings and the risk of incorrect assumptions in automated drafts.

Moreover, an Outlook Copilot button and inline capabilities aim to make access seamless across workflows, and Tholfsen highlights how the tool can prepare meeting briefs with relevant documents and summaries. This helps users focus on decisions rather than logistics, while also raising governance tradeoffs about who can trigger or view generated insights. Therefore, administrators should consider policies that balance convenience with oversight.

Admin tools, dashboards, and governance

The video also covers administrative features such as Copilot Dashboard insights, readiness reporting in the Microsoft 365 admin center, and chat analytics that track adoption and usage. These reporting tools give IT leaders visibility into who uses Copilot, which apps see the most traffic, and where training may be required, helping measure return on investment. At the same time, collecting these signals requires careful handling of telemetry and compliance requirements, so rollout plans should include privacy reviews. Hence, admin teams must weigh the benefits of observability against employee expectations and regulatory obligations.

Tholfsen highlights that some governance features now come with lower license barriers, and yet others remain gated behind Premium tiers or specific enterprise licenses. This split forces organizations to decide between enabling advanced capabilities immediately and controlling costs through staged rollouts. Consequently, IT leaders should model adoption scenarios and test pilot groups to understand both budget and security implications.

Workplace agents, notebooks, and adaptive updates

Finally, Tholfsen covers agent extensions across OneDrive, Teams, and PowerPoint, plus updates to Copilot Notebook and Copilot Pages shortcuts that support richer, app-specific automation. He shows how agents can call other agents, forming multi-agent workflows that tackle complex tasks like research synthesis and slide assembly. Adaptive Card refresh enables dynamic, real-time content in custom agents, which improves interactive experiences but can complicate debugging and testing. Thus, while these features enable more sophisticated automation, they also demand stronger development and operations practices.

In addition, the video touches on new OpenAI models and AI-driven profile skill inferencing that feed personalization across Microsoft services. These updates promise better contextual responses and smarter recommendations, but they also underscore ongoing challenges with model updates, consistency, and user trust. Therefore, organizations should pilot features, gather user feedback, and refine policies before broad deployment to manage risk and realize benefits.

Conclusion

Mike Tholfsen’s video offers a practical tour of seven notable Copilot updates in 2026, emphasizing real workflows and clear tradeoffs between productivity, cost, and governance. As the tools move toward agentic behavior and deeper grounding, they deliver meaningful time savings but require thoughtful access controls and change management. For teams considering a pilot, the video provides concrete demos and prompts questions about permissions, testing, and rollout strategy. In short, the features are worth trying, but organizations should pair experimentation with governance to capture benefits safely.

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