Imagine having an on-call research assistant that can analyze mountains of work and web data to give you insightful expertise in minutes, whether you’re preparing for a big meeting, brainstorming new product ideas or creating a strategic report.
That’s what Researcher, a new AI agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot, is designed to do. You tell it what you need, and it uses deep reasoning capabilities to securely gather and analyze your emails, meeting notes and work documents, plus external information like news articles and industry blogs, to quickly produce a comprehensive report that would have taken you hours or even weeks.
Researcher is one of several AI agents, or tools for automated tasks, available in Copilot Chat for users with Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses. While Copilot Chat and Researcher have access to the same work and web-based information, their difference lies in how they reason over it. Copilot Chat is great for quick, concise answers, while Researcher is built for multi-step analysis based on large quantities of disparate data.
Researcher can gather extensive information, do deep analysis and ask clarifying questions to understand your request and contextualize answers. Its complex reasoning means answers may take minutes instead of seconds.
You can now choose which model it uses and see its “chain of thought,” or reasoning steps for reaching conclusions, to help you verify its responses and understand the breadth and depth of its research. It uses data to better understand your question and synthesize it into a comprehensive report. And it uses only the data you’re allowed to access, staying in line with your organization’s security and privacy policies.
Here are six unexpected ways Researcher can save time and resources and help you shine at work.