Microsoft has posted a new event on LinkedIn for September 16 titled “Microsoft 365 Copilot: Wave 2,” and it will be hosted by CEO Satya Nadella and vice president of AI at Work Jared Spataro. According to the short description of the event, it will cover the “next phase of Copilot innovation,” and The Verge’s Tom Warren expects it to focus on business offerings rather than consumer products.
As its title hints, the event will also introduce a rebranding of Copilot to “Microsoft 365 Copilot” — a fairly minor change, but one that likely aims to merge the two products and encourage businesses to see Copilot as an integral part of any Microsoft 365 subscription.
Along with the new name, Warren also expects a host of new Copilot features to be announced for the $30-per-user-per-month Copilot tier. This gives employees access to Copilot in Microsoft 365 apps and in Teams, with priority model access and enhanced data protection — but many businesses are still hesitant about the steep fee. There’s no word on a price drop, so Microsoft may instead be planning to add more and more features until the cost seems more worthwhile.
While the business-focused subscription will be the focus, we could also hear about some new features for the consumer-focused Copilot Pro subscription as well. At the moment, it offers many of the same core features as the $30 tier, but it doesn’t include Teams and it lost its customization feature, Copilot GPT Builder, in June.
The primary purpose of Copilot tools is to take care of jobs like email writing, converting Word documents into PowerPoint presentations, and summarizing meetings. It’s all about making mundane tasks easier to deal with, which means features need to give quick and accurate results to be useful. So, as happy as we are to see new features, they need to be well-polished and ready to use if they’re to make the high subscription fees worth it.
The event kicks off at 8 a.m. PT/11 a.m. ET on September 16 and we’ll bring you all the highlights when it airs.
