Designed for professional use, Copilot’s two new agents are capable of analyzing large sets of information while accessing your professional data.
On Tuesday, March 25, 2025, Microsoft announced the arrival of two new reasoning agents in its 365 Copilot assistant. Named Researcher and Analyst respectively, these two tools are designed for professionals. They will have “secure and compliant” access to your data as well as the web and will be able to process dense and complex information.
Researcher: an agent who breaks down his reasoning
Researcher follows the trend of chain-of-thought reasoning language models, now favored by OpenAI since the o series. Microsoft also specifies that it “combines OpenAI’s deep search model with the orchestration and advanced search capabilities of Microsoft 365 Copilot .” Its reasoning is thus divided into three phases:
- Planning: The agent clarifies the user’s needs and defines a general plan.
- Search: he searches for information in successive stages until he no longer learns anything new.
- Synthesis: he groups the results, draws conclusions and writes a structured response.
You can use Researcher to develop a detailed go-to-market strategy based on all your business data and broader competitive data from the web; identify opportunities to launch a new product based on emerging trends and internal data; or create a comprehensive quarterly report for a client, detailing work completed and the latest market analysis, Microsoft says.
This access to company data allows Researcher, according to Microsoft, “to integrate user and organizational context, including information about people, projects, products, and the unique interaction of these entities in the user’s work .” Researcher can also access external sources, in order to use data from your professional tools, such as Salesforce or Confluence.
Analyst: an “experienced data scientist”
Analyst is designed to “think like a seasoned data scientist .” It’s also based on OpenAI technology—o3-mini, in this case—and also uses chain-of-thought reasoning , while being specifically calibrated for processing large sets of raw data.
You can use Analyst to transform raw data spread across multiple spreadsheets into forecasting demand for a new product, visualizing customer buying habits, or projecting revenue, Microsoft says.
Analyst can extract insights from complex, poorly structured, or multi-file data (Excel, CSV, TSV, Power BI, etc.). It can also generate and execute code (Python) to navigate and analyze the data accurately. In the example video presented by Microsoft, Analyst helps a marketing professional analyze a messy file of customer data, automatically generating insights and clear visualizations from a simple natural language query.
Researcher and Analyst in Microsoft 365 Copilot: When will they be available?
Researcher and Analyst will launch globally in April 2025. Personal and Family plan subscribers will be able to use them individually, while Enterprise or Business plan users will have access to them for professional use.
The agents will be integrated into a new program called Frontier that “will give customers early access to new Copilot innovations while they are still in development ,” Microsoft says.
