Microsoft's July 2026 updates for Copilot bring new AI models, smarter automation, and better admin controls across the Microsoft 365 suite. Here's a quick tour of what's new.
Copilot App: New Models
OpenAI's GPT-5.6 family — Copilot now supports the GPT-5.6 family of models, bringing stronger reasoning for complex, multi-step tasks.
Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 5 — Paired with Work IQ grounding in your real work data, drafting, analyzing, and creating content becomes noticeably easier.
Copilot Cowork
Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 — Delegate complex work with step-by-step supervision, so you stay in control.
Event-triggered tasks — Tired of constantly refreshing your inbox or worrying about missed pings? You can now set up event-driven tasks using natural language to track activity across Teams, Outlook, and more.
Copilot Notebooks
Notebooks now support Markdown (.md), plain text (.txt), and Rich Text Format (.rtf) files as notebook references.
Word
Review workflows — Track and approve edits across an entire document.
Drafting workflows — Insert and update tables of contents, headers, footers, page numbers, dates, and footnotes automatically.
Excel
Brand kit skills — Format workbooks according to your organization's brand kit from the Microsoft 365 Brand Center.
Theme design skill — Ask Copilot to design or publish sheets with consistent design themes and styling.
PowerPoint
Custom user skills — Upload your own custom skills to OneDrive so you don't have to repeat the same instructions every time.
Trusted design reuse — Upload existing presentations or decks as references to reuse designs you already trust.
Teams
Meeting Recap app — All your AI-generated meeting recaps, together in one app.
Catch up on meeting highlights by listening instead of reading through Audio Recap.
SharePoint
Generate documents from forms — Using Power Automate, you can now create documents from templates by mapping form inputs directly to template fields.
More Copilot Connectors
The connector ecosystem keeps growing across industries:
Financial services: Daloopa, FactSet, Fitch Solutions, Morningstar, PitchBook, S&P Global
Professional services: Dice, Forrester, HG Insights
Industrial and manufacturing: Infor Nexus, Sight Machine
Software and technology: Granola
Healthcare and life sciences: Article Galaxy, Nyquist AI
Retail and consumer goods: Passby Pulse, Polar Analytics
Cross-industry: CB Insights, Sprouts.ai
Copilot Chat
Add Word, Excel, and PowerPoint agents directly into Copilot Chat — no more switching between apps.
Microsoft 365 Admin Center
Domain exclusion from web grounding — Exclude up to 1,000 specified domains from Copilot's web grounding results.
DLP for restricting emails — Prevent messages from external senders from being used as grounding data.
Agent 365 Dashboard — Track agent usage and adoption with organization-wide reporting, filtering by group, and identification of top-performing agents.
Copilot Connectors usage report — See how users benefit from connected knowledge, track data sources by value, and optimize your deployment strategy over time.
Copilot Chat usage report for GCC, GCC High, and DoD — Track active users and Copilot Chat usage with detailed breakdowns and user-level details to inform Microsoft 365 licensing decisions.
Cost management updates — Improved spending alerts and a clearer spending policy have been added.
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