Microsoft announced a redesigned "Copilot" on Friday that shifts
standard chatbots to autonomous agentic agents.
The move allows Microsoft to compete directly with Meta Platforms' AI agent "Muse."
The three new tools in Copilot will roll out in the
coming weeks. Each is intended to help advertisers save time, scale creative production, and
automate routine tasks by embedding agentic AI workflows into daily projects.
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Jared Spataro, Microsoft, CMO of AI at Work, in a blog post highlighted the new features in Copilot. Instead of switching apps, users can
ask Copilot to create a launch plan in Word and then a budget in Excel.
The new Copilot app has three new capabilities: "Home," "Code," and "Autopilot." The Autopilot feature expands to a
private preview at the end of the month.
Home and Office in Copilot enable brands to pull campaign data into Excel to analyze return on investments (ROI) or automatically generate recaps
in PowerPoint for brands.
In Code, for example, marketers can build data pipelines, API integrations, or tracking scripts like custom Meta or Google pixels, without waiting for a dedicated
engineering team.
Microsoft also launched a smarter way to track budget and launched a secure digital vault inside Microsoft 365. This allows brands to
build and run custom AI apps and tools safely, keeping all company data entirely private.
This same secure setup is what powers Microsoft’s own
tools. Now the company is opening up the strategy so brand's or a company's
outside developers and agency partners can build custom AI tools tailored
specifically to a company's brands.
While Meta's Muse focuses heavily on the outward-facing side of advertising
such as generating images, writing copy, and targeting audiences within social feeds, Microsoft’s redesigned Copilot focuses on the administrative and strategic
bottlenecks that happen before an ad ever goes live.
At Meta Connect 2026 this week, CEO Mark Zuckerberg laid out a new vision for Muse and the hardware built around
it, emphasizing the tools intended not only for consumers, but also for enterprises, agencies and brands.
Rather than letting Muse operate for consumers or entirely as an isolated web crawler,
some major enterprise commerce platforms have begun to integrate directly with Meta's agent
architecture.
To launch a campaign using Meta's Muse, for example, a marketer still must manually bridge the gap between their business planning and Meta Ad Manager. Marketers must plan
the budget in one tool, write the strategy in another, and then input it into Meta.
Microsoft Copilot now acts as an autonomous agent to combine Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.
An advertiser
can ask Copilot to "create a launch plan in Word" and then "build the budget in Excel" at the same time.