M365 Community Conference Highlights and Copilot Updates

One of the questions I hear most from customers and community members is some version of: “How do you keep up with all of this?” It’s a fair question. Microsoft’s pace of release has accelerated to the point where even full-time practitioners struggle to separate the genuinely important from the marketing noise. The best answer I can give is that we do it together. Community summaries, MVP recaps, and posts like this one exist specifically to help you filter the signal from the stream.

This post covers two things: what came out of the Microsoft 365 Community Conference in Orlando (April 21-23), and the full list of Copilot feature updates that shipped in April 2026. If you made the trip, hopefully this reinforces what you heard. If you didn’t, you’re in the right place.

M365 Community Conference Takeaways

Approximately 3,000 IT pros, Microsoft engineers, and community members gathered at the Loews Sapphire Falls and Royal Pacific resorts for three days of sessions, keynotes, and conversations. This year’s theme was “A Beacon for Builders, Innovators, and Icons of Intelligent Work,” which was a reasonable frame for a conference that felt more focused on real enterprise implementation than the aspirational keynote-ware we’ve sometimes seen in past years.

The conference opened with back-to-back keynotes from Jeff Teper (President, Collaborative Apps and Platforms) and Ryan Cunningham (Corporate Vice President, Power Platform), covering Copilot, Teams, SharePoint, and agentic AI. Because the Power Platform team and the Microsoft 365 team have merged into a single organization at Microsoft, it no longer feels strange to see both represented at the same conference. The two keynotes ran together without a break and honestly felt like one coherent session.

Here are the highlights worth paying attention to:

• Copilot and the Anthropic partnership. There weren’t many net-new Copilot feature announcements at the conference itself, but the keynotes spent meaningful time showcasing the deepening relationship between Microsoft and Anthropic. Copilot now gives users an explicit choice between Claude models, OpenAI models, or an “auto” mode that lets the system decide. The standout demo involved using Claude models in PowerPoint to transform a dense finance slide into something visually clean and compelling. For visual and design-heavy work in PowerPoint, Claude has proven to be particularly strong, and it’s worth selecting it manually rather than relying on auto mode. The Researcher agent’s “critique” feature was also showcased, where one model handles planning, research, and drafting, while a second acts as an expert reviewer before you ever see the output.
• Copilot Cowork. Powered by Anthropic’s Claude, Copilot Cowork helps users take action with AI by describing an outcome they want, such as organizing their inbox, preparing for meetings, or conducting research. The Microsoft-hosted version and the Claude-native desktop version are distinct products with different capability profiles and tradeoffs around data access and security controls. Forrester
• SharePoint Skills in public preview. This was Jeff Teper’s own pick for the most important announcement of the week, and it’s easy to see why. You describe a SharePoint process in plain English, something like “Create a deal room with these four folders, these two templates, and this metadata,” and SharePoint saves it as a reusable skill that lives in your site. Anyone with access can invoke it by asking to create a new deal folder or workspace. The skills are markdown files stored directly in the site, versioned, governed, and editable using the SharePoint controls you already know. Licensing note: SharePoint Skills are included in your existing Microsoft 365 or Microsoft Copilot license, so there’s no additional procurement step. The official announcement on the Microsoft Tech Community blog has full setup guidance, and the public preview is available now.
• SharePoint rebranding of Viva. Viva Connections and Viva Amplify are being rebranded back under the SharePoint name. Viva Connections mobile will literally be renamed to SharePoint. The new SharePoint UI announced at the platform’s 25th anniversary event is now generally available, including a redesigned navigation structure and a unified OneDrive experience consistent across Teams, SharePoint, and Outlook.
• Teams channel agent and workflow automation. The channel agent demo was genuinely impressive. Channel agent workflows in Microsoft Teams can trigger Azure DevOps, GitHub Copilot, Asana, and Jira automations from a single chat message or emoji reaction. The demo scenario showed feedback posted to a Teams channel that automatically created a bug in Azure DevOps, assigned it to GitHub Copilot, opened a pull request, and tagged the engineering manager for review. If you run any kind of triage process, this automation is worth exploring. The channel agent also handles welcome messages, member management, and scheduled tasks, and is rolling out this month.
• Agent 365 goes generally available. Agent 365 hit general availability on May 1, priced at $15 per user per month standalone or included as part of the Microsoft 365 E7 license. It functions as a centralized control plane for every agent in your organization, covering first-party Microsoft agents, agents built on the M365 SDK, and agents from external platforms including Amazon Bedrock and Google. A new Shadow AI pane gives IT teams the ability to push policies that restrict unsanctioned AI tools running on company devices, which is the governance answer a lot of organizations have been quietly waiting for. Ryan Cunningham shared that Microsoft currently manages over 500,000 agents internally across roughly 228,000 employees, which signals how seriously Microsoft is treating agent governance as an enterprise-scale problem.
• Teams meeting controls redesign. Not everything at the conference was an AI story. The redesigned meeting controls in Teams make it easier to customize your in-meeting options, reducing the likelihood of accidentally clicking “leave” when you meant to stop sharing. It’s a small thing, but it’s the kind of friction reduction that practitioners actually notice.

April 2026 Feature Roundup

Beyond the conference announcements, April was a substantial month for Copilot feature updates across the M365 apps. The official “What’s New in Microsoft 365 Copilot” post for April has the full details. Here’s the practitioner-focused breakdown:

• Voice chat in the M365 Copilot app. This is a full hands-free, conversational experience available from both desktop and mobile at m365.cloud.microsoft.com. It’s distinct from dictation, which just types your words into the prompt field. Voice chat supports mid-conversation instructions (change language, adjust speaking pace), and saves the full text transcript to your chat history when you’re done. On Windows, you can invoke it by saying “Hey Copilot” directly from the desktop.
• Audio summaries in Word. When you open a Word document online, you’ll start seeing an automatically generated summary and an audio recap option surfaced at the top of the document view, without needing to open the Copilot panel first. The Copilot icon is also moving from the ribbon to a floating icon in the bottom right corner in the updated experience.
• PowerPoint agent. Available in the M365 Copilot app under All Agents. Upload existing documents as grounding material, select your audience, choose a length range (concise is roughly 5-7 slides, detail is 8-10, in-depth is 10 or more), set your content balance preference (text vs. visuals), and select a theme or organizational brand kit. The agent shows its reasoning step by step as it builds the presentation, and the output saves automatically to your OneDrive. Requires Anthropic to be enabled in your tenant for full capability.
• Excel agent. Same access point as the PowerPoint agent. Builds financial models, formulas, and multi-tab templates from a plain-language prompt. You can specify purpose, business model type, and time horizon during a guided setup. Generation takes longer than PowerPoint (plan for five to seven minutes on complex models). The output opens directly in Excel online for further refinement via Copilot or manual editing.
• Word agent. Also available under All Agents. Handles status reports, summaries, and structured documents with the same multi-turn refinement approach. Supports web grounding, organizational data grounding, or both, configurable via the Sources panel before generation begins.
• Inline PowerPoint editing via conversation. For existing presentations, you can invoke Copilot and ask it to rewrite content, convert a paragraph to a table, restructure a slide, or apply other changes through natural language without switching to a separate tool.
• Image editing in PowerPoint canvas. Right-click any image in a slide to access enhance, blur background, erase elements, and other options directly in the canvas. No more exporting and reimporting.
• Explain in PowerPoint. Select any element on a slide (text, image, chart, diagram) and click Explain to get a concise, plain-language explanation in the right panel, aimed at roughly 150 words. Useful for presenting content you didn’t write or for quickly building context before a customer conversation.
• Copilot Notebooks refresh. Copilot Notebooks is rolling out a wave of new capabilities in preview for Frontier program users, including the ability to reference SharePoint content and OneNote notebooks, edit Copilot Pages through chat, generate Word documents or PowerPoint presentations from notebook content, share a notebook with a Microsoft 365 Group, and explore content with mind maps and study tools. Notebooks now also surfaces a summary page and audio overview by default when you open an existing notebook.
• Planner agent. Available in the M365 Copilot app (Frontier program). Let’s you have a conversation about your task backlog, identify what’s due, and plan your week through natural language rather than navigating the Planner UI directly.
• SharePoint List agent. Previously previewed, now generally available. Enables intelligent schema generation, list creation, and list management through conversational prompts, including formatting columns without writing JSON.
• Calendar search for email delegates. Executive assistants and others with delegated calendar access can now search their manager’s calendar directly within Copilot Chat using the @ mention syntax.
• Interpreter: Consecutive interpretation mode. Interpreter now supports two modes: real-time simultaneous interpretation (launched previously) and a new consecutive interpretation mode designed for back-and-forth conversations. This rolled out to Public Preview in April. Interpreter is also now available in Teams Rooms on Windows.
• Teams Workflows app. A Workflows app within Teams makes Power Automate-style automations accessible without leaving the Teams interface. You can view existing workflows, create new ones, and configure triggers and output destinations directly from the app.
• File analysis via Code Interpreter. When Copilot surfaces a file in response to a search query, you can now send it directly to Code Interpreter for deeper analysis rather than downloading it separately.
• Embedded image understanding in agents. Agents can now interpret embedded visuals within documents and PDFs, including charts, diagrams, and screenshots, and surface answers based on that visual content. This closes a meaningful gap for organizations whose reference materials rely heavily on visual data.
• Copilot mobile refresh. The M365 Copilot mobile app has a refreshed chat-first design with text formatting support in prompts, a new layout that makes responses easier to view and reference, and liquid glass styling. Meeting preparation is now a one-tap action from mobile. Copilot Pages can also be viewed, edited, and shared in Outlook mobile.
• AI in SharePoint (formerly Knowledge Agent). The SharePoint knowledge agent has been renamed “AI in SharePoint” and now uses Anthropic models for its more advanced features. Its primary function is metadata enrichment for existing content at scale.

Where to Start

If you’re trying to prioritize, three things stand out:

1. SharePoint Skills is the most structurally significant announcement for organizations with meaningful content operations in SharePoint. It’s in public preview, covered by your existing licensing if you have Microsoft 365 Copilot, and it directly addresses the gap between generic AI responses and AI that understands how your organization actually works. Start with one team, one site, and one repeatable process.
2. For practitioners managing AI governance, Agent 365 is now live. The Shadow AI pane in particular is worth evaluating before your users find ways to connect unsanctioned tools to company data.
3. And if you’re still introducing Copilot to end users who feel overwhelmed by model choices, the practical message is simple: Auto works fine for most tasks. For visual work in PowerPoint, point them toward Claude.

The pace of change isn’t slowing down. The best thing you can do is stay connected to people who are testing this in the real world, not just reading the press releases. I’m planning to make this type of update a regular occurrence on my blog, so if you like this post, get ready for more…