Microsoft 365 in an Intent-First World

What am I trying to accomplish?

That sounds like a small UX change, but I think it is much bigger than that. Once intent becomes the starting point, the role of the applications begins to change.

From Application-First to Intent-First

Consider a fairly typical business request:

“We need to assemble the Q3 postmortem for the EMEA rollout. Pull together the incident logs from SharePoint, sentiment feedback from the Viva Engage community, and deliverables tracked in Loop. Summarize the major risks, identify what slipped, and prepare an executive summary.”

In the traditional application-first model, I immediately have decisions to make. Where do I start? Word? Loop? SharePoint? Do I need Excel? Will this eventually become a PowerPoint deck?

Then comes the scavenger hunt. Find the incident logs, track down the feedback, locate the project deliverables, copy pieces between applications, organize the material, decide what matters, and finally start creating the thing I actually needed in the first place.

The emerging intent-first model turns that around. I start by describing the outcome, context, audience, and constraints. The destination becomes a secondary decision. Maybe the information initially belongs in a collaborative workspace where the team can challenge the findings. Maybe the executive summary belongs in Word. If leadership needs a presentation, PowerPoint becomes the next logical destination. If the numbers need deeper analysis, we move into Excel.

The applications still matter, but increasingly, the application becomes the destination artifact rather than the starting point.

The Apps Aren’t Going Anywhere

This is where I think some of the predictions about the death of traditional productivity software go wrong. An intent-first world does not mean nobody opens Excel anymore.

A financial analyst may still spend much of the day inside Excel. Someone producing a complex policy document may need the editing and review capabilities in Word. A communications team building an executive presentation still needs the depth of PowerPoint. Specialists will continue to live inside the tools that match their craft.

The difference is that everyday knowledge work doesn’t always need to begin with a software decision. That is why I don’t see Copilot as replacing Microsoft 365. In many ways, Copilot makes Microsoft 365 more important.

The documents, conversations, meetings, sites, business context, and organizational knowledge across Microsoft 365 become part of the environment surrounding that intent-first experience. The applications aren’t obsolete containers being dragged into the AI era. They increasingly become specialized execution environments within a much larger system.

I was chatting about this very topic yesterday with fellow MVP+RD Ståle Hansen, and how he is increasingly using Copilot Notebooks inside of OneNote (where I still spend a good portion of my day) to pull together all of the relevant artifacts from the various Office tools, allowing him to create within each native app, but pull them together into a single space where Copilot can then reason exclusively with the materials that you decide are important (blog post on this is forthcoming).

Governance Becomes the Invisible Infrastructure

There is another consequence that I think organizations need to take much more seriously. If Copilot becomes the front door, everything behind that door matters: permissions, information architecture, metadata, content ownership, lifecycle management, and, perhaps most importantly, information quality.

A conversational interface can make accessing organizational knowledge feel dramatically simpler, but a simpler interface doesn’t magically clean up what sits underneath it. If an organization has years of outdated, redundant, poorly organized, or overshared content, Copilot doesn’t make that governance problem disappear. It potentially makes the quality of the information environment more consequential.

That is why Copilot adoption cannot simply be a licensing exercise followed by a few prompt-writing workshops. Teaching people to communicate effectively with AI is certainly part of the equation, but organizations also need to improve the environment those questions operate against.

That means getting serious about permissions, information architecture, content ownership, lifecycle policies, authoritative sources, and the growing sprawl of collaborative workspaces. The irony is that a more conversational interface doesn’t make Microsoft 365 governance less important.

It makes good governance the invisible infrastructure for AI.

The Cocoon and the Butterfly

When people see conversational workspaces and autonomous agents, it is easy to assume that the traditional productivity suite is facing extinction. I think they’re mistaking the cocoon for the end of the line.

The butterfly isn’t an app-free world where every task gets reduced to a generic chat window. It is an intent-first world where people provide the expertise, context, audience, business problem, and judgment, while the technology handles more of the orchestration around them.

Word still matters. Excel still matters. PowerPoint still matters. So do SharePoint, Teams, Loop, Outlook, and the rest of Microsoft 365. What changes is the question at the beginning of the workflow.

Instead of asking:

“Which application should I open?”

We increasingly begin with:

“What am I trying to accomplish?”

That may sound like a subtle distinction, but I think it is one of the biggest changes to knowledge work since the productivity suite itself.

And there’s the paradox. As the applications become less visible at the beginning of the workflow, the Microsoft 365 platform behind Copilot becomes more important, not less.

The front door has moved.

I say let Copilot handle the front door. The apps will be waiting right where you need them.