Will Microsoft Copilot Researcher make your job easier?

Most people who have checked out Microsoft Copilot, started with “quick questions and and answers” queries. But what about when you have a more complex question, or a multi-part task with several questions, in sequence, and a need for references and a specific output format? Copilot Researcher can help with that!

Microsoft Copilot Researcher is an advanced AI agent, part of the Microsoft Copilot family, intended to help with complex research tasks and act as a “digital research assistant” that uses reasoning, combines multiple content sources, and creates the specific output for your needs. Researcher can gather information from your enterprise files, meetings, emails and chats, provide reference sources and work within compliance awareness, if needed.

From the business perspective, Copilot Researcher can save employees hours of work on detailed report-gathering and formatting. Researcher will also encourage data trust, through inclusion of citations. Output is designed to encourage clear data presentation and understanding through formatting with bullet points, headings, visuals etc. Copilot Researcher is just one example of how AI can help employees eliminate “drudge” work and free up time for tasks that require human interactions with colleagues or customers.

What can Copilot Researcher do for you? Some examples of business use cases:

Your sales team needs to create a proposal to pitch a project to a customer.

Researcher can gather details across the internet and your accessible company data to provide support for proposals by including current trends, details from past interactions with the customer, and emerging technologies to build a profile enabling sales reps to quickly prepare for meetings.

Your leadership team needs to prepare executive briefings and strategic planning.

Researcher can create succinct meeting notes that combine external and internal data, to inform at a high level, with grids, summaries and citations for sources used.

Your marketing team needs to gather market research and evaluate competition.

Research can collect data on industry trends, what your competitors are sharing on the web and social accounts, and help to create insightful suggestions for strategy around product launches or development.

Microsoft Copilot Researcher is much more than a research tool, it has capabilities for deeply investigating queries, creating comparisons of different sources and shaping insights.

Key features and details

Researcher uses OpenAI’s deep research models to gather details for multi-step queries and then combines the data into cohesive, insightful reporting. As a human research analyst might do, Researcher will often ask questions to clarify the scope of the query, based on sub-topics discovered. In addition, Researcher follows enterprise compliance and permissions and cannot access data that is not accessible to the user running the query. Administrators of your company’s Microsoft 365 environment can enable or disable agent functionality and access to internet content, across the organization.

How to get started with Microsoft Copilot Researcher?

First, you’ll need to have a Microsoft 365 Copilot license assigned to your user account. As of now, Researcher is not included in the standard Microsoft 365 subscriptions; it’s available with Microsoft 365 Business or Enterprise licensing with the Copilot add on. Microsoft 365 Premium subscriptions can also add a Copilot license.

Once the correct licensing is in place for your user account, begin in the Copilot app, navigate to the Agents list and select Researcher. As of this post, Researcher is available in the Microsoft 365 apps and in the Copilot agent store.

Need expert advice on AI and Microsoft Copilot?

Does your organization need guidance on how to successfully incorporate the features of AI and Microsoft Copilot into your employee work processes? If so, give the Beringer Team a call today at 800-796-4854. We have extensive experience evaluating technology needs, business requirements, and showing business leaders how AI and Microsoft Copilot can help everyone “work smarter”.

At Beringer Technology Group, we’re not like most other MSPs! We offer both IT Managed Services and Microsoft Cloud Applications Consulting to customers in the Philadelphia area and beyond. Now offering Microsoft Co-Pilot and Azure AI Consulting services. Visit our website www.beringer.net to see all the services we offer and the industries we serve.