Office management edition
Copilot Cowork lets you choose between fast and thorough, Planner gets its own agent, and the AI bosses are hitting the brakes themselves.
Copilot Cowork: you now decide if the answer is fast or thorough
A new slider and a clearer overview of automations change how you set up recurring routine work.
Microsoft 365 Copilot Cowork was updated this month. Three things stand out if you keep the office running. The left-hand menu is no longer called "Scheduled" but "Automations". This is where your recurring tasks are grouped. There's also a new slider: it lets you choose, per task, between a fast, cheap answer or a slower, more thorough approach. The choice between a GPT or Claude model now sits in the prompt box itself, so you set it while typing the task. Cowork can also prepare a briefing document, a presentation, and an Excel overview all at once for a client meeting. That's exactly the kind of stacked work that normally lands on your desk: figures from one system, background from another, then everything gathered in one folder. Note: this sits behind a paid licence. Ask your admin whether your licence includes Cowork. The slider controls how much computing effort the AI puts into your task. Left means: quick thinking and quick answers. Right means: more steps, more control, more time and cost. For a short summary, left is fine. For a briefing that management will use, set it to the right. "Automations" is a list of fixed tasks that run at set times, for example putting together an overview every Monday morning. Because the model choice now sits in the prompt box, you choose it per task instead of in a settings menu. That slider isn't a free button: more thorough means slower and pricier, and that adds up across dozens of automatic tasks a week. More importantly: thorough isn't the same as correct. Cowork builds a briefing from what it can find, but it doesn't know that a participant is only free after eleven, or that a file is sensitive. That context only exists in your head. So check every automatic document before it goes out, especially in the first few weeks. Only set the slider to the right for documents where a mistake really hurts.
Background for subscribersCowork now gives you the button for fast or thorough work yourself, and Planner builds a plan based on your description. That saves time, but the control shifts to you: you check whether assignments, deadlines, and automatic documents are correct before they go out. Also watch where you put sensitive text, since a public chatbot can store and use it. And check who oversees an AI agent, because that responsibility now lies with your own organisation.
Planner gets an agent that builds a project plan on its own
Microsoft showed six new Copilot features this week. Three of them touch your daily routine work. Planner now has a Copilot agent: you describe in plain language what needs to happen, and the agent turns that into tasks, deadlines, and assignments in an up-to-date project plan. Copilot can also build complete, interactive PowerPoint slides within a few commands. And it can translate a whole presentation, keeping both the layout and the speaker notes. That saves a lot of time if you need to prepare a deck for an international session. The features are rolling out worldwide, but aren't visible everywhere yet. The Planner agent reads your instruction and picks out what needs to happen, when, and by whom. The more specific your instruction, the more useful the plan: so mention names, dates, and order. When a deck is translated, the structure stays intact and only the text is replaced, including in the notes field under the slide. An agent that assigns tasks doesn't know the people involved: it doesn't know who's already overloaded or who's on holiday. So check the assignments and deadlines before sharing the plan. For a translated deck, check names, amounts, and job titles, since those are exactly what often goes wrong in automatic translation. Also check whether your organisation already has these features switched on before you build a deadline around them.
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