Microsoft unveiled two deep reasoning agents dubbed Researcher and Analyst for Microsoft 365 Copilot. The company claimed that these two reasoning agents analyze vast amounts of information with secure, compliant access to work data.
Microsoft disclosed that Researcher and Analyst will start rolling out to customers with a Microsoft 365 Copilot license in April as part of a new ‘Frontier program’ that gives customers early access to new Copilot innovations while they’re still in development. Microsoft also claimed that the new agent flows in Copilot were powerful enough to automate any task ‘imaginable’ with rule-based workflows that included AI actions.
Charles Lamanna, the corporate vice president of business & industry Copilot at Microsoft, said deep reasoning in Copilot enabled agents to handle complicated tasks that required detailed analysis, methodical thinking, and nuanced understanding – in other words, it gave agents critical thinking skills. There has been a surge of deep research agents launched recently across chatbots, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and xAI’s Grok.
Microsoft enhances Copilot with deep research AI agents
Our Researcher and Analyst agents are like having a highly skilled expert on call for you 24/7 across your work data and the web. Excited to bring reasoning to Microsoft 365 Copilot & Copilot Studio today. https://t.co/1eC43EzQdi
— Satya Nadella (@satyanadella) March 26, 2025
Today, Microsoft announced the integration of two AI-powered “deep research” tools–Researcher and Analyst–within Microsoft 365 Copilot, aimed at enhancing productivity and competing with similar offerings from OpenAI and Google. Lamanna claimed that these agents were powerful because they could self-assemble steps and actions to complete a task, although he acknowledged that this variability did not work for every process.
Microsoft claimed that Researcher could perform analyses including developing a go-to-market strategy and creating quarterly reports for clients. Researcher will use OpenAI’s o3 Deep Research model, along with ‘advanced orchestration’ in Copilot and ‘deep search algorithms’ to help customers perform multi-step research using their work data. Researcher will also tap into third-party enterprise data through connectors to sources like Salesforce or ServiceNow and web data to further improve its research.
The Analyst agent–which uses OpenAI’s o3-mini model and is optimized for advanced data analysis at work–will help customers quickly turn their raw data into insights. Customers will also be able to upload an Excel file with data and request this agent to visualize the data.
“Our Researcher and Analyst agents are like having a highly skilled expert on call for you 24/7 across your work data and the web. Excited to bring reasoning to Microsoft 365 Copilot & Copilot Studio today.”
–Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO at Microsoft
The Microsoft team emphasized that the new deep research tools were designed to provide detailed insights by analyzing lengthy documents, synthesizing data, and offering context-rich summaries.
Microsoft extends deep research tools to Copilot Studio
Microsoft’s Lamanna also revealed two new capabilities that the team was adding in Microsoft Copilot Studio–deep reasoning and agent flows. According to Lamanna, these features represented the latest milestones in a wave of AI innovation, marking significant advancements in how agents were built and managed. The features highlighted the quality of agents that can be created when enterprise business data, access to advanced reasoning models, and workflows are combined, noted Lamanna.
Lamanna explained that with deep reasoning, agents could perform complex tasks and make more accurate decisions. He added that agent flows brought AI workflows into Copilot Studio that enable agents to follow a predefined sequence of actions, ensuring consistent results for structured tasks. He also believes that deep reasoning and agent flows can jointly boost the potential of the agents built in Copilot Studio. Lamanna mentioned that Microsoft currently had customers with thousands of agents already.
Microsoft disclosed that deep reasoning capability extended agents’ abilities beyond task completion to complex judgment and analytical work. The system will dynamically determine when to invoke deeper reasoning, either implicitly based on task complexity or explicitly when users include prompts like ‘reason over this’ or ‘think really hard about this’.
Microsoft has also announced the launch of six Security Copilot agents that enable teams to autonomously handle high-volume security and IT tasks while integrating with Microsoft Security solutions. Alexander Stojanovic, the vice president of Microsoft Security AI Applied Research, said that this was just the beginning because Microsoft’s security AI research was pushing the boundaries of innovation, and the company was eager to continuously bring even greater value to its customers.
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