Transform Your Research Game with New AI Features in Microsoft's Copilot
Microsoft has confirmed the addition of 'deep research' AI-powered tool into the Microsoft 365 AI chatbot app.
When you look around you, the world is buzzing with deep research agents across various chatbots, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, xAI’s Grok, and more. Powering them are so-called reasoning AI models, which possess the ability to think through problems and fact-check themselves — skills arguably important for conducting in-depth research on a subject.
Microsoft’s Researcher and Analyst
The new researcher from Microsoft combines OpenAI’s deep research model — which powers the company’s own ChatGPT deep research tool — with “advanced orchestration” and “deep search capabilities.” According to Microsoft, the Researcher can perform analyses, including developing a go-to-market strategy and creating a quarterly report for a client.
As for Analyst, it’s built on OpenAI’s o3-mini reasoning model and is “optimized to do advanced data analysis,” Microsoft said. Analyst progresses through problems iteratively, taking steps to refine their “thinking” and provide a detailed answer to queries. Analyst is also designed to run the programming language Python to tackle complex data queries, Microsoft added, and expose its “work” for inspection.
Standout Performer
What makes Microsoft’s deep research tools slightly more unique than the competition? The answer lies in their access to work data as well as the worldwide web. For example, Researcher can tap third-party data connectors to draw on data from AI “agents,” tools, and apps like Confluence, ServiceNow, and Salesforce.
While the primary challenge is ensuring tools such as Researcher and Analyst don’t hallucinate or otherwise make stuff up, models including o3-mini and deep research are by no means perfect. From time to time, they mis-cite work, draw incorrect conclusions, and pull from dubious public websites to inform their reasoning.
Microsoft isn't stopping with this new upgrade; the company is set to launch a new Frontier program through which Microsoft 365 Copilot customers can gain access to Researcher and Analyst. Those enrolled in Frontier, which going forward will gain experimental Copilot features first, will get Researcher and Analyst starting in April.
