Microsoft is now taking a page out of OpenAI’s book and bringing deep-reasoning AI agents to its AI-powered chatbot, Copilot. Researcher and Analyst – the two AI agents – aim to provide businesses with automated insights, strategic planning capabilities, and advanced data processing, making workplace productivity more efficient. Microsoft is rolling out these features under its Frontier program, allowing select users to access them starting in April.
The Researcher AI agent is built using OpenAI’s deep research model, a tech that powers other AI research tools, such as ChatGPT’s deep research mode. Microsoft has customized this model by integrating advanced orchestration and deep search functions, enabling businesses to gather, analyze, and structure information. The research tool can handle tasks such as generating in-depth market reports by collecting data from both internal and external sources, developing go-to-market strategies based on organizational insights, industry trends, and competitor analysis, as well as creating structured client reports by analyzing company emails, meetings, and financial records, while also referencing third-party platforms like Salesforce and ServiceNow.
AI agents can process vast amounts of information quickly, while traditional market research, analysis, and planning require businesses to manually collect data from various sources, analyze it, and structure insights into actionable reports. The trade off is obvious, and this is where Researcher comes in, since businesses can benefit by gaining comprehensive reports that are generated in minutes, significantly reducing research time.
Analyst is the second AI agent that Microsoft is introducing, and it is built on OpenAI’s o3-mini reasoning model. It enables businesses to analyze, interpret, and visualize complex datasets and can perform tasks like interpreting raw data from spreadsheets, databases, and external financial reports, utilize Python scripts to run advanced data queries and create structured insight, as well as apply chain-of-thought reasoning to break down complex problems.
For example, businesses can use Analyst to forecast product demand, identify trends in consumer purchasing behavior, or generate revenue projections. Unlike traditional data analytics software, Analyst allows users to view and verify the AI’s thought process in real time, so there is greater transparency and accuracy in decision-making. Unlike standard AI research tools that rely solely on internet-based information, Microsoft’s AI agents can access private company data from email communications, files, spreadsheets, and chats, to name some. This reduces the likelihood of AI-generated misinformation or hallucinations. Analyst can be useful in industries where real-time data analysis is critical, such as finance, retail, and logistics, by performing tasks like improving financial planning by interpreting revenue data and predicting future trends, as well as assisting marketing teams in understanding customer behavior through data-driven insights.
To access Researcher and Analyst, Microsoft 365 Copilot users will have to enroll in Frontier, an early-access program designed to test new AI innovations before they are widely deployed. From next month, participants in the Frontier program will be able to test Researcher and Analyst in real-world business scenarios (alongside other AI agent capabilities as well). Still, Microsoft seems to be late to the game, and has fallen behind the likes of OpenAI and Google, both of whom are pushing forward with AI-powered research tools in their respective chatbots (ChatGPT for OpenAI and Gemini for Google).
