We’re excited to announce the general availability of Researcher and Analyst, two first-of-their-kind reasoning agents designed specifically for work.
Today, we’re excited to announce the general availability of Researcher and Analyst, two first-of-their-kind reasoning agents designed specifically for work. Since these agents debuted in April through the Frontier program, early users are increasingly turning to them to complete complex, analytical work in minutes—saving time and resources.1 Now, these powerful agents are available to everyone with a Microsoft 365 Copilot license.
Researcher helps you tackle multi-step research at work—delivering insights with greater quality and accuracy than previously possible. It combines OpenAI’s deep research model with Microsoft 365 Copilot’s advanced orchestration and deep search capabilities. Early adopters have used Researcher to quickly assess the impact of tariffs on business lines, prepare for vendor negotiations, and gather client insights ahead of sales calls.
Analyst thinks like a skilled data scientist, so you can go from raw data to insights in minutes. Built on OpenAI’s o3-mini reasoning model and optimized to do advanced data analysis at work, Analyst uses chain-of-thought reasoning to progress through problems iteratively, taking as many steps as necessary to refine its reasoning and provide a high-quality answer that mirrors human analytical thinking. It can run Python to tackle your most complex data queries—and you can view the code it’s running in real time and check its work. Early adopters have used Analyst to assess how discounts affect customer behavior, identify top customers who aren’t fully using products they’ve purchased, and visualize product sentiment and usage trends to inform go-to-market decisions.
How to get started with Researcher and Analyst
With built-in access, flexible usage, and growing language support, reasoning agents are now easy to find and use in the Microsoft 365 Copilot app. Researcher and Analyst are pre-pinned in the app, and any user with a Microsoft 365 Copilot license can run up to 25 combined queries per month. Researcher supports 37 languages, while Analyst is available in eight—with more coming soon.
Whether you’re an end user or an admin, getting started is simple. Copilot administrators can manage Researcher and Analyst by following these instructions. And users can get started and see value fast by using the sample prompts in each agent—no need to start from scratch.
Of course, you can also tailor your own prompts to fit specific needs. For example, here’s one that Steve Clayton, Vice President for Communications Strategy at Microsoft, gave to Researcher: Help me build a list of 200 important, impactful, or notable Microsoft product releases chronologically. Please provide this as a table. The headings should be 1) product name 2) year released 3) category—such as game, operating system, developer language or tool, hardware. Please be sure to only use authoritative sources for this research and triple check the answers, especially the dates. The timeline is 1975 to 2025.
Based on Researcher’s response, Steve and his team created this periodic table for our new company magazine, Signal:
Try Researcher and Analyst today in Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat
This announcement furthers our ambition to empower every employee with a Copilot and transform every business process with agents. With Researcher and Analystexpertise is right at your fingertips. If you have a Microsoft 365 Copilot license, try them today in Copilot Chat.
1The Frontier program gives customers with a Microsoft 365 Copilot license early access to new Copilot innovations while they’re still in development.
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