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Copilot can now connect directly with OneDrive, Google Drive, email, and other services.
The connectors are opt-in only and available through user settings.
The AI assistant can also now create and export documents via simple natural language prompts.
Microsoft has begun rolling out an update to Copilot on Windows that enables the AI assistant to connect directly with OneDrive, Outlook, Google Drive, Gmail, and other personal productivity apps. The news arrives just days after Copilot was upgraded with new memory adjustment features.
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Through the new connector upgrade, which is opt-in only, Copilot users can prompt the system in natural language to, say, summarize a work project timeline that was sent in an email by a colleague. The assistant will automatically search through your email to retrieve the requested information.
To grant Copilot access to their personal accounts, users can open settings, click "Connectors," and select which services they'd like the system to be able to interact with. Of course, you'll be sharing more data with Copilot by doing this, so think twice if you're not comfortable.
Create and export documents
In addition to the new connector options, Microsoft also announced Friday that Copilot users can now create and export Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PDFs, and PowerPoint presentations through natural language instructions.
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"With just a prompt, you can instantly turn ideas, notes, and data into shareable and editable documents with no extra steps or tools required," Microsoft explained in a company blog post. For example, if you're working with Copilot to create a customized, day-by-day travel itinerary for an upcoming vacation, you can prompt it to upload the schedule into a PowerPoint presentation, and then export the file to share with others.
Both this upgrade and the suite of new connectors are currently only available to members of Microsoft's Copilot "Insider" program, which grants early access to features still in testing. The company added in its blog post that the new updates to Copilot "are gradually rolling out so not all Insiders will get the update right away."
AI productivity apps
The new features arrive at a time when Microsoft, like many tech developers, has been pushing aggressively to expand the reach of its core AI offerings. That effort has hinged in large part on fusing it directly with the productivity apps that are already an integral part of many people's day-to-day lives.
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Last month, Perplexity launched a new Email Assistant that can surface information directly from users' personal Gmail or Outlook accounts.
Microsoft has also been distancing itself from its long-standing reliance upon OpenAI, as evidenced by its recent reported partnership with Anthropic, through which it will embed the startup's AI systems across its Microsoft 365 suite of apps. Anthropic's Sonnet 4 and Claude Opus 4.1 are also now accessible through Copilot Studio, Microsoft's platform for designing custom AI agents.
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OpenAI, meanwhile, is reportedly taking on Microsoft Office 365 and Google Drive by developing its own workplace productivity platform.