Microsoft adds AI-powered deep research tools to Copilot

Microsoft is introducing a “deep research” AI-powered tool in Microsoft 365 Copilot, its AI chatbot app. There’s been a raft of deep research agents launched recently across chatbots, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and xAI’s Grok. Powering them are so-called reasoning AI models, which posses the ability to think through problems and fact-check themselves — skills arguably important for conducting in-depth research on a subject. Microsoft’s flavors are called Researcher and Analyst. Researcher combines OpenAI’s deep research model — which powers the company’s own ChatGPT deep research tool — with “advanced orchestration” and “deep search capabilities.” Microsoft claims that 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, ... Read full article.