Finding the right document, email, or chat across your organization often takes longer than completing the task itself. Employees lose valuable minutes rephrasing keywords, jumping between apps, and scrolling through lists, leading to frustration and lost productivity. As digital workplaces continue to scale, surfacing precise, relevant information at the right time has become a critical challenge for organizations.
Addressing this need, Microsoft has announced the general availability of Microsoft 365 Copilot Search, ushering in a transformative way for professionals to discover, synthesize, and act on information across their environment.
Understanding Microsoft Search and Copilot Search
Microsoft Search is the enterprise-grade search engine built into Microsoft 365. It indexes organizational data across SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams, Outlook, and Office while respecting security and compliance boundaries, allowing employees to locate files, conversations, people, and sites efficiently.
Copilot Search extends this foundation by adding generative AI capabilities on top of Microsoft Search. It allows users to phrase complex, conversational queries and receive synthesized, structured, and actionable outputs within their workflow. Instead of presenting static links alone, it extracts summaries, highlights key points, and generates relevant content drafts from retrieved information.
In essence, Microsoft Search organizes and surfaces your organization’s data securely, while Copilot Search interprets, refines, and delivers insights through conversational AI.
Licensing-Based User Experience
Users with an eligible Microsoft 365 Copilot license will see the new Copilot Search experience within the Microsoft 365 Copilot app across desktop, web, and mobile. This enables access to conversational discovery, AI-powered summarization, and contextual insights directly within daily workflows.
Note: Users without an assigned and eligible Copilot license will continue using the classic Microsoft Search experience.
This approach enables organizations to plan a phased rollout, allowing teams ready for Copilot adoption to leverage advanced search while ensuring continuity for others.
Key Capabilities of Copilot Search
- Conversational Retrieval: Users can phrase requests naturally (“Show me this quarter’s project proposals from the design team”) and receive summarized, relevant results without manual filtering.
- Integrated Discovery: Available across OneDrive, SharePoint, Outlook, Teams, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, it ensures consistent, intelligent discovery without requiring app switching.
- Contextual Relevance: Copilot Search leverages Microsoft Graph signals, prioritizing results based on user relationships, recent activity, and work patterns for accurate, personalized outputs.
- Action-Oriented Results: Beyond locating files, it extracts highlights, compiles summaries, and generates content drafts, moving employees from discovery to execution seamlessly.
Expansion of File Types in Copilot Chat
Microsoft is also expanding the file types supported in Copilot Chat to align with the Microsoft Search experience. This enhancement allows users to ground questions in a broader range of organizational content, improving the relevance and accuracy of Copilot’s responses.
With this update, Copilot Chat will support additional file types, including CAD, ZIP, and MP4, enabling it to retrieve and reason over a wider variety of files during queries. This expansion enhances productivity and flexibility, allowing users to extract insights from more content without disrupting their workflow.
Looking Ahead
The general availability of Microsoft 365 Copilot Search marks a significant step forward for organizations looking to transform how employees find and act on information. By combining the robust indexing and compliance strengths of Microsoft Search with the conversational, AI-powered capabilities of Copilot, businesses can empower employees to move from information overload to actionable insights seamlessly within their workflows.
For teams managing large volumes of knowledge and documentation, Copilot Search is an opportunity to modernize information discovery, reduce time spent on manual filtering, and enable employees to focus on impactful work across their day.
