After Google and OpenAI offered up AI news on Tuesday, Microsoft has followed with announcements of its own, including details of two “deep reasoning” agents for Microsoft 365 Copilot that it claims are the first of their kind, dubbed Researcher and Analyst, as well as new capabilities for custom AI agents. Researcher relies on OpenAI’s deep research AI model to pull off “complex, multi-step research,” along with access to third-party data via connectors to sources like Salesforce or ServiceNow so that business customers can derive insights from across their tools. Analyst is based on the o3-mini reasoning model from OpenAI, and Microsoft claims that with chain-of-thought reasoning, it’s capable of turning raw data into spreadsheets, running Python code that you can view while it’s running, and operate on the level of a skilled data scientist, pulling together reports like this one. Those tools are scheduled to start rolling out in April to Microsoft 365 Copilot license holders in an early access program, along with new autonomous agent capabilities that are starting to roll out now in Copilot Studio.

Full report : Microsoft unveils AI “deep reasoning” agents for 365 Copilot: Researcher, based on OpenAI’s deep research model, and Analyst, based on o3-mini, coming in April, 2025.