Microsoft Copilot Notebooks turns project files into working drafts. Check feature access, source accuracy, sharing permissions, and review time before adoption.
The post Copilot Notebooks Turns Project Files Into Drafts: What to Check appeared first on TechRepublic.
Microsoft Copilot Notebooks turns project files into working drafts. Check feature access, source accuracy, sharing permissions, and review time before adoption.
The post Copilot Notebooks Turns Project Files Into Drafts: What to Check appeared first on TechRepublic.
Swedish Government Offices block direct ChatGPT and Claude access but retain Copilot. Learn what the restrictions mean for workplace AI security policies.
The post Swedish Government Offices Block ChatGPT, Claude; Keep Copilot appeared first on TechRepublic.
Swedish Government Offices block direct ChatGPT and Claude access but retain Copilot. Learn what the restrictions mean for workplace AI security policies.
The post Swedish Government Offices Block ChatGPT, Claude; Keep Copilot appeared first on TechRepublic.
Microsoft will remove eight OneDrive Copilot shortcuts from File Explorer starting in November 2026, changing how users access AI-powered file tools.
The post Microsoft Is Removing 8 Copilot Shortcuts From File Explorer — Here’s What Stays appeared first on TechRepublic.
Microsoft will remove eight OneDrive Copilot shortcuts from File Explorer starting in November 2026, changing how users access AI-powered file tools.
The post Microsoft Is Removing 8 Copilot Shortcuts From File Explorer — Here’s What Stays appeared first on TechRepublic.
In less than four months, Microsoft has added roughly half an Amazon to its market value.
The tech giant’s stock has gained about $1.4 trillion in value since early summer, rising from $352.83 on June 25, its lowest close in more than a year, to a record close of $543.45 on Tuesday, giving it a market value just above $4 trillion. The increase over that period is nearly as much as Tesla is worth.
As stock turnarounds go, it’s extraordinary. In January, Microsoft lost $357 billion in a single day, the biggest one-day drop in its history, as investors worried about the company’s AI spending and its reliance on OpenAI. By midsummer, Microsoft was the worst performer this year among the big tech stocks known as the “Magnificent Seven,” according to Morningstar.
The rebound accelerated in late July, when Microsoft reported that Azure, its cloud platform, grew 43% and topped $100 billion in annual revenue. The stock jumped 15.5% the next day. It has mostly kept climbing since, as Microsoft rolled out a revamped Copilot app, a new AI push for Windows and new AI chips.
Microsoft isn’t rising alone. The broader stock market has also been hitting record highs, led by AI stocks. The S&P 500 closed above 7,800 for the first time last week, even as the benchmark 10-year Treasury yield reached its highest level since 2002.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has been making a broader pitch along the way. In an essay posted on X in July, he warned that companies relying on outside AI labs “pay for intelligence twice, once with money, and again with something even more valuable,” meaning their own knowledge.
He urged businesses to keep control of that knowledge and avoid tying themselves to any one AI model. Microsoft sells access to models from OpenAI, Anthropic and others, along with its own.
Last weekend, he took up a related theme, calling on X for an “emergency brake” on advanced AI models. That means “separating the model from the harness that orchestrates its work,” he wrote. “We must assume a model is compromised and contain it from the start.”
The message also fits Microsoft’s business interests. As companies use AI models from multiple providers, the advantage could shift to companies like Microsoft that run the cloud and workplace software where businesses keep their data.
Microsoft reports its next quarterly results Oct. 28.
Charles Lamanna, the Microsoft executive who oversees Microsoft 365 and the platform behind Copilot, says most business software will end up running behind AI agents rather than in front of users. That’s bad news for a lot of apps.
“If my agent interacts with your app exclusively, the agent’s your customer, not the end user,” Lamanna said Wednesday morning, speaking with Madrona’s Matt McIlwain in the opening keynote at the venture capital firm’s annual IA40 Summit in Seattle. “And agents are very harsh customers.”
Agents will pick whatever service is cheapest, fastest and most reliable, he said, and they’ll move people to another one quickly. Apps that sit behind agents will have a hard time holding on to pricing power or customer loyalty.
Lamanna splits software into two groups.
Microsoft’s own apps aren’t exempt. Word, Excel and PowerPoint won’t go away, Lamanna said, but most people will use them inside Copilot, which can now run Office without switching apps. In his view, the standard setup for an office worker ends up as Copilot for AI and Teams for communication, “and that’s maybe it.”
He compared a headless app to a company that sells only on Amazon. It can be a business, he said, but prices get squeezed when buyers are simply choosing between “your pencils or those pencils.” A brand such as Nike has more leverage.
Amazon itself is resisting that role. Earlier this week it blocked Meta’s Muse agent from shopping on its site, saying Meta never asked permission and that the agent doesn’t identify itself and appears to store customer credentials. Meta has said Muse can’t see users’ passwords or payment methods. Amazon is also in a legal fight with Perplexity over that company’s Comet shopping agent.
Amazon is open to agents on its own terms. Days after blocking Muse, it opened its seller tools to Anthropic’s Claude, letting merchants manage inventory, prices and listings without going into Seller Central.
Lamanna brought up Muse himself onstage, predicting it will reach far more people than work-focused agent tools such as Copilot and Claude Cowork.
Microsoft is on the other side of the same question. Copilot depends on other companies’ software being willing to work behind it. In an August profile, Lamanna said Copilot uses connectors to pull data from services such as Salesforce and ServiceNow, so people don’t have to leave the app.
It’s the end of an era at Microsoft: Frank X. Shaw, the executive who oversaw the tech giant’s communications for nearly three decades, first at an external agency and for the last 17 years as one of its senior leaders, is leaving at the end of the year.
Shaw, 64, said he’s not retiring, although he doesn’t have another job lined up. He plans to stop working for a while, do some of the things he hasn’t had time for, and then decide what’s next.
“I have had a ringside seat at some of the biggest leadership, technology, and business transformations that have ever taken place,” Shaw said, sharing the news of his departure (under embargo) in a phone call Thursday afternoon. “I just feel incredibly fortunate.”
He said he had been discussing his potential departure for some time with Takeshi Numoto, Microsoft’s chief marketing officer, looking for the right moment.
Microsoft has not announced a successor for his role as chief communications officer. In a LinkedIn post, Shaw said the company will consider internal and external candidates.
A statement from Shaw’s colleagues in corporate communications credited him for his many years shaping Microsoft’s “voice and reputation with intelligence, candor and wit. His leadership and contributions to the company are too extensive to list, as is the number of journalists who have, at one point or another, used his name in vain.”
A former Marine Corps public affairs officer, Shaw has worked with all three of Microsoft’s CEOs. He started on the agency side, at Waggener Edstrom — now known as We. Communications — when Bill Gates was still running the company.
He built his reputation defending and advocating for Microsoft through some of its hardest stretches: the antitrust years, the Windows Vista backlash, the scramble to replace Steve Ballmer as CEO, and the weekend in 2023 when OpenAI’s board fired Sam Altman.
As the company’s top communications executive, he has also told the story of Microsoft’s reinvention under CEO Satya Nadella, from the LinkedIn and Activision Blizzard deals to an AI push that has carried Azure past $100 billion in annual revenue.
Evolving with technology: Shaw has spent much of his career closely watching the tech landscape and moving Microsoft’s voice into new channels as they emerged.
“We’re always thinking about what is the art and science of communications,” Shaw told PRWeek. “How do we reach our audiences most effectively in a changing environment?” He called the arc from print to radio and TV to social media and newsletters a “constant evolution of influence.”
He turned the corporate blog into a place where the company argued its own case, writing “Microsoft by the numbers” himself in 2010 — a stat-by-stat comparison against Apple and Google that TechCrunch dubbed “fantastic passive-aggressive.”
He and his team experimented with different and risky methods of telling the company’s story, holding mass briefings under embargo and publishing documents known as the “Book of News” in advance of its major keynotes and conferences. The prospect of a reporter having to answer to “fxs” was no doubt a factor in ensuring the news (mostly) didn’t leak.
Shaw hired Steve Clayton out of a technical role at Microsoft in London, where he had been blogging about the company unofficially out of frustration with how it was perceived, and made him chief storyteller. In the middle of the AI boom, Clayton and Shaw embraced the analog undercurrents in popular culture and launched Signal, a quarterly Microsoft print magazine for business leaders.
Clayton was VP of communications strategy by the time he left in January to become chief communications officer at Cisco, making Shaw’s planned departure the second high-profile exit from Microsoft’s comms team in a year.
Adapting to AI: In recent years, Shaw made his own team a testing ground for AI, publishing what worked and what didn’t. In a 2023 post he described using Copilot in Teams to pull story ideas out of conversations with spokespeople and anticipate coverage after interviews, and asking the AI to “poke holes in a statement we’re making on a tricky topic.”
He called it his corporal, a reference to Napoleon, who was said to bring one to meetings and ask whether his generals’ war plans made sense to him. A survey of 80 people in Microsoft’s communications and marketing organization found 84% did not want to go back to working without it.
Shaw was also known to use AI as a sounding board when a story frustrated him, offering him an objective take before he called and let a particular reporter have it.
He announced his departure Friday morning in a message to Microsoft’s communications team (reminding them he’s still there for a few months yet) and his public post on LinkedIn.
“Thank you as well to all the reporters, editors, writers, influencers and analysts who have put up with me over this time, enduring my early and late night calls, my off the record ‘no comments,’ my bad story ideas and my extended commentary on headlines and positioning,” he wrote.
“You all have incredibly hard and valuable jobs,” he added, “and while I’ve not agreed with everything said about us 😊 I appreciate you anyway.”
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