Microsoft 365 Copilot February 2026: What's New and What It Means for Your Team
Microsoft's February 2026 Copilot update brings AI agents, mobile widgets, SharePoint grounding, and new admin controls across Microsoft 365.
Microsoft’s February 2026 “What’s New in Microsoft 365 Copilot” update is a substantial one. It covers everything from how you interact with Copilot responses in chat, to AI agents that can manage projects on your behalf, to new security tooling for IT teams trying to keep oversight of all this AI activity. There is a lot here, so here is what actually matters and why.
Copilot Chat Gets More Precise
One small change that will make a noticeable difference: you can now select specific text from a Copilot response and ask a follow-up question about just that part. Highlight the text, click “Ask Copilot,” and the next response focuses on exactly what you flagged rather than rehashing everything. If you have ever had Copilot give you a wall of text when you only needed to clarify one point, this is the fix.
Copilot Chat in Outlook has also got smarter about context. When you have an email open, Copilot now grounds its responses in that email automatically, and even shows you the email subject in the prompt box so you know what it is working from. Highlight part of the email, and Copilot narrows its focus to just that section. Notably, this works even for users without a full Microsoft 365 Copilot licence.
Coming in March: Copilot Chat in work mode will let you ground prompts directly on a SharePoint site or list. Type ”/” and start typing a site name. For teams that store process documents, project trackers, or reference data in SharePoint, this makes Copilot considerably more useful for day-to-day questions.
Agentic AI: From Chat to Action
The bigger story this month is the continued push toward what Microsoft calls “agentic” AI. The idea is that Copilot stops just answering questions and starts completing tasks.
Agentic PowerPoint on the Web is live now. You can have a conversation with Copilot inside a presentation and it will generate slides, update content, adjust layouts, and apply your organisation’s brand kit, all while preserving your existing formatting. It can pull from files, meeting notes, and emails to populate content, which should meaningfully cut down the time spent on first drafts.
The Project Manager Agent is rolling out to Public Preview in March and worldwide in April. It helps you plan and manage work through AI-assisted project tracking. The initial release covers core task management, with more advanced capabilities coming over time. If your team currently patches together project tracking across emails, Teams messages, and spreadsheets, this is worth watching.
Agents in OneDrive let you create an agent that understands a whole set of related documents at once. Rather than asking Copilot about one file, then another, then another, you point it at a collection of plans, specs, notes, and research, and the agent holds all of that context together.
Microsoft also introduced Copilot Tasks this month, described as “a to-do list that does itself.” Tasks can run in the background on a schedule, work across apps and services, and report back when done. This is the clearest signal yet that Microsoft is positioning Copilot as something that works for you, not just with you.
Connecting to External Tools
Federated Copilot connectors are now in Public Preview across all tenants by default. These let users authenticate with their own credentials to bring live data from external services directly into Copilot. The current list includes Canva, HubSpot, Notion, Linear, Intercom, Google Contacts, and Google Calendar.
A few important details for IT admins: this data is retrieved in real time and is not indexed by Microsoft. Connectors currently only work with the Researcher agent. Admins can review, enable, or disable individual connectors from the Microsoft 365 admin centre. Users connect with their own accounts, so your corporate data permissions are not involved.
Mobile, Meetings, and Everyday Apps
Mobile widgets for iOS and Android rolled out in February. You can add Copilot to your Home or Lock screen and start a chat, trigger a voice conversation, or open the camera to attach a photo, all with a single tap. Small change, but useful if you find yourself reaching for Copilot regularly on mobile.
In Teams meetings, customisable recap templates are now available globally. You can choose a Speaker Summary (organised by who said what) or an Executive Summary (key takeaways only), or build your own template using a free-text prompt and save it for future use. This works across all languages supported by AI summaries.
In Word, opening a blank document now prompts Copilot automatically and turns on “Edit with Copilot” without any extra steps. It reduces the friction of getting started and keeps you in an AI-assisted flow from the first keystroke.
Brand Consistency in Create
The Create experience now supports brand kits. Upload your organisation’s brand guidelines document and Copilot will extract colours, fonts, and style elements automatically. From there, any Copilot-generated content in Create, and in agentic PowerPoint, can draw from those brand assets rather than defaulting to generic styling.
What IT and Security Teams Need to Know
Defender AI Security Posture Management is now generally available worldwide after a Public Preview that started in November. It gives SOC teams a risk-based inventory of AI agents running across Microsoft Foundry and Copilot Studio. You can view each agent’s security posture, see misconfigurations and excessive permissions, and investigate agent activity through Defender’s unified experience. As AI agents multiply across an organisation, this kind of visibility matters.
The Connector Usage Report in the Microsoft 365 admin centre shows which connectors are active, how many agents reference them, and how they are augmenting Copilot experiences. It is a straightforward governance tool, but a welcome one.
Microsoft also launched a dedicated Microsoft Agent 365 blog on the Tech Community this month, focused on observability, security, and governance of agents. Worth bookmarking if you are responsible for AI governance in your organisation.
On the privacy side: prompts and responses are never used to train Microsoft’s models, and Copilot inherits your existing Microsoft 365 permissions, sensitivity labels, and retention policies throughout.
The Bigger Picture
Microsoft currently has 15 million paid Copilot seats and is clearly investing heavily in making the product compelling enough to grow that number. This month’s update reflects two things happening in parallel: Copilot is becoming more capable through agents and external integrations, and Microsoft is adding the admin controls needed for organisations to feel confident deploying it at scale.
For most users, the practical wins this month are in the details: smarter chat interactions, better context in Outlook, mobile shortcuts, and cleaner meeting notes. For IT and security teams, the Defender integration and connector governance tools are the features to focus on. And for anyone planning ahead, the Project Manager Agent and Copilot Tasks are the capabilities that signal where all of this is heading.