Microsoft AI Weekly #16: Copilot, GitHub, Azure AI & more

👋 Hi all !

If last year was about copilots helping us work faster, this year is increasingly about agents getting work done alongside us. This week’s announcements span agentic coding, Copilot Cowork, Work IQ memory, Copilot Studio harnesses and a steady stream of GitHub Copilot updates, all pointing toward a more autonomous future for Microsoft AI.

Let’s dive in.

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⚡️ Microsoft

The latest from Microsoft on AI.

💼 Productivity & Work

• 7 New Microsoft Copilot Features That Save You Time (November 2026) • Mike Tholfsen

• Create Incredible Copilot Dashboards in Excel, PowerPoint & SharePoint • Mike Tholfsen

👩‍💻 Coding & Developer Tools

• Beyond code generation: A developer’s guide to agentic engineering • Nick Liffen and Philip Holleran

• Do AI coding agents care about SemVer? • Waldek Mastykarz

• Your best AX fixes are hiding in agent trajectories • Waldek Mastykarz

• Bring Agentic Coding On-Device with Foundry Local • Baiju Meswani, Emma Ning and Tianlei Wu

• Dataverse goes where you build: Copilot Cowork, coding agents and n8n • Suyash Kshirsagar

🐙 GitHub Changelog

• Copilot code review: API management and review overview updates

• Copilot impact dashboard adds chat and VS Code agent usage

• GitHub Copilot weekly releases

• GitHub Copilot is now available in Xcode’s coding assistant

• BYOK and enterprise custom models in the Copilot usage API

• GitHub Copilot is now available in JetBrains Air

🏗️ AI Apps, Agents & Platform

• AI Weekly: Cowork Meets Planner, Copilot Studio MCP, and Images 2.6 • Josh Cook

• ThinkingBox: Catching failures and training agents • Mirco Milletari and Tuhin Kundu

• Work IQ: SharePoint Tools • Paolo Pialorsi and Patrick Rodgers

• Microsoft Foundry extension for Azure Developer CLI is generally available • John Miller

• Introducing SharePoint tools in Work IQ • Patrick Rodgers

🧩 Business Apps & Low Code

• Create and edit non-SPA Power Pages sites with Agentic Coding tools • Neeraj Nandwana

🛡️ Security, Governance & Admin

• Inside Track: Securing low-code platforms at Microsoft in the age of AI • Stephanie Parry

• Your Agents Are Not Only Copilots: Monitoring Custom AI Agents with Microsoft Sentinel • David Alonso Dominguez

• Power Platform admin plugin for Copilot Cowork | EP05 • Microsoft Power Platform

Copilot Studio

• Paper: How utilizing the Microsoft Copilot harness in Copilot Studio enabled complex task execution • Ben Appleby

• More powerful agents and workflows for autonomous business processes: Introducing a new harness for Copilot Studio • Ryan Cunningham

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🌍 From the community

Hand-picked from MVPs and AI subject-matter experts around the globe.

👩‍💻 Coding & Developer Tools

• If Syntax Was Never The Goal, What Is The Job Now? • Jamie Maguire

• Nine engineers, 1,211 pull requests in a day: Lessons from building Copilot Cowork • Bas Brekelmans

🛡️ Security, Governance & Admin

• Restricted Content Discovery Hides Files. It Doesn’t Stop Your Agents. • Ragnar Heil

• Security Testing for Everyone • Paul Schnackenburg

• Your Copilot budget has no owner. Until it runs out. • Ragnar Heil

• Protecting Local AI Agents with Microsoft Execution Containers • Loris Ambrozzo

📢 Message Center

Microsoft 365 Message Center posts, via mc.merill.net.

• MC1301714: Microsoft Purview | Data Loss Prevention- DLP to restrict processing external emails in M365 Copilot and Copilot Chat

• MC1535647: Microsoft Copilot app: Updates to Home and navigation

• MC1536062: Changes to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint agents in Microsoft Copilot

• MC1536065: Microsoft 365 Copilot: Suggestions to continue in another Copilot experience

• MC1536158: Limits in Copilot Chat

• MC1536163: Limits in Copilot Chat

• MC1537495: Microsoft 365 Copilot: Discover featured AI Skills Navigator playlists in Learning Agent

• MC1539004: Work IQ expands memory capabilities to agents

• MC1540293: Sales agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot

• MC1540330: Opal (Frontier)

• MC1542062: Copilot Cowork: Power Platform connectors now follow Microsoft 365 admin center settings

💭 Joanne’s Corner

This week I set myself a challenge: whenever I caught myself about to do something manually, I had to ask Copilot first.

A few times I found myself opening browser tabs to research a topic before remembering I could just ask Copilot for a summary. While putting together this newsletter, I also used it to spot common themes across dozens of articles instead of connecting the dots manually.

Not every result was perfect, but the biggest surprise was where the time savings came from. It wasn’t writing content. It was finding information faster, getting unstuck quicker, and reducing all those little moments of friction throughout the day.

I suspect a few of those habits are now permanent. 😊

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🪃 Acknowledgement of Country

MSAI.ms is written between Melbourne and Dubai. Part of this work is created on Wurundjeri land, and we acknowledge the traditional owners of country throughout Australia, recognising their continuing connection to land, water and community. We pay our respect to them and their cultures and to elders both past and present.