M365 Copilot + GPT-5 = big improvement

Have you tried M365 Copilot lately? It has gotten seriously good.

Click on the “Try GPT-5” button on the top right, and you’ll get what seems to be the same features and models as in ChatGPT Teams, with autorouting to fast or reasoning models.

Click on the “Researcher” agent on the left sidebar, and you’ll get what feels like Deep Research mode on ChatGPT or Claude – it will create a research plan, then go away and search the web for 10 minutes and synthesize the results.

Notebooks lets you create a mini-RAG like Google NotebookLM – drop in files from OneDrive or your desktop and it will use those specifically to answer questions.

In the old version of Copilot especially the Work tab seemed underpowered, using some old model like GPT-3.5. The Work tab also uses GPT-5 now, so you can use the most current model with work documents, emails, chats, transcripts, notebooks, …

I dismissed Copilot as “ChatGPT Lite” in the past, but since the update I’ve switched to it as my daily driver, it’s that useful. Give it a try if you haven’t used it in a while.