Microsoft is adding more AI features to Outlook, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint that you will not have to pay Copilot prices for.
Starting in early 2026, a new wave of tools will arrive in Microsoft 365 to help write, plan, and crunch numbers without the usual Copilot license. It’s a sign that the company wants everyday Office users to get a taste of its AI helpers, not just premium customers.
The free tier of Copilot Chat inside Microsoft 365 is getting a serious boost in Outlook, as per The Verge. Instead of only working inside a single email thread, Copilot will soon be able to look across your whole inbox, calendar entries, and meetings as well. That means it can help triage busy inboxes, surface what matters, and prep you for upcoming calls and meetings.
The bigger shift is Agent Mode spreading beyond paid Copilot plans. This feature is coming to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint for all Microsoft 365 subscribers, and can spin up complex documents or spreadsheets from a simple prompt.
In Excel, you will even be able to pick between Anthropic and OpenAI reasoning models for more control over how data is handled. In PowerPoint, Agent Mode can refresh old decks with your company theme, generate new slides from a brief description, and handle rewrites or formatting tweaks in one go.
Microsoft says it aims to start previewing these no-extra-cost features for Microsoft 365 subscribers by March 2026. The move follows earlier changes this year where more AI tools were bundled into Office apps for consumer plans, and where separate sales, service, and finance Copilots were folded into the main subscription.
Alongside the free additions, Microsoft is also preparing a cheaper business plan. Microsoft 365 Copilot Business launches next month, aimed at small and midsize companies with fewer than three hundred users and priced at twenty-one dollars per month. For teams that held off at thirty dollars, that discount, plus the new built-in features, might finally make it worth trying AI inside the tools they already use every day.
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