We’re using AI and continuous improvement to redefine how we use Microsoft Outlook to get work done.
In just a few short years, work has changed in fundamental ways. The rapid rise of AI has brought an entirely new mindset to the workplace.
To adapt to that shifting mindset, we’re reimagining how the tools employees use meet them in the moments that matter. That’s especially true for things they use every day, like Microsoft Outlook, the app that has long been the tool our employees “live in” at work.
With that in mind, how do we provide new opportunities for productivity and AI-first workflows without disrupting the deeply ingrained habits that drive so many of our employees’ and customers’ days? How do we respect those patterns while enabling new ones?
Innovative capabilities in the new Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft 365 Copilot features are streamlining communication through enhanced email while helping people prioritize their work and time with intelligent calendaring. These features operate with a profound understanding of an employee’s role in the business, the projects they’re working on, their team landscape, and their communication style. They augment the user’s workflows through the strength of large language models, giving them superpowers that a human assistant would ordinarily handle.
This is the story of how we’re using a continuous improvement mindset to make Outlook more supportive, intuitive, and impactful for our employees at Microsoft and our customers.
“People have an emotional attachment to their email. Everybody interacts with email according to their own highly personalized workflows, so we have to be very careful to factor that human element into any evolution or transformation of these tools.”
Mark Stratford, senior product manager, Microsoft Digital
Readying Outlook for a new era of work
As our product teams explored ways to align Microsoft Outlook with the age of AI, they started with the needs of the employees who use it.
“People have an emotional attachment to their email,” says Mark Stratford, senior product manager within Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization. “Everybody interacts with email according to their own highly personalized workflows, so we have to be very careful to factor that human element into any evolution or transformation of these tools.”
At the same time, the changing nature of work is introducing new challenges for both businesses and their employees. High productivity is becoming a greater and greater necessity.
“Outlook continues to evolve, building on its legacy as a tool that millions of people rely on. We’re transforming it into a dynamic partner that helps users navigate new demands.”
Matthew Marzynski, principal product manager, core experiences, Microsoft Digital
Microsoft 365 Copilot is poised to support the parallel needs for personalization and productivity that will help employees excel. That requires a shift away from thinking of Outlook as a simple pane for communications and scheduling.
“As the pace and complexity of work accelerate, Outlook continues to evolve, building on its legacy as a tool that millions of people rely on,” says Matthew Marzynski, a principal product manager of core experiences within Microsoft Digital. “By integrating AI and continuous improvement, we’re transforming it from an organizer for emails and meetings into a dynamic partner that helps users navigate new demands. This will empower people to make better decisions, take meaningful action, and stay focused on what matters most in an accelerating modern work context—without disrupting the familiar workflows they depend on.”
To enable this shift, our product teams prioritized three characteristics that capabilities in the new Outlook Copilot in Outlook should embody:
On-demand: Features should provide assistance in real time, collaborating with the user within the flow of their work, whether that’s in the Outlook app or Copilot Chat. They should demonstrate personalized understanding and facilitate multimodal interaction to provide tailored support as users need it.
Proactive: AI assistants should anticipate the user’s needs without explicit direction. Outlook and Copilot should act as safety nets by providing reminders and insightful briefings, recognizing urgency, and suggesting actions and next steps.
Automatic: Features should initiate assistance for users without the need for them to ask. Agentic autonomy doesn’t eliminate decision-making for humans. Instead, it anticipates user needs intelligently and offers tailored support.
“The human needs are largely the same—we need to interact with each other, communicate, share materials, connect,” says Margie Clinton, group product manager for Outlook. “What AI introduces are new opportunities to enhance and streamline how we perform those tasks while offloading the responsibility for managing them onto Copilot.”
AI in Outlook: Transforming communications and scheduling
Together, advanced capabilities within the new Microsoft Outlook combine with Copilot in Outlook to bring the power of AI to employees’ inboxes and calendars. Rich, contextual insights make it easier to navigate communications, advanced reasoning capabilities help employees prioritize their work and their time, and proactive recommendations and automated workflows reduce the time people need to spend on administrative tasks.
There are several different ways to add ease and automation to employees’ Outlook workflows.
Chat with Copilot Using Outlook side-by-side with Copilot Chat helps users retrieve information contextually, without leaving the app or their flow of work. From there, they take action using natural language. This feature supports broader conversations about organizational data and information from the web while addressing personally relevant questions about an employee’s specific context. For example, an employee might ask Copilot to summarize an email thread and ask if there are any calls to action.
Beyond Copilot Chat, users can access a suite of capabilities designed to streamline and enhance communication and prioritize their work and time.
Streamlining and enhancing communication
New email features and Copilot are game-changers for business communication. From assistance drafting emails to understanding the narrative behind a conversation, they boost employees’ abilities to understand their peers and be understood themselves.
Draft with Copilot There are plenty of reasons why different people experience different challenges while drafting emails. They may not be natural writers, or they might be communicating across languages, or the sheer volume of communications may just feel overwhelming. Draft with Copilot alleviates these burdens by inviting employees to prompt their AI assistant with the essential content to include in their message so they can edit it after Copilot has done the heavy lifting. If a user has existing text that needs refining, they can simply highlight the content and hit the Copilot button to reveal a set of helpful prompts for rewriting.
Coaching by Copilot Coaching boosts employee confidence when drafting emails. It provides suggestions on tone, clarity, and sentiment, and surfaces insights into how the reader might interpret the message. Unlike drafting, coaching takes what employees have already written and provides suggestions for making it clearer and more effective. People who want to get better at communicating or need assistance getting their message across stand to benefit from this feature.
Summary by Copilot It can be a struggle for employees to catch up with long, meandering email threads, and they can feel overwhelmed if they don’t have time to review all their messages. AI-generated email summaries keep employees informed while minimizing this burden. Copilot looks for key points in a message or thread to create a summary that appears at the top of the email, even providing numbered citations where necessary.
Prioritize It’s easy for employees to feel overwhelmed when they’re inundated with emails. Knowing where to start might seem impossible. To combat this paralysis, Copilot reviews your emails as they arrive in your inbox and assigns them a priority based on factors that include the people on the thread, their job titles, action items, and more. This feature doesn’t delay emails because the process happens in parallel with delivery. Instead, it’s about empowering employees with support for decision-making around what requires their most urgent attention.
Focused inbox The more ways there are to organize and prioritize emails, the more quickly employees can start tackling the tasks that matter to their work. This feature separates an employee’s inbox into two tabs: “Focused and “Other.” A user’s most important email messages show up on the “Focused” tab while the rest remain easily accessible on the “Other” tab. Focused inbox recognizes that while all messages deserve attention, not all of them need that attention immediately. Outlook can help employees decide which is which based on the context it assembles through access to an employee’s wider digital community and behaviors. It considers email accounts and contacts while filtering out noisy sources like automatically generated or bulk emails.
Prioritizing work and time
Meetings dominate many employees’ days. Outlook and Copilot have several new capabilities that help users manage those meetings, conduct them more smoothly, and take follow-up actions more effectively.
The unified Microsoft 365 Calendar is at the center of the AI-enhanced scheduling and meeting experience. By centralizing the calendar function across Microsoft 365, Copilot can provide contextual, personalized experiences wherever employees access them. Outlook also brings new capabilities to the table to help people keep abreast of events.
Chat-assisted scheduling For users who’d rather rely entirely on their AI assistants to manage their meetings, Copilot simplifies the process of scheduling and blocking time directly. Employees just type a prompt into Chat, and Copilot will suggest available times after checking the calendars of all attendees in order to find a convenient slot.
Follow a meeting in Outlook In the same way that getting inundated with emails can feel overwhelming, employees can also get swamped with meetings. Sometimes it’s best to opt out, even if a meeting’s agenda includes important information or action items. If an employee is unable to attend a meeting, they can select “follow” as their response to the invite. This feature for the new Outlook reminds the organizer to record the meeting and alerts the employee to any follow-ups. To stay up to speed with action items and important information, the attendee can access the recording and meeting transcript.
Prepare for meetings Coming into a meeting cold can be a frustrating experience. Meetings are also more productive when participants are fully primed to engage and contribute. Copilot prepares employees for meetings within minutes by summarizing key information, including overviews of relevant emails and documents, specific actionable tasks, and recaps of previous sessions. This minimizes the cognitive load that meeting preparation puts on employees.
Continuously improving and innovating in Microsoft Outlook
New features for the new Microsoft Outlook and Copilot in Outlook wouldn’t be possible without the commitment to continuous improvement that infuses so much of our work. Careful research, attainable planning, honesty and humility around how we measure outcomes, and the agility to adapt to what’s working and what’s not—these are all muscles the Microsoft Digital and product teams are strengthening throughout our ongoing AI and continuous improvement journey.
“We’re an agile organization, and we continue to iterate across teams and features,” says David Gorelik, principal group product manager for Copilot in Outlook engagements, focused on email features. “The learning that comes with hearing from our employees and customers just pours more value into that feedback loop.”
“In an environment where people need to be hyper productive but feel completely inundated with inbound requests, it’s really clear that the ways they work need to evolve. The tools they use need to evolve as well.”
Sarah Spieler, product marketing manager, Microsoft Outlook
The evidence is in how employees are using the new Outlook and Copilot. We’ve seen a virtuous cycle that starts with new features accessed through Outlook and leads to greater AI adoption overall. Without concerted adoption efforts, 50% of Microsoft Digital employees have toggled to the new Outlook of their own accord, simply because the tool is available and its features provide value.
It’s becoming evident that the new Outlook makes for an effective entry point into AI-first behaviors. That’s all the more remarkable considering the decades-long legacy of the tool and the habituation to certain workflows it’s fostered. Users who have switched over to the new Outlook are 3.5 times more likely to engage with Copilot. Outlook is also the third-largest driver of Copilot usage after Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 itself.
“In an environment where people need to be hyper productive but feel completely inundated with inbound requests, it’s really clear that the ways they work need to evolve,” says Sarah Spieler, a product marketing manager within Microsoft Outlook. “The tools they use need to evolve as well.”
Key takeaways
As we’ve witnessed the evolution of Microsoft Outlook usage among our employees, we’ve learned lessons that can help you empower your own people to reimagine their workflows. Here are some trends we’ve noticed and ways we’re approaching them internally at Microsoft:
Everyone’s problems are unique. Some people struggle with drafting, some with keeping up with emails, some with coordination and scheduling. As a result, a one-size-fits-all approach to skilling and adoption around Copilot in Outlook isn’t likely to work. Throughout our wider Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption efforts, we’ve seen firsthand the power of scenario-specific adoption support. As you encourage your employees to build new behaviors that incorporate AI, it will be helpful to provide use cases and examples of workflows that directly apply to their roles or organizations. Your early adopters can help you assemble these scenarios from their own experience. Use these videos as a jumping-off point.
For many people, the biggest blocker is that the new Outlook is more than a fresh skin on an old product. Once they try it out, they understand that it’s different from the previous iteration. In spite of similarities in look and feel and features, the new Outlook provides opportunities for employees to change their relationship with email and scheduling. In your adoption efforts, emphasize that the goal is the same but the pathways are different, with much more capacity for ease of use and productivity.
Even when people get on board with new ways of working, it can take time for them to reconfigure their personalized workflows and fully adopt Copilot. The new Outlook is a very effective inroad into those behaviors. To accommodate people’s attachment to their Dual use, the ability for employees to use both classic and new Outlook side by side is a substantial accelerator for this process. Instead of expecting employees to adopt the new Outlook in one go, encourage them to use their legacy workflows where they feel most comfortable while trying out new processes. From what we’ve experienced, that will help them grow bolder about building new workflows and experimenting with Copilot.
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