Copilot now answers the phone, and reads your whole SharePoint

Microsoft’s September update is mostly incremental, with one exception worth planning around. Teams Phone Agent reached general availability, which means an agent answering customer phone calls is now a supported product rather than a preview you were testing. Copilot in SharePoint and Copilot in OneDrive also went generally available, with OneDrive rebuilt on the SharePoint foundation.

The phone agent is a different kind of deployment

Every Copilot feature until now sat behind a screen, with an employee reading the output before anything reached a customer. A phone agent removes that. It talks to your customer directly, in real time, and whatever it says is what your company said.

That moves the work from configuration to policy. Before you turn it on, decide what it may promise, what it must escalate, and how a caller reaches a person. Also note the disclosure duty that took effect in August: a caller has to be able to tell they are talking to software, by the first interaction.

SharePoint and OneDrive going GA widens the blast radius

Copilot answering questions across SharePoint and OneDrive is useful in exact proportion to how well your permissions are set. It respects existing access rules, which is the problem. Most organisations have folders that are technically open to everyone and stayed quiet because nobody browsed there. A search tool that reads everything a user may read will find the salary spreadsheet in the open folder.

• ✳Audit site and folder permissions before you switch it on, starting with anything inherited from a migration
• ✳Look specifically for files shared with the whole organisation years ago by someone who has since left
• ✳Decide where HR, finance and board material lives, and confirm those sites are restricted rather than merely unadvertised
• ✳Run a few deliberately nosy queries as a normal user and see what comes back

Smaller changes worth knowing

Copilot Chat now takes agents and skills inline: type a slash to call an agent, an at-sign to call a skill, without leaving the conversation. Teams and Outlook got a refreshed Copilot layout, and the mobile app gained a record feature. These are quality-of-life changes. Mention them in your next internal update rather than scheduling training around them.

One scheduling note: GA means your tenant may get these without you asking. If you want the permissions audit to happen before the search tool does, that work starts now.