| Edit with Copilot lands in Word and PowerPoint |
| Microsoft has now made “Edit with Copilot” generally available in Word and PowerPoint, not just Excel. From 22 April, Copilot now plans and executes multi-step edits directly on your document or deck – restructuring a report, rewriting sections to a different tone, redesigning a slide layout, swapping imagery, or building a deck out from a brief – all while showing you each step so you can adjust as it works. |
| Insights: This is the moment Copilot stops being a sidebar suggestion engine and becomes a co-author working in the document with you. The trick is to start with a clear outline or messy first draft and let Copilot do the heavy lifting on structure and polish. Watch the steps as they appear. It’s available to Microsoft 365 Copilot Premium users. |
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| Claude joins Copilot in Word, Excel and PowerPoint |
| In a notable move, to power the Edit with Copilot feature above, Microsoft has added Anthropic’s Claude as a selectable model inside Copilot for Word, Excel and PowerPoint, sitting alongside the GPT-5.x family. Claude is widely respected for long-form writing, reasoning, and a more measured tone of voice. Giving users a choice of model for drafting work is a real step forward. |
| Insights: Different models have different writing personalities. GPT tends to be punchy and confident, Claude tends to be more considered and structured. For longer documents, reports, or anything where tone matters, it is worth experimenting with both and seeing which suits your brand voice. UK availability may lag the US rollout for some people. |
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| Copilot Basic loses the in-app chat panel – a significant reversal |
| Microsoft has rebranded the free tier as Microsoft 365 Copilot (Basic) and the paid tier as Microsoft 365 Copilot (Premium) – but the bigger story is what Basic users are losing inside the apps. |
| Organisations with 300+ users (Enterprise): The Copilot Chat side panel is being removed entirely from Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote unless you have a Premium licence. Outlook keeps Copilot Chat for Basic users, and the standalone copilot.microsoft.com web experience is unaffected. Organisations under 300 users (SMB): You don’t lose the side panel, but Basic users are dropped to “standard access” – meaning reduced quality and slower performance at busy times, plus prompts nudging you toward a paid licence. This is only six months after Microsoft added Copilot Chat to those apps, so it’s a real about-turn. |
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| Insights: If your team has been getting real value from the free Copilot Chat panel in Word, Excel, or PowerPoint, you now have a decision to make rather than a free ride. For most small businesses the question is simple: identify the two or three people doing the heaviest content, analysis, or admin work and look at Premium for them rather than spreading thin licences across everyone. |
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| Copilot Notebooks become a proper workspace |
| Copilot Notebooks are getting smarter. They can now generate full Word documents and PowerPoint decks from your uploaded references documents, pull in SharePoint content, and OneNote Notebooks, build mind maps from a notebook’s contents, and be shared with a Microsoft 365 Group rather than just individuals. |
| Insights: Notebooks are the underrated feature in the Copilot family and have now moved ahead of ChatGPT’s equivalent Projects feature, which has remained static for some time. If you are working on anything multi-source – a tender response, a research piece, an event plan, a board paper – drop the relevant emails, files, and pages into a Notebook, then let Copilot generate the deliverable from there. It is a much better way of working than starting from a blank document and copy-pasting context in. |
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| ChatGPT moves to GPT-5.5 – and retires Custom GPTs |
| OpenAI launched GPT-5.5 and GPT-5.5 Pro on 23 April, now the default flagship in ChatGPT for Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise users. The bigger structural change came a day earlier: Custom GPTs are being replaced by Workspace Agents, a Codex-powered system aimed squarely at teams. Workspace Agents are designed to take on multi-step, tool-using work across your connected sources, not just answer questions as a chatbot. |
| Insights: The pace of AI improvements is relentless – just 6 weeks after GPT 5.4, we now have GPT 5.5. It really is powerful and outperforms all other models on current benchmarks. If you have built Custom GPTs for your business, do not panic as they’ll still work but do start planning next steps. Workspace Agents are far more capable, but the design philosophy is different: less “personality on top of ChatGPT”, more “specialist worker plugged into your tools”. For most small businesses, this is good news; the old Custom GPTs were limited as other than answer questions, they couldn’t take actions. |
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| ChatGPT Images 2.0 – slides, infographics, and multilingual text that actually works |
OpenAI also shipped ChatGPT Images 2.0 on 21 April, with a new gpt-image-2 model. The headline improvements: it can render multilingual text accurately, keep characters and visual style consistent across up to eight images from one prompt, and produce professional looking infographics, slide-style visuals, maps, and even comic/manga-style sequential art. A significant additional improvement is the ability to understand context. That is, you can point at a website address or past in a social post and ask for a relevant image. |
| Insights: The “AI can’t do text in images” problem is largely solved. That added to its ability to understand websites and text makes ChatGPT genuinely useful for social posts, simple infographics, slide decks, and storyboard. As ever, judge the output against your brand standards, but the floor has just risen significantly. You might want to check whether you still need your Canva subscription. |
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| Sora is shutting down |
| A surprise here, in that OpenAI discontinued Sora, its consumer text-to-video product, on 26 April. The web app and mobile experience are gone, and the Sora API will follow on 24 September. Users can export their content from sora.chatgpt.com/sunset, and unused Sora credits can be redirected to Codex. No direct replacement has been announced. |
| Insights: A rare flagship feature cancellation. If your business built any social, marketing, or training-video workflow around Sora, you need a new tool now and fortunately there are plenty of options: Runway, Pika, Veo, and Kling are the obvious alternatives. OpenAI is concentrating its spend on Codex, agents, and ChatGPT itself rather than standalone creative tools and there’s talk of bringing it all together in a ‘superapp’. Perhaps, video creation will return at that point. |
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| Copilot Cowork available on the Frontier program |
| Copilot Cowork, which can take multi-step tasks across Microsoft 365 on your behalf, is now available via the Frontier program. Cowork is powered by Anthropic’s Claude and combined with Microsoft’s own capabilities, it can plan and execute work across Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Teams, OneDrive, and SharePoint – sending emails, scheduling meetings, drafting documents, posting in Teams, running deep research, and managing files – all from a single natural-language brief, with progress tracked through a dashboard. |
| Insights: This is the most ambitious version of “Copilot as a working agent” Microsoft has shipped yet, and it is also the clearest sign that the future of Copilot is multi-model. Claude for some tasks, GPT for others, with Microsoft routing the work behind the scenes. Less prompting, more delegating and getting stuff done. |
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| Claude steps up: Opus 4.7, a Word add-in, and a wave of connectors |
| April was Anthropic’s loudest month in a while. Claude Opus 4.7 went generally available on 16 April as the new flagship model, with stronger long-form writing, tool use, and reasoning. Three days earlier, Anthropic launched Claude for Word – a beta add-in that puts Claude directly inside Word for Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise subscribers. Then came two waves of connectors: 15 everyday-life connectors on 23 April (calendar, email, fitness, food, travel and more) and 9 creative-tools connectors on 28 April covering Adobe, Blender, Affinity, Ableton, Autodesk, and Splice. |
| Insights: If you write long-form, value a more measured tone, or just want a second AI opinion, Claude is a contender. The connectors are a quiet revolution too: Claude is rapidly catching up with Copilot and ChatGPT on real-world integrations. |
