I paid Microsoft's premium Copilot agents to do my work - they were confidently bad at it
A recent experiment with Microsoft's Copilot agents revealed significant shortcomings in their performance. Despite the company's heavy investment in AI technology, the results from the agents were often unhelpful and frustrating. The experience highlighted the gap between expectations for AI assistance and the current capabilities of these tools in a business context.
- ▪Microsoft is investing heavily in AI features, including building data centers and licensing models from various companies.
- ▪The Copilot agents are designed to assist with tasks like writing memos and organizing meetings, but often produce inaccurate results.
- ▪In a test, the Copilot agent failed to deliver a usable Excel file despite claiming to have created one.
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| Original publisher | ZDNet |
| Canonical URL | https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-365-premium-copilot-agents-hands-on/ |
| Publication time | Wed, 03 Jun 2026 14:43:41 GMT |
| Retrieval time | 2026-06-03T14:47:10.367Z |
| Last seen | 2026-06-03T14:47:10.367Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | n6I3qsMACswO |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Innovation Home Innovation Artificial Intelligence I paid Microsoft's premium Copilot agents to do my work - they were confidently bad at it Can you get a Copilot agent to do your work for you? I tried, but the AI wasn't ready to play along. Written by Ed Bott, Senior Contributing EditorSenior Contributing Editor June 3, 2026 at 7:43 a.m. PT The Microsoft Copilot Analyst agent at work Ed Bott/ZDNETFollow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google.ZDNET's key takeawaysCopilot agents are built to help with research and analysis. In my tests, those agents didn't produce useful results.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at ZDNet.
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