GPT-5 Is Now in Microsoft Copilot: What It Means for Your Workday

Microsoft has officially rolled out GPT-5 into Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Studio, marking a major leap in AI-powered productivity.

The update, released 7^th August 2025, introduces a smarter, dual-mode system that adapts to the complexity of your tasks. Whether you're looking to draft emails, analyse data, or evaluate proposals, GPT-5 is helping you work more efficiently and with more insight than ever. 

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What this article covers:

• Smarter Responses with Dual-Mode Intelligence
• Where You'll See GPT-5 in Action
• Potential Challenges with GPT-5
• Future Developments
• How to Get Started with GPT-5 in Copilot

Smarter Responses with Dual-Mode Intelligence

GPT-5 brings a two-tiered reasoning system to Copilot. For quick queries, you can now expect quick answers, powered by a high-throughput model. For more complicated requests, GPT-5 will use its deeper reasoning engine: taking time to understand context, plan a response, and verify its output. Its human-like approach will offer both speed and depth depending on the situation and context of your request.

A great example of this is reviewing Request for Proposal (RFP) responses. Copilot will quickly summarise each one, but if you ask for it to rank them based on specific criteria, GPT-5’s reasoning model will provide deeper, more thoughtful recommendations based on the context of the information you provide.

Where You'll See GPT-5 in Action

GPT-5 is now powering multiple experiences across Microsoft 365. Here are some of the ways you can make the most of it:

• Copilot Chat: Understands your prompt and routes it to the most appropriate model – using either quick answers or deep reasoning.
• Word and Outlook: Draft and summarise content with improved tone and structure.
• Excel and PowerPoint: Generate formulas, visualisations, and narratives from natural language.
• Teams: Gain meeting insights and recaps. (Screen-share analysis will also be coming soon!)
• Copilot Studio: Create customer agents that can reason both over the web and company data.

Examples of GPT-5 in the Everyday

Some quick examples of how GPT-5 works for you and your business, every day:

• Marketing Evaluation: Say a member of your Marketing team asks Copilot to summarise RFP responses from prospective suppliers. Copilot will quickly scan the relevant documents and provide a summary. When followed up with a request to evaluate and rank the responses, it switches to GPT-5’s reasoning model and delivers a well-rounded recommendation.
• Writing Assistance: GPT-5 helps refine tone and structure in your Word documents - turning rough drafts into polished documents. It can also generate long-form content from bullet points or summarise longer documents into executive summaries.
• Data Analysis: GPT-5 can interpret natural language queries in Excel like, “Show me sales trends over the last quarter,” and generate charts, formulas, and insights instantly.
• Meeting Recaps: GPT-5 provides intelligent summaries of Teams meetings, highlighting decisions, action items, and unresolved issues. It can even analyse shared screens to extract relevant content.

Potential Challenges with GPT-5

Whilst GPT-5’s capabilities are undeniable, there are a few potential hurdles that you may want to consider:

• Over-reliance on AI: It is easy for users to become too dependent on Copilot for decision-making. This can often lead to critical human judgment and context being overlooked.
• Accuracy and hallucinations: Although GPT-5 has become more reliable, there is still the risk of it producing incorrect or misleading information, especially when interpreting ambiguous prompts.
• Data sensitivity: GPT-5’s ability to reason over work data is powerful, but it means organisations must ensure proper access controls and data governance are in place to prevent unintended exposure.
• User training: The capabilities of GPT-5 have evolved, so users may need guidance on how to craft effective prompts and interpret AI-generated responses appropriately.

Future Developments

Microsoft has signalled that GPT-5 is just the beginning of a broader evolution in Copilot capabilities. In the future, you may expect to see:

• Multimodal support: Enabling Copilot to understand and generate content across text, images, and audio.
• Expanded agent autonomy: Allowing Copilot agents to take more proactive roles in managing workflows, responding to external triggers, and making decisions based on business logic.
• Deeper integration with third-party tools: Enhancing compatibility with platforms outside the Microsoft ecosystem.
• Improved personalisation: Tailoring Copilot's behaviour and tone based on individual user preferences and roles.

How to Get Started with GPT-5 in Copilot

If you’re already a licensed Microsoft 365 Copilot user, you're in luck! GPT-5 is already available. Simply open any Microsoft 365 app like Word, Excel, or Teams and start using Copilot as usual, and you’ll benefit from GPT -5 automatically. To be specific, you will only see this option if your company has enabled the early release feature on the environment, see here for more details.

For those without a license, Microsoft has announced that GPT-5 will be rolled out in the coming weeks. You can learn more and follow updates on the official Microsoft 365 Blog.

If you have any further questions on Copilot and GPT-5, or need more advice on how to use it, please don’t hesitate to reach out.