Driving Productivity: Copilot from Driver’s Seat to Board Seat
- Chris McNulty
- Jul 30
- 13 min read
Updated: Jul 31
Our #SummerOfCopilot series has been exploring Copilot, day by day for the past eight weeks on LinkedIn. I’m also recapping and analyzing our daily posts in my weekly Copilot Navigator newsletter, with a deeper dive here in the Insights blog.
Last week and this week, I’m looking at how Copilot helps business leaders in every role across the C-Suite. We’ll roll that all together in for our next newsletter.
Today, I’ll explore the breaking Copilot developments that have everyone talking: an AI copilot for your car, new features that let your content literally speak to you, smart productivity boosts across Outlook, Teams, and beyond, and even an AI helper for building intranet pages. As part of our #SummerOfCopilot series, this post provides a closer look at what these innovations mean for you as a business leader.
This week includes:
Mercedes Benz adds M365 Copilot and Teams to New CLAs
Copilot in Word – Audio Overviews
Copilot Notebook Audio Summaries: Tailored, formatted, and downloadable
Meetings Recapped in 5 Minute Audio Briefings
Company News Audio Briefings in Viva Connections
Communications Memory
Summarize Emails in Outlook
“Hey Copilot” Voice Activation
Scoped Teams Channel Answers
Excel to PowerPoint Integration for new presentations
Auto-Sections with Copilot in SharePoint
#SummerOfCopilot Week 8 Blog Posts
Week 4: Copilot Goes Ubiquitous – Agents plus Copilot training resources
Our next few posts:
Week 9: Copilot for Leadership (CEO, Boards of Directors, CFO, CMO, CRO, CHRO, COO, CIO, CDO, CAIO and CISO)
Week 10 & 11: Copilot in the Real World (Estee Lauder, Newman’s Own, Hidden Valley Ranch, and more non-salad dressing success with Copilot)
We’ll close out the summer with user tips and tricks, and a comprehensive recap of everything we’ve learned in the Summer of Copilot. Let’s get into it.
Copilot in Your Car: The Ultimate Co-Driver
One of the most buzzworthy developments is the partnership between Microsoft and Mercedes-Benz to integrate Microsoft Teams and 365 Copilot into Mercedes vehicles. It will debut in the upcoming 2026 Mercedes-Benz CLA, effectively making it the first car with built-in Microsoft Copilot capabilities. The goal is to transform your car into a productive workspace when you need it (and only when you need it).
How does it work? When you’re parked, your car’s infotainment screen can function like a mini-conference center – join Teams meetings, see video and shared content. The moment you shift into drive, the system smartly switches to audio-only mode for safety. You continue listening and speaking in the meeting, and thanks to the interior camera, colleagues can still see your face, but you won’t see any distracting visuals. It’s a careful balance: you stay connected, but the tech respects the rules of the road.
What’s more, you can interact with Copilot via voice while driving. Picture this: you’re commuting and ask, “Copilot, read me my last email from the CFO,” and it obliges, summarizing aloud the key points from that message. Or, “Copilot, take a note: remind the team about Q3 goals in our next meeting.” All of this without taking your hands off the wheel or eyes off traffic. Mercedes-Benz describes this as having “the potential to transform the vehicle into a third workspace, complementing the office and home office” – a bold vision that recognizes work isn’t tied to a desk anymore.
Of course, this concept may raise some eyebrows. Is turning cars into offices is a boon for productivity or a recipe for burnout (and potential distraction). Some critics say that technology is invading even our drive time. (I’d note that many folks, including me, got used to the idea of Teams meetings in the car during the pandemic, and that hasn’t gone away.)
But Mercedes and Microsoft are clearly aware of the concerns – that’s why the integration is opt-in and designed with safeguards like automatic video disabling while moving. As a business leader, you might see this as an optional tool: it won’t force anyone to work from the road, but for those days when an urgent issue pops up during your commute, it’s empowering to handle it safely on the go.
From an organizational perspective, think of field service managers, traveling executives, or salespeople: their cars are often their offices already (at least their phones are). Equipping them with seamless, hands-free access to meetings and data could be a game-changer for productivity. And for everyone else, it means if you’re stuck on a long drive, you’re not cut off from critical discussions. The key is to use this tech judiciously – to make drive time productive without extending work into all of your personal time. As always with AI and new tools, balance is everything.
Use Case Example: Jane, a regional director, spends hours each week driving between client sites. With Copilot in her car, she can safely join the Monday executive call en route, then have Copilot read a brief on the next client’s history before arrival. By the time she walks into the meeting, she’s up to speed – without ever pulling over to read documents.
Big Audio Dynamite: Copilot’s New Audio Summaries
If you have been in the habit of talking to your computer screen people might assume you’re just talking to yourself. (Happens to me.) But this summer, your computer will start to talk back.
We live in an age of information overload, and it often feels like there’s no time to read it all. Microsoft’s answer is don’t read, listen. Several new features allow Copilot to convert written updates into spoken words, meaning you can consume information while walking, commuting, or whenever it suits you.
Most of these features are rolling out in the next two months. For full details, check out the Microsoft 365 Roadmap. Let’s break down the new audio summary capabilities and their benefits:
Word Documents – Audio Overview: You might already rely on Copilot to summarize documents in text form. Now Copilot can go a step further and produce an audio overview of any Word document. This feature appears in the document’s Summary section, where with one click, the AI will generate a spoken version of the summary. For a busy leader, this means you could have that 20-page market research report “read” to you in a matter of minutes, highlighting only the most crucial insights. It’s like turning any document into a mini-podcast episode focused on what you need to know.
Copilot Notebooks – Narration on Demand: Copilot Notebook is an AI-generated notebook that compiles notes, files, and context around a project or topic. New updates now let you generate an audio narrative of an entire notebook. Even more impressive, you can customize this narrative. Using natural language, you might ask Copilot to “focus on the budget and timeline sections” or “keep it under 3 minutes and use a formal tone.” The output is an audio file you can download. This essentially turns complex project updates into a tailored audio briefing. If you have a big project binder you’ve been meaning to review, now you can listen to its distilled essence during your commute or flight.
Teams Meetings – Week’s Highlights in Minutes: If you’re leading a team, you probably can’t attend every meeting – but you still need to know what decisions and discussions happened. Copilot’s new capability for Teams can compile multiple meeting transcripts into one succinct audio recap. Imagine it’s Friday and you want to catch up on all the key points from various meetings. Copilot could produce a 5-minute montage with two AI voices summarizing and even lightly conversing about the salient points (think of a news radio segment summarizing the week). It’s engaging and easier to follow than reading raw notes. You’ll hear, for example, “Project X had a budget overrun of 5%, and the team decided to implement cost-saving measures…” in a conversational tone. It’s a lot more digestible than scrolling through transcripts, and you can listen while clearing your inbox or driving home.
Viva Connections – Daily News Podcast: Large organizations often have internal news posts and announcements that employees should read. But employees are busy – newsletters go unread. Viva Connections’ News AI Audio Briefing will automatically take the top 10 internal news items (leadership announcements, HR updates, big project wins) and convert them into an audio digest, delivered through Teams. It’s essentially a daily internal podcast for your company. For leaders, it ensures your messages to staff (and other important news) can reach people even if they don’t open the email – they might listen during their commute or morning coffee. For employees, it’s a convenient way to stay in the loop without dedicating extra screen time. (And you can author News easily in SharePoint or Viva Amplify.)
Collectively, these audio features mark a significant push toward auditory productivity. They acknowledge that not everyone has the time (or ability) to read walls of text, but almost anyone can find time to listen – whether it’s during a workout, on a drive, or while multitasking at the office. From an accessibility standpoint, this is a win too. People with visual impairments or reading difficulties get more content available in spoken form. And from a learning style standpoint, those who absorb information better by hearing it will gain a new way to engage with their work content.
It’s important to highlight that this doesn’t eliminate the written word – it augments it. You still have the full document or written summary if you need to dive in; the audio is an added option. As a leader, you might start to offer both formats for key communications: a written report and an audio summary for those who prefer listening. It’s about meeting your team where they are.
Personally, I’d like to see all of this combined into a new meta feature so I can get my entire daily broadcast in the morning, during my Starbucks run, alongside listening to the New York Times’ “The Daily” podcast. (I’m sure most of you are actually already listening to my Polaris podcast. 😊)
One more thing to watch: Copilot’s communication memory. As mentioned briefly above, starting September 2025 Copilot will begin leveraging the emails and chats you’ve already read to inform its answers to you. In practice, if Copilot is summarizing a project status and you previously read an email about a delay in that project, Copilot can incorporate that detail automatically, as it “remembers” you know it. Essentially, Copilot will know what context you’ve been exposed to and won’t treat you like a blank slate each time – a bit like a human assistant who remembers conversations and uses that to help you better.
New Productivity Features: Little Things Making a Big Difference
Beyond the headline-grabbing car and audio updates, Microsoft has introduced some bread-and-butter productivity features in Copilot that deserve your attention. These might not sound as flashy, but they tackle everyday pain points for knowledge workers. Let’s take a closer look at four such features rolling out as of August 2025, along with how they can help you and your organization.
Summarize Emails in Outlook: Copilot can now summarize lengthy email threads in Outlook with one click. For example, if you’re cc’d on a discussion that spans dozens of replies, Copilot will display a succinct summary at the top of the thread. No more scrolling and skimming – you get the gist in moments. Even colleagues who don’t have a Copilot license benefit, as the summary text can be shared or is visible to them as well (Microsoft’s goal here is to democratize AI assistance in the workplace).
Important: this is coming to Copilot Chat – it won’t be limited to the $30 Copilot seat license.
Benefit: This feature can save hours each week, reduce miscommunications, and ensure important details aren’t missed just because you didn’t read every single email.
“Hey Copilot” Voice Activation: Instead of clicking the Copilot icon or typing a prompt, you can simply say out loud, “Hey Copilot,” and ask your question or give a command. This voice activation is coming to Windows 11 and the Copilot mobile app. This may not be the single biggest update here, to be fair.
Microsoft is refining it to avoid inadvertent activations (we’ve all had experiences with voice assistants chiming in uninvited).
As I’ve noted before, use carefully in common areas to avoid other people asking the “wrong” Copilot (e.g., my Copilot, not theirs.)
Scoped Teams Channel Queries: If your company has many Teams channels, you know information can be siloed by project or department. Now, when asking Copilot something in Teams, you can specify a channel to ground the answer. For instance, in your “Marketing Launch” channel you might ask, “Hey Copilot, what’s our launch budget status?” The AI will only use messages and files from that channel to answer, giving you a relevant answer like, “The latest budget in this channel is $250K, and 80% is already allocated”.
Benefit: This dramatically improves the signal-to-noise ratio of Copilot’s answers. You get precise, context-specific insights without worrying that it’s pulling in unrelated info from other teams. It also reinforces data security by keeping the query scoped to where the info lives (no chance of an answer accidentally revealing info from a team that shouldn’t share it).
Excel to PowerPoint Integration: I often need to include charts or tables from Excel when creating PowerPoint decks for meetings. Copilot makes this easier by directly fetching data or visuals from Excel and inserting them into PowerPoint upon request. You could say in Copilot, “Insert the sales growth chart from the Q2 Results Excel into this slide,” and it will place that chart onto the slide, correctly formatted.
These features might seem small in isolation, but together they streamline many daily tasks. Microsoft’s strategy appears to be embedding Copilot into the everyday fabric of work – not just big dramatic use cases, but the little moments like triaging email, assembling reports, or asking for info. As a leader, it’s worth encouraging your team to experiment with these tools. The learning curve is generally mild (it’s built into tools they already use), and the productivity gains can be significant over time.
Here’s a quick reference table summarizing these four features and what they bring to the table:
New Copilot Feature (Release Aug 2025) | Why It Matters |
Outlook Email Thread Summaries (Roadmap ID 498320) | Saves time & improves clarity: Cuts through long email threads so you grasp the key points at a glance, even if you’ve missed emails. Also shares AI insights beyond just Copilot licensees, fostering a more informed team. |
“Hey Copilot” Voice Activation (Roadmap ID 497848) | Hands-free productivity: Invoke Copilot while multitasking or on the move. Great for accessibility and natural interaction, reducing reliance on keyboard. |
Teams Channel-Specific Queries (Roadmap ID 497915) | Contextual accuracy: Get answers drawn only from the relevant project space. Minimizes noise and cross-team confusion, enhancing trust in Copilot’s responses. |
Excel-to-PowerPoint Data Pull (Roadmap ID 497537) | Efficiency & accuracy: Builds slides with live data directly from the source. Less copy-paste means fewer errors and faster updates when data changes. |
Table: Four new Copilot features and their benefits to your workflow.
AI-Powered Intranet: SharePoint’s “Sections with Copilot”
Internal sites and pages are the backbone of sharing information across a company – whether it’s a resources page for sales teams or an HR policy hub. The challenge has been that not everyone has the design skills or time to make these pages appealing and up to date. Here’s where SharePoint’s new “Sections with Copilot” feature steps in to help democratize content creation within your organization.
What It Does: Instead of manually crafting a section of a SharePoint page (deciding the layout, writing the content, adding images, formatting everything just right), you provide Copilot with a prompt. For example, “Create a section summarizing our Q3 sales results with a bar chart and three bullet points of key wins.” Copilot will fetch the relevant data (if available in your files or notes), generate a draft text for that summary, select a relevant chart (or create one from data), and even suggest or insert images (perhaps a stock photo or a product image) to make the section visually engaging. All of this happens in seconds. If the result is close but not perfect, you can refine it by telling Copilot what to change. Maybe, “use a more enthusiastic tone” or “add a call-to-action button at the end.” Copilot will adjust the section accordingly.
Why It Matters: SharePoint’s Copilot-driven page creation lets you quickly generate an entire page or update just a section with a simple prompt. This flexibility means you can insert or refresh specific content without reworking the whole page. Whether launching a new intranet destination or updating an existing page, Copilot empowers users to keep information dynamic and relevant with minimal effort.
This feature turns what could be a 2-hour task into a 10-minute task. For non-technical staff, it lowers the barrier to contributing to the intranet. A marketing manager can quickly publish an update page about a campaign without needing a web designer. This keeps information flowing. When pages are easier to make, they’ll be made more often, and kept more current.
From a leadership perspective, think about speed and consistency. You often want teams to document their work and share successes or lessons learned, but it gets de-prioritized because it’s labor-intensive. With AI assistance, you can encourage a culture of documentation and sharing: “Just spend a few minutes telling Copilot to draft the project recap page, it’s that easy.”
Real World Feedback: Early users have been impressed – one SharePoint expert dubbed it “the intranet editor’s dream,” a tool that gives everyday users the superpower of a seasoned web content team. Some have compared the experience to using modern AI website builders (like those in Notion or Wix) but tailored for enterprise needs and data.
Best Practice: Use Copilot to draft sections for you, but treat it as a first draft. Have the content owner or subject matter expert review and tweak the final bits. This ensures AI-enhanced content remains human-approved and trustworthy.
Embracing Copilot: How to Lead in the Age of AI
All these advancements underscore a key point: the future of work is here, and it’s augmented by AI. As a business leader, adopting these tools should be done strategically and thoughtfully:
Monitor Microsoft’s announcements and the Microsoft 365 Roadmap to stay updated on new feature rollouts.
Subscribe to newsletters and tech community updates for timely information about new Copilot capabilities and organizational success stories.
Pilot new features with select teams, gather feedback, and use insights to shape best practices for your company.
Communicate openly about AI-powered tools to address concerns, emphasizing employee empowerment and privacy safeguards.
Establish clear usage guidelines for features like Copilot in vehicles and AI-generated content review.
Offer brief training sessions or resources to help employees adopt new features and identify champions to support team learning.
Microsoft’s Copilot continues to evolve with a clear message: work smarter, not harder. By integrating AI into more facets of our work – yet doing so in a considered, user-centric way – they are laying building blocks for the modern workplace. It’s a workplace where mundane tasks are minimized, and human focus is maximized.
In this #SummerOfCopilot, we’ve seen leaps that once sounded like sci-fi: your car acting as your admin, your Word docs talking to you, your AI assistant having memory of your context, and your intranet building itself. And we’re only at the beginning of this journey. As these tools become available to you, embrace them with curiosity. They might not all be perfect at first, but with each iteration (and your feedback), they’ll improve.
Stay tuned to our Insights blog and the Copilot Navigator newsletter for continued updates on the AI tools changing the way we work. Thanks.
This is a powerful shift in how we view productivity tools. In my work with Reputation Management Consulting UAE, I see that true productivity gains must be protected by a strong online reputation. A Copilot's insights are most valuable when they support a brand that stakeholders already know and trust.