Microsoft joins the club of deep reasoning with its Researcher and Analyst models

Microsoft has unveiled Researcher and Analyst, its own AI reasoning agents integrated into Microsoft 365 Copilot, its AI chatbot. These first two models are capable of securely analyzing large amounts of data from both the company’s internal sources (emails, meetings, files, chats, etc.) and the Internet, to deliver advanced responses.

Although both Researcher and Analyst are still in development, these reasoning agents will begin to be implemented for Microsoft 365 Copilot customers in April through early access via a “Frontier” program.

How Microsoft Copilot’s Researcher and Analyst work

With the launch of these two reasoning agents, Microsoft is following the trail of other major companies that, in recent months, have presented their own deep reasoning models, also known as “deep research” models. Some examples are: Deep Research by Perplexity, DeepSeek R1, Deep Research by ChatGPT, or the recent Gemini 2.5.

An aspect that sets Researcher and Analyst apart from other reasoning AIs is their capability to access both company work information and the web.

Researcher

This model has been designed to assist users in conducting in-depth and complex research. For its development, Deep Research by ChatGPT was combined with the advanced orchestration and deep search capabilities of Microsoft 365 Copilot.

A notable capacity of Researcher is its ability to leverage third-party data through connectors to access information from external sources such as applications like Salesforce, ServiceNow, Confluence, and, of course, Microsoft 365 Copilot itself.

Microsoft highlights some use cases for this agent: “You can use Researcher to create a detailed go-to-market strategy based on the context of all your work data and broader competitive data from the web; identify white space opportunities for a new product based on emerging trends and internal data; or create a comprehensive quarterly report for a client review detailing ongoing work along with the latest market analysis.”

Analyst

While its counterpart is intended for deep research, Analyst is designed for expert data processing, capable of transforming raw data into coherent and strategic information in just a few minutes.

Microsoft drew on the o3-mini reasoning model from OpenAI, optimizing it for advanced data analysis to develop Analyst. This agent “uses chain reasoning to solve problems iteratively, taking the necessary steps to refine its reasoning and provide a high-quality response that reflects human analytical thinking.”

Furthermore, Analyst can execute Python to tackle the most complex queries and is also capable of seeing the code it executes in real-time, verifying its function.

The tech giant notes: “you can use Analyst to convert scattered raw data across various spreadsheets into a demand forecast for a new product, a visualization of customer purchasing patterns, or a revenue projection.”

Photo: Microsoft