Microsoft plans to expand the reach of its OneDrive generative AI assistant for people who use OneDrive on the web. This week, the company revealed on its Microsoft 365 Roadmap site that Copilot is scheduled to roll out to OneDrive web users sometime in May.
The listing on the Microsoft 365 Roadmap site states:
Copilot in OneDrive, available on OneDrive for Web, will allow you to ask questions and get information from files in your OneDrive without having to open the files. It will also summarize one or multiple files. Copilot in OneDrive will work on the following file types: DOC, DOCX, FLUID, LOOP, PPT, PPTX, XLSX, PDF, ODT, ODP, RTF, ASPX, RTF, TXT, HTM, and HTML.
This new feature will require a subscription to Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365. In January 2024, the company revealed that Copilot for Microsoft 365 was now generally available for all businesses. The cost of adding Copilot to a Microsoft 365 business plan is $30 a month per person.
Microsoft has been paying a lot more attention to its OneDrive cloud storage services in the last few months. In October 2023, the company first announced its plans for "OneDrive 3.0" with a new user interface and features including a new People hub that organizes cloud files based on the people that have shared them with the user.
That new design started rolling out for personal users of OneDrive earlier this week, and it will continue through the month of February.
Microsoft also rolled out its new OneDrive app for Teams users in December. It includes many of the same new features the company revealed in October, including the People hub, along with the Shared View section, which lets users see any stored file that"s been shared by someone else with you, along with the For You hub, which shows off any AI-recommended files you might have stored on your account.