Microsoft's Copilot Wave 2 joined notebooks, search and agent controls
Microsoft's April 23, 2025 Wave 2 announcement added Copilot Notebooks, enterprise search and an Agent Store, while putting Researcher and Analyst in a licensed Frontier rollout.
Historical reporting: Source 0 is Microsoft's dated April 23, 2025 Microsoft 365 Copilot Wave 2 announcement. Source 1 is a current Microsoft Learn requirements record, used only for present Copilot Notebook licensing and storage context; it does not establish the April rollout, product design or customer access state.
Key takeaways
- Microsoft's Wave 2 announcement named Copilot Notebooks, Copilot Search, an Agent Store and personal memory as distinct product surfaces.
- Researcher and Analyst were rolling out through the Frontier program, which Microsoft defined as early access for licensed customers while innovations remained in development.
- Current Notebook requirements show why access and storage must be reviewed separately from a launch announcement.
Wave 2 put several assistant surfaces in one release[source 1]
Microsoft announced the Microsoft 365 Copilot Wave 2 spring release on April 23, 2025. The announcement named an updated Copilot app, AI-powered Search, a business Create experience, Copilot Notebooks and an Agent Store. Treating those as one undifferentiated feature would lose the useful product detail. Search was described as a way to find information across organization and connected-app data; Notebooks collected selected material for grounded actions and insights; the Store was a place to find agents. The event therefore widened the assistant surface through separate retrieval, context-assembly and agent-discovery functions. It did not show that an organization enabled all of them, connected every source, or approved each agent for every group.
Notebooks made selected work material a context boundary[source 1]
Microsoft said Copilot Notebooks could gather notes, documents, websites and meeting recordings, then ground Copilot on the notebook's contents while scanning source material for updates. The company also described a podcast-style audio overview. This is a useful assistant pattern because it puts a selected collection between a broad tenant and a generated response. But selected does not mean verified. A notebook can contain stale documents, incomplete recordings, conflicting web material or data a user is not entitled to share more widely. The April page did not provide an independent accuracy result for notebook answers, nor did it say a generated insight was a decision. A team still needed to review references, access controls and the resulting action before relying on it.
Agent availability and governance were separate claims[source 1]
The announcement said Researcher and Analyst were rolling out through the Agent Store to customers in Microsoft's Frontier program. Microsoft defined that program as early access for Microsoft 365 Copilot license holders while new innovations were still in development. The page also said organizations could use administrative tools to enable, disable or block agents for particular users or groups, with the Agent Management capability generally available. Those statements belong to different evidence categories: an early product rollout, and a governance control. Neither proves that a particular tenant received the agents, that an administrator chose to enable them, or that a generated analysis was correct. The event supports those product and control descriptions, not an operational outcome at a customer.
Current requirements expose storage and license dependencies[source 2]
Microsoft's current Learn requirements page says Copilot Notebooks need a Microsoft Copilot or Copilot Chat license and rely on Microsoft 365 and SharePoint infrastructure. It further says Copilot Pages and Notebooks share a user-owned SharePoint Embedded container with Loop My workspace, while interactive sharing can depend on Loop being enabled. This is current technical context, read on October 24, 2026, not an April 2025 feature claim. It explains why a real rollout has more than a launch headline: licensing, identity, SharePoint storage, retention and sharing configuration can affect the usable product. The April source does not establish an organization's configuration, and the current requirements do not rewrite its release timing or Frontier eligibility.
Sources
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