🔹 Feature: Apps Inside Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat — The New, Easier Way (Easier Than Building an MCP Server)
🔹 What It Does: Until now, the route for an app to deeply integrate with Copilot was building an MCP server — useful, but a real engineering effort. Now apps can render their own interactive experience directly inside Copilot chat. The seller logs a Dynamics 365 Sales opportunity, the manager approves a Power Apps form, the marketer edits a flyer in Adobe Express — all without leaving the conversation. The catalog is small today, but the standard is open and the trajectory is clear. 🧩
What Is It Giving You:
✅ Real Interactive App UI Inside Copilot: This isn’t “Copilot calls an API and pastes a string back.” Agents bring the app’s actual interactive widgets and forms into the chat surface — users complete real work in-app without ever switching tabs.
✅ Concrete Workflows On Day One: Schedule meetings in Outlook (GA), log opportunities in Dynamics 365 Sales (public preview), handle cases in Dynamics 365 Customer Service (public preview), and run any line-of-business workflow built on Microsoft Power Apps (public preview).
✅ Curated Partner Apps: Adobe Express, Adobe Acrobat, Base44, Box, Canva, Coursera, Figma, Miro, Monday.com, Optimizely, and Wix — discoverable in the Microsoft 365 Agent Store.
✅ Easier Than Standing Up an MCP Server: Backed by two open extensibility standards — MCP Apps and the OpenAI Apps SDK — both designed for exactly this pattern. Familiar dev patterns, much less custom plumbing. Your dev team can wire an internal app into Copilot chat without building a full MCP server from scratch.
✅ Open Standards, Not a Walled Garden: MCP Apps and OpenAI Apps SDK are open — any ISV, partner, or your own internal team can plug in. The catalog WILL grow.
✅ Same Governance as Every Other Agent: IT decides which apps are available — globally, per agent, or per department. Each agent operates strictly within existing app permissions and identity boundaries — no new unmanaged entry points. Monitor everything end-to-end in Agent 365.
📋 Honest take on where this is today:
🔸 The app catalog is small — Microsoft apps + ~10 named partners. Today’s menu is short.
🔸 But the standards are open. Anyone — vendor or your own developers — can plug in.
🔸 In 12 months your Copilot will feel less like a chatbot and more like a control panel for the whole work day. Worth watching closely now, even if you wait to adopt broadly.
🚀 The path to \”stop tab-switching\” just got radically shorter.
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