How to Use Researcher in Microsoft 365 Copilot (and What Changes From October)

Researcher is one of the most useful parts of Microsoft 365 Copilot and one of the least used. Most people with a Copilot licence have never opened it, and the ones who have often treat it like a slower version of Copilot Chat.

It is worth getting right now, because Microsoft is changing how it looks. From 21 October 2026 Researcher moves onto the same platform as the rest of Copilot, and several of its own tabs and controls disappear. The research itself stays. This guide covers what Researcher is for, how to get good reports out of it and where everything is moving to.

Key takeaways

• Researcher is a reasoning agent built for multi-step research. It works across your emails, meetings, chats and files as well as the web, and produces a structured, cited report.
• It is included with a Microsoft 365 Copilot licence, including Copilot Business. It is not part of the free Copilot Chat experience.
• Use it for questions that need several sources pulled together. Use Chat for quick answers.
• From 21 October to 30 December 2026, Researcher's own tabs and report-length control are retired and replaced by shared Copilot features. No admin action is needed.
• The Sites control is being retired too. You now steer Researcher to specific websites by naming them in your prompt.

What Researcher is for

Copilot Chat is built for quick turnaround. Ask a question, get an answer in seconds. Researcher is built for the opposite: questions where the answer lives in several places and has to be assembled.

It takes your question, plans a line of enquiry, searches your Microsoft 365 content and the web, reasons over what it finds and writes a report with citations you can click through and check. That takes minutes rather than seconds, and it is supposed to.

The grounding is what makes it valuable inside a firm. Through Work IQ, Researcher can draw on the emails, meeting transcripts, Teams chats and SharePoint files you already have access to, and it respects your existing permissions. It will not surface anything you could not open yourself.

Good jobs for Researcher

The best Researcher prompts are the ones you would otherwise hand to someone with half a day to spare:

• Client briefings. Pull together everything from the last six months with a client, including emails, meeting notes and open actions, into a one-page briefing before a review meeting.
• Project catch-up. Summarise where a matter or engagement stands, what was agreed and what is outstanding, for someone picking it up cold.
• Market and competitor scans. Combine public web sources with your own internal notes on a sector or competitor.
• Policy and regulation questions. Compare your internal policy documents against current published guidance and flag the gaps.
• Proposal groundwork. Gather what the firm has already written on a topic before drafting something new.

If the question could be answered by reading one document, it is a Chat job. If it needs five sources and some judgement, it is a Researcher job.

How to get a good report

Brief it like a colleague. Say who the report is for, what decision it supports and what format you want back. "A one-page briefing for a partner before a client meeting, with open issues listed at the end" gets a far better result than "tell me about this client".

Point it at sources. Name the client, the project or the documents that matter. If you want particular websites used, name them in the prompt, for example "use information from gov.uk and icaew.com". That expresses a preference rather than a strict rule, so check the citations if the source matters.

Answer its questions. Researcher often asks clarifying questions before it starts. Answer them properly. It is the cheapest way to improve the result.

Check the citations. Every claim should link back to a source. For anything going to a client or into a decision, click through on the important ones. Researcher is thorough, but it is still AI, and a citation is only as good as what it points to.

Choose the model if you need to. Where your firm has enabled Anthropic, Researcher can use Claude models as well as OpenAI's. Our guide to the AI models in Copilot explains the difference and the UK data considerations.

What is changing from October

Microsoft is rebuilding Researcher on shared Copilot platform components. The retirement starts on 21 October 2026 and is expected to finish by 30 December 2026. It rolls out gradually, so people in the same firm may see the change at different times.

Here is where things move to:

• Report length control: retired. Researcher now picks an appropriate length itself. If you need something short, say so in your prompt.
• History tab: your previous Researcher conversations appear in your normal Copilot conversation history.
• Saved prompts tab: saved prompts live in the shared Copilot prompt experience.
• Reports tab: tracking and managing reports moves to shared experiences such as Task Hub.
• Explore tab and recommended prompts: prompt discovery moves into the wider Copilot experience.

Separately, the Sites control, which let Frontier users build a list of websites for a research request, is being retired this month. As above, you now name the sites in your prompt instead. Naming sites expresses a preferred scope rather than a strict allowlist, and tenant web search settings still decide whether Researcher can use web content at all.

None of this needs admin action. What it does need is a heads-up to anyone who uses Researcher regularly, and an update to any internal guides or training material with screenshots of the old tabs. Microsoft recommends exactly that.

Researcher, Notebooks or Cowork?

Copilot now has several tools that overlap, so it helps to be clear:

• Researcher answers a question with a one-off report.
• Copilot Notebooks is a long-running workspace for a project, where you collect sources and keep coming back.
• Cowork does the work, producing files and drafting actions, and is billed per task in Copilot Credits.

A useful pattern is to run Researcher first, save the report into a notebook and use it as a reference for the deliverables that follow.

The honest summary

Researcher is one of the clearest returns on a Copilot licence, and most firms are leaving it on the table. The October changes are cosmetic rather than fundamental: the tabs move, the research stays. Take the moment to show your people what it is for, because the firms getting the most from it are the ones where someone took twenty minutes to demonstrate a good prompt.

At IQIT we help UK firms get real value from Copilot, including hands-on training on Researcher, Notebooks and the rest of the toolkit using your own work. If you want your team using Researcher properly, get in touch.