New Intelligence: GPT-5 Arrives in Microsoft Copilot and Beyond

Today marks a monumental moment in artificial intelligence: GPT-5, OpenAI’s most advanced AI system to date, is officially rolling out. This powerful new intelligence is making its debut in Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft Copilot Studio across the world. This isn't just an upgrade; it's a significant leap in intelligence that promises to make AI even more powerful, especially when applied to our daily work.

Microsoft is deeply committed to bringing the latest AI innovations to its users. As part of this commitment, OpenAI’s newest models are made available in Microsoft 365 Copilot within just 30 days of their release. What does this mean for you? It means Copilot is constantly evolving, tuned specifically for work and tailored to your business needs, all while maintaining the security, compliance, and privacy you've come to expect from Microsoft. GPT-5 is not just for one product; it's being incorporated into a wide variety of Microsoft offerings, enhancing capabilities across consumer, developer, and enterprise platforms.

Table of Contents

1. The "Two-Brain Approach" of GPT-5 in Copilot: Smarter, More Adaptable AI

2. Widespread Availability: Who Gets Access and How

3. GPT-5 Across the Microsoft Ecosystem: Empowering Developers and Enterprises

4. Copilot with GPT-5 vs. Researcher: Knowing When to Use What

5. Enhanced AI Safety Profile: Trust and Responsibility

6. Conclusion

   
   

Key Takeaways

• GPT-5 Released: Now available in Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Studio—OpenAI’s most advanced model yet.

• Smart Response System: Uses a “Two-Brain Approach” to switch between fast replies and deep reasoning.

• Wide Access: Available today for Microsoft 365 Copilot users; rolling out soon to all, including free users via Smart mode.

• Integrated Ecosystem: Powers Microsoft 365, GitHub Copilot, Visual Studio Code, and Azure AI Foundry.

• Copilot vs. Researcher: Copilot handles everyday complex prompts; Researcher focuses on deep, source-heavy tasks.

• Stronger Safety: GPT-5 passed Microsoft’s toughest AI safety tests.

The "Two-Brain Approach" of GPT-5 in Copilot: Smarter, More Adaptable AI

One of the most exciting advancements GPT-5 brings to Copilot is its innovative "two-brain approach". For the first time, Copilot can not only understand your prompt but also use GPT-5’s real-time router to intelligently choose the best model to process your request and generate a response. This clever system is designed to mirror how humans approach problems – sometimes we need a quick answer, and other times we need to delve deeper and reason through a complex issue.

Here’s how this "two-brain approach" works:

High-Throughput Model

For common or routine questions, Copilot prioritizes speed. It uses a smart, efficient model to quickly craft succinct responses to your straightforward queries. Think of it as your AI quickly giving you a simple summary or a direct answer. For example, if you ask Copilot to track down and summarize RFP responses from different agencies, it will understand this simple request, scan your work data, and quickly provide the list you asked for.

Deeper Reasoning Model

When a prompt is more complex or open-ended, Copilot is now smart enough to detect that it requires advanced reasoning. In these situations, Copilot will use GPT-5’s deeper reasoning model. This model takes its time to craft a plan, gather and comprehend all relevant context, and even check its work before providing a thorough response. This allows Copilot to apply relevant, proprietary context from your full work data – including documents, emails, meetings, and chats – to a highly specific process. So, if you go a step further and ask Copilot to help evaluate and stack-rank those RFP responses, it recognizes this is a more complex request and routes it to the reasoning model, giving you a thoughtful recommendation.

The result is a Copilot that can provide both fast, fluent responses and deep, reasoned analyses. This dual capability makes the GPT-5 era of Copilot incredibly powerful and versatile.

Widespread Availability: Who Gets Access and How

The good news is that GPT-5 in Copilot is becoming broadly available, ensuring many users can benefit from its enhanced intelligence.

For Licensed Microsoft 365 Copilot Users

If you have a Microsoft 365 Copilot license, GPT-5 is available to you starting today. You can leverage it to reason over both web data and your work data – this includes your calendar, emails, chats, documents, meetings, and contacts – to receive fully contextual responses. You'll see a new "Try GPT-5" button in Copilot Chat. Once activated for a session, Copilot will use GPT-5. These users also receive priority access for more predictable quality and performance.

For Users Without Microsoft 365 Copilot Licenses

GPT-5 began rolling out today for these users as well, with availability for everyone expected in the coming weeks. These users will receive standard access.

For Free Microsoft Copilot Users

Everyone can experience the power of GPT-5 in Copilot for free. Simply go to copilot.microsoft.com or use the Copilot app on Windows, Mac, Android, and iOS devices. The new Smart mode within Microsoft Copilot specifically utilizes the latest GPT-5 model to help you discover the best possible solutions to your queries.

This broad rollout ensures that a wide range of users, from enterprises to individual consumers, can begin leveraging GPT-5's advanced capabilities immediately.

GPT-5 Across the Microsoft Ecosystem

GPT-5 isn't confined to just a few products; it's being integrated across Microsoft’s vast ecosystem, enhancing capabilities for developers and businesses alike.

Microsoft 365 Copilot

With GPT-5, Microsoft 365 Copilot gains improved abilities in reasoning through complex questions, maintaining flow in longer conversations, and better understanding the user's context. This allows enterprise users to apply OpenAI’s most advanced models directly to their work responsibilities, enhancing productivity.

Microsoft Copilot Studio:

Developers and users building custom agents in Copilot Studio can now select GPT-5 as their agent’s primary model. This enables their custom agents to take on more complex and ambitious business processes.

GitHub Copilot and Visual Studio Code:

GPT-5 is being brought to all paid GitHub Copilot plans. This means developers will be able to write, test, and deploy code across GitHub Copilot Chat, Visual Studio Code, and GitHub Mobile with OpenAI’s best model for coding and agentic tasks. OpenAI notes that this model excels at completing longer and more complex coding and agentic tasks end-to-end. Developers using Visual Studio Code can also use GPT-5 to develop agents within the code editor through the Azure AI Foundry extension.

Azure AI Foundry:

For developers, all GPT-5 models are now available in Azure AI Foundry. This platform is supported by Microsoft’s built-in model router, which evaluates each prompt and decides the optimal model to use based on complexity, performance needs, and cost efficiency. All of this comes with the robust enterprise-grade security, compliance, and privacy protections available in Azure.

These integrations showcase how GPT-5 is set to transform how professionals interact with AI tools across various facets of their work, from coding to business process automation.

Copilot with GPT-5 vs. Researcher: Knowing When to Use What

With the introduction of GPT-5 to Copilot, it's important to understand the distinctions between Copilot and another powerful Microsoft AI tool, Researcher.

While GPT-5 dramatically enhances Copilot’s ability to handle complex, everyday prompts, making it incredibly useful for a wide range of daily tasks, Researcher serves a different, more specialized purpose.

Researcher, which was introduced earlier this year, is a separate, advanced reasoning agent. It is purpose-built for deep, research-intensive work. Where Copilot excels at providing intelligent assistance for your typical workflow, Researcher excels when you need exhaustive reasoning and synthesis across many sources, whether those are internal documents or external websites. It is ideal for highly detailed projects such as preparing board-level briefs, conducting competitive analyses, or comprehensive client preparation. In essence, use Copilot for intelligent daily assistance and complex problem-solving in your workflow, and turn to Researcher for in-depth, exhaustive investigative tasks.

Enhanced AI Safety Profile: Trust and Responsibility

As AI models become more powerful, ensuring their safety and responsible use is paramount. Microsoft takes this responsibility very seriously.

The Microsoft AI Red Team rigorously tested the GPT-5 reasoning model using its strict security protocols. This team's work involves anticipating and reducing potential harms by thoroughly probing critical AI systems before they are released.

The results of these rigorous tests showed that the GPT-5 reasoning model demonstrated one of the strongest AI safety profiles among prior OpenAI models. It performed exceptionally well against various modes of attack, including attempts at malware generation, fraud/scam automation, and other potential harms. This commitment to safety provides an important layer of trust as GPT-5 is integrated across Microsoft’s platforms.

Try GPT-5 in Copilot Today

If you have a Microsoft 365 Copilot license, try prompts like:

• "Read through my recent emails and chats and provide a comprehensive analysis of my communication style by identifying my core values, strengths, weaknesses, skills, and areas where I can improve professionally".

• "Look at the last 5 work days, identify all the meetings where I was working on GPT-5, and give me a total number of hours I spent on the topic".

For all users, including those without Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses, you can explore prompts such as:

• "Look at the attached project plan and give me five substantive ways to make it better; include rationale for your responses and specific text to insert into the plan".

• "As a financial compliance analyst, prepare a summary comparing the Dodd-Frank, Basel III, and MiFID II capital adequacy and reporting requirements for banks".

Conclusion

The arrival of GPT-5 in Microsoft Copilot and across Microsoft’s consumer, developer, and enterprise offerings marks a truly exciting moment. This is not just an incremental update; it is a significant leap in intelligence that promises to transform how we work, create, and interact with technology.

With features like the "two-brain approach" for intelligent prompt routing, a focus on both speed and deep reasoning, and broad availability across various Microsoft products, GPT-5 is set to make AI more adaptable and helpful than ever before. Whether you're a licensed enterprise user, an individual looking for smarter assistance, or a developer building the next generation of AI agents, the power of GPT-5 is now at your fingertips.