Microsoft 365 business customers are running out of places to hide from Copilot (www.theregister.com)

Microsoft is automatically deploying three Microsoft 365 “companion” apps—People, Files and Calendar—to Windows 11 devices for commercial Microsoft 365 tenants via the regular Microsoft 365 Apps update process, and it’s also baking Copilot directly into them. The People and Files integrations are live now (Calendar is coming soon), and they let Copilot draw on organizational data—recent communications, responsibilities, documents, meetings—to surface context-aware prompts, summaries, action items and prep suggestions without users having to switch apps. For the AI/ML community and enterprise IT, this matters because it further embeds Copilot into everyday workflows and broadens the AI’s access to tenant data, raising governance, privacy and security questions. Administrators can control whether the companion apps are deployed, but there’s no separate toggle to strip Copilot out once the apps are installed. The move continues Microsoft’s trend of pervasive Copilot placements (e.g., Excel cells, possible Exchange Server support) and highlights tensions around monitoring/usage reporting and data-grounding of LLM features—practical considerations for deployment, compliance, and model-risk management in organizations.