Computerworld.com [Hacking News]

A few weeks ago, Google launched the powerful AI model Gemini 3 and now it’s time for a faster variant called Gemini 3 Flash.

In addition to speed, Gemini 3 Flash is said to offer improved intelligence, at least compared to its predecessor, Gemini 2.5 Flash.

According to the Humanity’s Last Exam (HLE) and Simple QA Verified measurement tools, Gemini 3 Flash scored almost the same as Gemini 3 Pro and GPT-5.2.

Gemini 3 Flash will be the default AI model in Google’s Gemini app, and will be available to enterprises in Vertex AI and Gemini Enterprise.

Your smartphone’s home screen is the heart and soul of your mobile tech experience — the launching pad for nearly everything you do on your device. And since you use Android, you’ve got a unique advantage over your iPhone-totin’ associates in that your home screen doesn’t have to be the same tired old grid everyone else is using. It certainly can be, if you want, but you also have the option to take complete control of that environment and turn it into a time-saving command center for your personal productivity needs.

We’re not just talkin’ about sprinkling a few exceptional widgets into the mix, either. With Android, you can install a completely new home screen launcher that lets you incorporate all sorts of custom actions, interfaces, and shortcuts into your device’s desktop — giving your phone a different look and feel and creating a system that’s custom-tailored to the way you like to get things done. It can make a current phone infinitely more useful and make any old Android device feel fresh and new again.

The Google Play Store has plenty of commendable launcher options to consider, and figuring out which makes the most sense for you ultimately comes down to deciding what exactly you want to accomplish and what style of interaction you prefer. After spending time with all the top contenders, these are the Android launchers I’d recommend for serious professionals — broken down by what type of experience they offer and in what areas they excel.

1. Smart Launcher: Complete customization

With long-time Android power-user favorite Nova Launcher now seemingly on life support, the throne is open and awaiting a new holder for the title of go-to general-purpose Android launcher champion.

That honor, without question, is well on its way to a popular independent creation called Smart Launcher. For the moment, at least, Smart Launcher is the launcher to look at if you’re seeking out a relatively traditional Android home screen setup with oodles of extra options and opportunities for customization.

Smart Launcher’s actually been around for some time now, but it’s struggled a bit to find its identity over the years. For a while, it positioned itself primarily around a specific distinctive layout and the idea of automated organization — an interesting approach, if inherently somewhat limited in the scope of its appeal.

Now, with Nova out of the mix, Smart Launcher is seamlessly stepping into the role of customization king. The app serves as a flexible framework for any arrangement of shortcuts and widgets imaginable, with a massive menu of options and the ability to tweak all sorts of details about the way your home screen and app drawer work — if you’re so inspired.

Smart Launcher gives you a flexible canvas for organizing your home screen — and app drawer — in practically any way you want.

JR Raphael / Foundry

The beauty of Smart Launcher, though, is that it’s really up to you to decide how deep you dive into geeky waters. If all you want is a fairly ordinary home screen with the ability to take total control over what’s on it — say, removing a permanently present widget or search bar that shows up on your phone’s standard home screen layout or arranging things in a way your stock setup doesn’t allow — Smart Launcher makes it simple to turn any such vision into reality.

And it offers some interesting extras, too, like the ability to create stacked widgets where you can swipe from one widget to another within the same physical space — and an app drawer that automatically splits your apps into different categories like productivity, media, and travel.

It lets you create a variety of custom gesture shortcuts, too — maybe double-tapping your home screen to fire up the excellent Smart Launcher universal search prompt, for instance, or opening specific apps or even pop-up widgets when you swipe in certain directions on the home screen or on different app icons.

And if you’re using a foldable phone, Smart Launcher empowers you to create completely different custom home screen layouts for your device’s inner and outer display (though you certainly don’t have to get that ambitious or complex).

Smart Launcher is free for its core features and perfectly pleasant to use in that state. Some of the more advanced extras — including the swipeable widget and pop-up widget abilities along with the option to edit the app drawer categories — require a Pro upgrade that’s available either for $21 as a lifetime upgrade or via a monthly or annual subscription (with prices varying based on both location and season).

In short: If you want complete control over every element of your home screen environment — or you just want a relatively standard home screen setup with a variety of extra options and opportunities for customization — Smart Launcher is the place to start.

2. Niagara Launcher: Ergonomic efficiency

Sometimes, the simplest solutions can be the most effective. That’s the idea behind Niagara Launcher, which works to strip away all the extraneous elements of an Android home screen and leave you only with fast and fuss-free tools to get where you need to go.

The Niagara home screen revolves around a single vertical menu of your most-used apps, but there’s much more to it than initially meets the eye. First, any shortcut on the home screen can either act as a traditional one-tap shortcut to opening an app or serve as a way to pop up a supercharged folder with a combination of both apps and widgets inside it.

From the simple vertical app menu (at left) to the supercharged folders (at right), Niagara’s home screen is all about simplicity and easy access to the items you need.

JR Raphael / Foundry

The top of the home screen, meanwhile, features a classy built-in info widget that can show you the current weather along with upcoming event info and even your phone’s current battery level. Tapping it pulls up a pop-up agenda panel with an even broader view of your agenda.

When you want to find an app that isn’t on your home screen, you simply slide your finger up or down along the edge of your screen to move through Niagara’s scrolling app list and jump to whatever it is you need. In a nice ergonomic twist, you can swipe or tap the list from the left or the right side of your screen, even, making it convenient to access no matter how you hold your phone.

Niagara has lots of other thoughtful efficiency-oriented features, including an option to show active notifications alongside an app’s icon on your home screen — even going as far as to let you interact with notifications and respond to messages or dismiss pending alerts right from that same area. It allows you to stack multiple Android widgets within your home screen’s topmost row for easily swipeable at-a-glance views of important info, too, and it gives you a smart search system that’s easily accessible with a single swipe upward anywhere on your home screen.

If all of that isn’t enough, Niagara features some intelligent automatic optimizations for larger-screen Android devices — so if you’re using a tablet or a foldable, it’ll make especially effective use of all your extra screen space (though in a way that happens on its own, following the Niagara framework, as opposed to being an open canvas for your own creation à la Smart Launcher — for better or for worse, depending on your perspective).

Niagara Launcher is free with an optional $14-a-year or $43 lifetime Pro upgrade that unlocks some of its more advanced options, including the built-in calendar and weather widgets.

In short: If you’re willing to keep an open mind and allow yourself a few days to adapt to a new and very unconventional approach, you might just find Niagara’s clever method of organization to be exactly the efficiency-enhancing change you didn’t know you needed.

3. Microsoft Launcher: The Microsoft-lover’s dream

Android is typically a Google-centric affair, but little by little, Microsoft has been creating its own sub-ecosystem right within the platform’s walls — and the centerpiece to that setup is the aptly named Microsoft Launcher.

Having Microsoft Launcher on your phone really does make it feel like you’re using a Microsoft Android device instead of a Google Android product. Most prominently, the app’s feed-like panel gives you glanceable info from your Outlook calendar along with tasks from your inbox, a panel of recent Windows-synced Sticky Notes, and a list of recently accessed documents from your cloud-based Microsoft Office storage. It also defaults to Bing for search, though you can easily opt to change that to any other provider if you want.

Microsoft Launcher puts Bing front and center and adds plenty of other Microsoft-centric touches to your home screen environment.

JR Raphael / Foundry

Microsoft-specific elements aside, the Microsoft Launcher is also just a nicely crafted take on the Android home screen interface, with a pleasant mix of tidy-looking simplicity and more advanced organizational options.

The app is completely free to use.

In short: If you work in Windows and want your phone to feel like an extension of that same ecosystem, Microsoft Launcher is the way to make it happen.

4. Square Home: Windows Phone meets Android

For all of its Microsoft focus, the actual Microsoft Launcher has nothing to do with the company’s now-abandoned Windows Phone effort and the content-packed organizational system that platform established. For that, you’ll want to turn to Square Home, which picks up where Windows Phone left off and brings its distinctive tile-centric setup into the realm of Android.

Even if you didn’t use Windows Phone, you might find Square Home to be a refreshing change that enhances your workflow. The launcher puts a series of customizable tiles on your home screen, each representing an app shortcut, a widget, or some other sort of action. You can even treat a tile as a three-dimensional cube and store related shortcuts on each side — say, Google Drive on the front, then Docs, Sheets, and other productivity apps on the inner sides — and then swipe the cube in any direction to access the associated items.

Square Home has tons of options, including some that let you control exactly how your tiles appear — everything from the number of columns for the tiles to the size of icons and text within them and the color and style of backgrounds used for different blocks. It also allows you to create some potentially useful custom shortcuts beyond just the usual gestures. You can set certain actions to occur when your phone is set flat with its screen facing either up or down, for instance, or even when you shake your phone.

Square Home transforms your home screen into a Windows-Phone-like environment, with plenty of advanced shortcuts and time-saving options.

JR Raphael / Foundry

Square Home is free with an optional $6 lifetime key or $2-a-year premium subscription for advanced features, options, and tile effects.

In short: If you miss the old Windows Phone interface or just like the idea of keeping everything you need in front of you and neatly organized in a geometrical manner, Square Home is your Android home screen answer.

5. ReZ Launcher: Gesture power

Taking interface inspiration from the past isn’t purely about nostalgia. Often, ideas are abandoned even when they have plenty of practical merit — as a result of broader business issues surrounding their creators or other such factors.

That’s absolutely the case with a nifty Android home screen concept Nokia once introduced into Android, during its short-lived era as an Android up-and-comer. Nokia came up with the idea of a home screen that revolves around gestures — not just the typical swipe-this-way-or-that variety but a more intricate and intuitive system of actually scribbling specific letters onto your screen to find what you need.

It’s a surprisingly swift and efficient way to fly around your phone, and the concept now lives on via a quirky off-the-beaten-path Android launcher called ReZ.

With ReZ as your default Android launcher, you can simply use your finger to draw any letter anywhere on your home screen. ReZ will recognize it right away and show you all the apps and contacts that match. If you don’t see what you want immediately, you can keep scribbling more letters to narrow down the search.

ReZ Launcher looks simple on the surface — but scribble a letter anywhere on its home screen, and you’ll see what makes it special.

JR Raphael / Foundry

Scribbling aside, ReZ gives you a swipeable widget at the top of its screen, with custom native widgets showing the time and date alongside any upcoming calendar events and active media controls (when relevant). Beneath that is the beginning of an easily accessible list of all your installed apps, which you can continue to see by swiping upward from the bottom of the screen.

You can add commonly accessed app shortcuts into a dock at the bottom of the screen, too — by long-pressing any icons in the main app list — and ReZ also offers a bevy of options for customizing its interface and the appearance of your home screen.

But more than anything, this one’s all about the gestures and that signature scribbling. It’s a delightfully different take on smartphone interaction, and that alone makes it well worth trying.

In short: If you enjoy the idea of finding anything you need with a swift ‘n’ simple scribble, ReZ is a one-of-a-kind concept and the kind of interesting possibility you’ll find only on Android.

6. Lynx Launcher: Sleek simplicity

When it comes to optimizing your digital universe, simplicity can go a surprisingly long way. That’s the key idea around Lynx Launcher, a relatively new contender in the Android launcher arena and one with an approach that absolutely makes it stand out from the pack.

Lynx Launcher is said to be “inspired” by the Linux-based Gnome desktop interface, but even if you aren’t a card-carrying computer geek, there’s plenty to like about its frills-free home screen setup. At its core, Lynx Launcher gives you a single primary home screen panel with a simple built-in clock widget at its top and a row of favorite apps on its right side. You can add any additional shortcuts and widgets you want into that main area as well, but it seems designed to be relatively sparse and open.

That’s in large part because of Lynx’s series of distinctive elements that exist around that primary panel:

1. With a swipe to the right — or a tap on the nine-dot icon within the favorites dock on the main screen — you zip over to Lynx’s lovely alphabetical app drawer, which makes it delightfully fast and easy to find what you need.
2. With a swipe to the left, you pull up a self-populating Favorites screen. It automatically fills itself up with your most frequently used apps and contacts for especially speedy access.
3. With a swipe downward on any home screen panel — or a tap on the search box at the top of your home screen — you launch Lynx’s swift search system. There, you can quickly find any app or contact on your phone by typing in a letter or two, and you can also perform a standard web search by typing out the full term and then selecting the “Search on Google” (or any alternate search engine you choose) option.
4. Finally, with a swipe up on any area of your home screen, you summon Lynx’s “Desktop” area. It’s basically an extra on-demand home screen panel where you can store any combination of shortcuts and widgets for easy ongoing access without having ’em constantly in your face.

The Linux-inspired Lynx Launcher has a sleek and simple primary home screen (at left) with some unusual elements around it, including an especially effective and easy-to-use app drawer (at right).

JR Raphael / Foundry

Lynx packs plenty of customization options, too, ranging from details of the launcher’s appearance to more functional changes related to which interface elements are and aren’t present and how exactly they work. And it sports a host of custom gestures you can set for launching apps or performing system functions with all sorts of different swipes, if you want to go down that road.

Lynx is free to use in its base form with an optional $4 pro upgrade to unlock some of the more advanced customization possibilities.

In short: Whether you love Linux or just appreciate a sleek, simple setup with plenty of practical touches, Lynx Launcher is an unconventional Android home screen contender that’s well worth your while to try.

7. Before Launcher: Minimalist focus

Speaking of simplicity, ever feel like you’re spending too much time on your phone? Before Launcher is all about giving you a minimalist, no-frills home screen for distraction-free productivity — a setup its creators claim can help you open your phone a whopping 40% less than you do now.

Before’s primary home screen panel is a plain-as-can-be text-based list of your most frequently accessed apps, with not a single icon or eye-catching flourish to be found. If you need to get to something else, you can find a complete list of installed programs one panel over to the right. And to the left sits a filtered notification drawer that can hide low-priority notifications and make ’em available only when you actively opt to seek ’em out.

From the plain-text primary home screen to the built-in notification filtering system, less really is more with the understated Before Launcher.

JR Raphael / Foundry

Before has some simple options for customizing the appearance of your home screen and creating a couple of custom gestures, but it’s all pretty barebones and basic by design. The launcher also offers an optional $7 Pro upgrade that adds in a handful of more advanced features, including a custom folder and label system for apps and the ability to hide apps entirely out of view.

In short: If you want the utmost in simplicity and a setup that keeps distractions almost entirely out of sight, Before Launcher is just what the minimalist ordered.

This article was originally published in June 2019 and most recently updated in December 2025.

Enterprise IT execs know well the dangers of relying too much on third-parties, how automated decision systems need to always have a human in the loop, and the dangers of telling customers too much/too little when policy violations require an account shutdown. But a saga that played out Tuesday between Anthropic and the CEO of a Swiss cybersecurity company brings it all into a new and disturbing context.

The tale began when Tom Hoffman, the CEO of a Swiss cybersecurity company called Wicked Design, on Monday received an alert from Anthropic’s system that the company’s entire account had been cancelled due to an automated review that supposedly found unspecified policy violations.

Hoffman knew the best way to get that addressed was with social media support, so he wrote about it on LinkedIn. He also alerted some people who worked at Anthropic, including the head of product legal. The latter responded, saying he’d flagged the issue internally for review. “We are working on the automated ban stuff,” said the Anthropic attorney.  (Hoffman shared multiple Anthropic screen captures with Computerworld.) 

Within a day, the account was restored — sort of. The new alert told him: “Earlier this week, your account was disabled by an automated system for being in violation of our Terms of Service or Acceptable Use Policy. Upon further investigation, we believe this was an error and your account has been reinstated. We apologize for the inconvenience and for your patience.” 

Hoffman briefly celebrated, logged in and found that most of the account — 80% of company projects and data, he said — was missing.

When he asked Anthropic’s automated system how to restore those files, the system replied, “I understand how frustrating this must be. When a user is removed and later re-added to an organization, previous projects and their associated chats are not restored — even if you use the same email address. Unfortunately, there’s no way to restore or transfer these previous projects back to your account once you’ve been re-added.”

But the message also said the files could be restored if the company paid. Apparently, that “there’s no way to restore” reference doesn’t apply if money changes hands. “Reactivating your subscription will restore access to all your previous projects,” Anthropic said. 

(After Hoffman paid the money, the files were restored, he said.)

As amusing — and simultaneously terrifying — as that back-and-forth is, it highlights key issues for enterprise IT.

AI third-party dependency

This is nothing new, though most fears about AI vendor dependency involve outages and cyberattacks. The idea that an AI vendor’s automated system could cancel an account with no details, no warning and no easy way to make your case to a human, is where the really annoying part kicks in.

In an interview, Hoffman said that despite everything that happened, he plans on sticking with Anthropic. Why? 

“Their service is quite good and where else am I going to go?” Hoffman said, adding he has no reason to believe Microsoft, AWS, Google, OpenAI or Perplexity — or even Oracle or IBM — would be any better at avoiding this problem with being cut off. (Computerworld reached out to Microsoft, Google, AWS, Anthropic, OpenAI and Perplexity for comment. None offered any comment.)

There’s another concern Hoffman noted. Given that these firms typically share no details about the rationale for a cancellation, that could provide cover if some government pressured them to punish a company using their service. Such retribution is far easier if an AI vendor already has a history of not saying why someone has been cut off. 

“I definitely don’t trust them anymore,” he said. “You want to build your business around AI integration. And it’s a crown jewel that someone else can easily switch off? What is your contingency plan? Maybe the next time [the account is cut off], I am not so lucky.”

What to tell customers who are being cut off

This issue requires a balancing act, which is where many vendors — and autonomous agents and bots — struggle. 

The argument for not giving detail information to customers is based in cybersecurity and anti-fraud protocols. On the chance that the disconnected customer actually is a fraudster/cyberthief/state actor, telling them specific details about how their bad behavior was detected could be a mistake. It might allow them to refine tactics, steal a new identity and try again, perhaps more successfully.

The argument for telling customers as much as possible is housed in fairness for the customer, allowing them a meaningful chance to address the accusations and mount a defense. Paying customers certainly deserve that.

The answer, I would argue, is squarely in the middle. It’s not that difficult. Tell the customer enough so they can address the issue, but not so much a thief could find useful. Tell them what you think they did, not necessarily how you discovered it. 

Criminal lawyers do this routinely. When a suspect wants to ask prosecutors for an immunity deal in exchange for revealing information to help their case, they have to do this dance. Reveal enough that prosecutors can evaluate the offer and make a decision, but don’t reveal so much they have no reason to make a deal.

Using automated decision software

This is an easy one, in theory. But when vendors face serious cost-cutting pressures, it can get a lot harder. Having a human in the loop is critical. 

But just that is not enough. If software recommends 11,000 customers be disconnected — and one person has 30 minutes to make decisions — that’s not a serious attempt at human management of the process. 

The software should detect issues, but humans must actively review them. Yes, there are edge cases, such as when lives are in danger, where an account needs to be immediately suspended, prompting a follow-up investigation. But those cases are rare. Most times, giving advance warning to a customer and letting them respond before a decision is made is preferable.

Having a person discuss the case

This is another time where money comes into play. If a vendor wants to make a secure environment for all, it needs to be staffed to discuss customer cutoff decisions. And these people need to be sufficiently senior to be able to overrule the software and immediately reinstate customers. 

And there should be significant compensation for customers incorrectly accused of wrongdoing. That serves two purposes. One, it will make the customer less angry. Two, companies have little incentive to improve these automated systems if there is no financial pain for it making bad recommendations.

To be clear, if a vendor is paying out too much money to customers who’ve been falsely accused, maybe the software needs to be changed. With enough financial pain, that might actually happen.

Sanchit Vir Gogia, the chief analyst at Greyhound Research, said this cutoff situation is going to become more common and enterprises need to devise ways to deal with it.

“Silent shutdowns of paying enterprise accounts by AI and cloud providers are not rare enforcement anomalies,” Gogia said. “They are an emergent control risk created by automation, contractual discretion, and platform scale. [Roughly] 47% of global CIOs admit they have no defined response plan if a core cloud or AI provider suspends their account without explanation. This is not a security gap. It is a governance gap. 

“Enforcement systems now combine billing, fraud, policy, compliance, and reputational risk signals into a single automated decision path. When that path triggers, suspension is immediate and broad. Explanation is optional. Human appeal is uncertain. Continuity becomes conditional. Enterprises that now run identity, data, analytics, and production workloads inside these platforms are absorbing existential operational risk without visibility, proportionality, or procedural protection.”

The best way to mitigate this risk is contractually, Gogia said. “If a vendor can shut you down without telling you why, continuity is conditional. Enterprises must treat provider-initiated shutdown risk as a first-class governance issue,” Gogia said. “Procurement must demand bounded disclosure, defined 

A warning from Microsoft that a Windows patch issued last week may cause the Message Queuing (MSMQ) function in the operating system to malfunction could be behind multiple reports of internet of things (IoT) applications failing.

David Shipley, head of Canadian security awareness training provider Beauceron Security, says he saw a query on a Microsoft learning forum today asking if the MSMQ problem is behind the failure of a firm’s point of sale system to issue sales receipts.

Another person posted a query on a different Microsoft forum about a building in an unnamed city being without its fire alarm or smoke detector systems.

A link between these posts and the December 16 security update from Microsoft on the MSMQ issue couldn’t be confirmed. But Shipley said it is odd that Microsoft’s initial advice says that a workaround is available, but instead of detailing it, it urges admins to contact Microsoft Support For Businesses.

“The scariest words when it comes to a serious bug in Windows you’re trying to fix, that’s crashing your applications, is, ‘Call us,’” he said.

MSMQ is a protocol for secure messaging between applications, Shipley noted, so if there is a problem, “it’s going to break stuff.”

The Microsoft post says that individuals using Windows Home or Pro editions on personal devices are “very unlikely to experience this issue. This issue primarily affects enterprise or managed IT environments,” including those running clustered MSMQ environments under load.

Symptoms include:

• MSMQ becoming inactive;
• Internet Information Services (IIS) sites failing with “Insufficient resources to perform operation” errors;
• applications unable to write to queues;
• errors such as “The message file ‘C:\Windows\System32\msmq\storage*.mq’ cannot be created” when creating message files;
• misleading log entries such as “There is insufficient disk space or memory”, despite sufficient disk space and memory being available.

Affected are servers running Windows Server 2019 and 2016, Windows Server 2012 R2 and Windows Server 2012.

Also affected are PCs running Windows 10 version 22H2, Windows 10 version 21H2, Windows 10 version 1809, and Windows 10 version 1607. Support for Windows 10 ended October 14, so the issue should only affect these systems if admins have paid for extended support and received the December update.

This issue is caused by a December Patch Tuesday security update (KB5071546) that introduced changes to the MSMQ security model and NTFS permissions on the C:\Windows\System32\MSMQ\ storage folder. MSMQ users now require write access to this folder, which is normally restricted to administrators, says Microsoft. As a result, attempts to send messages via MSMQ APIs might fail with resource errors.

“A workaround is available for affected devices,” says the Microsoft update. “To apply the workaround and mitigate this issue in your organization, please contact Microsoft Support for business. We are investigating this issue and will provide more information when it is available.” 

Jack Bicer, director of vulnerability research at Action1, suggested as a temporary workaround for MSMQ failures that Windows admins grant write access to the MSMQ directory C:\Windows\System32\msmq. Once Microsoft provides the official update, revert the directory permissions to their original state and deploy the fix, he said.

Danny Nguyen of Wicloud suggested on a Microsoft Learn forum that admins could either roll back the December security update (KB5071546) or adjust the permissions, as Bicer suggests. However, Nguyen urged admins to consult with their security team before making system-level permission changes.

A Microsoft spokesperson was asked for comment, but no response was received by press time.

This isn’t the first MSMQ problem in recent memory; last year Microsoft discovered a remote code execution vulnerability (CVE-2024-30008) that carried a criticality rating of 9.8. 

In this case, however, said Robert Beggs, head of Canadian incident response firm DigitalDefence, although the cause of the issue is a security patch, the impact and workaround are not strictly security issues. Therefore, he believes the fix is a workaround that does not involve security and security support, but regular support for a Windows system. 

As for the company’s reason for asking admins to contact Microsoft Support for Business for the workaround, he suggested that Microsoft may want to spread the workload to ensure that security support is not overworked.

More broadly, warned Shipley, any update that leads to a business application failure is the kind of issue that turns admins off patching. December is the biggest month of the year for retail, and not the time for POS machines to go down because of the installation of a new patch.

IT leaders are setting their operations strategies for 2026 with an eye toward agility, flexibility, and tangible business results. 

Download the January 2026 issue of the Enterprise Spotlight from the editors of CIO, Computerworld, CSO, InfoWorld, and Network World and learn about the trends and technologies that will drive the IT agenda in the year ahead.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has opened up a new can of worms for the tech industry, with memory prices increasing rapidly as demand grows. In response to these increased costs, manufacturers will be forced to raise prices on their products, making for more expensive smartphones, computers, and more.

It’s a bigger problem than you think. Because while AI means we need more server-side memory to drive all those generative AI (genAI) cloud services, it also means we need more AI in the devices to handle edge intelligence queries.

Making more from less

Apple has always been reluctant to insert too much memory into its devices. The company has regularly argued that it makes more sense to optimize hardware and software to deliver the best possible performance, rather than simply throwing vast quantities of memory at problems. 

That’s why even as recently as 2023; iPhones shipped with just 4GB RAM inside. When AI truly hit the market last year, Apple doubled that to 8GB and now places 12GB memory in its highest end iPhones. 

While those memory levels are still lower than the quantity of RAM installed in similar smartphones, Apple’s systems are more efficient. It means that they can generate more computational performance for the same memory than competitors, and means an Apple Silicon iPhone can easily handle on-device AI, as well as multitasking — all with decent battery life. 

This extends to Macs, which also use Apple Silicon. 

Computers with better designers

As a result, Apple is a little less exposed in the coming memory price war than its competitors. Where other smartphones might carry 24GB of RAM, their performance is usually matched by an iPhone with half that. 

That’s not simply a happy accident; Apple’s systems are designed that way. (Design isn’t just how it looks, but also how it works.) If you think about it, one of the benefits of Apple’s historical disadvantages in PowerPC and then Intel processor performance is the company needed to figure out how to get more performance out of fewer computational resources.

That’s less of a problem with Apple Silicon, but a cultural preference for optimization supported by innovations such as Unified Memory is deeply woven into Apple’s DNA. The company has gotten used to squeezing out more from less.

Flogging the horse

Historically, critics and competitors have pretended to be blind to Apple’s approach. Rather than consider things like relative performance benchmarks between their chosen platform and Apple’s, they have insisted on pointing to the quantity of installed memory — ignoring iPhones or Macs that achieve near equal or (now) better performance on what is there. 

While it is true that Apple has made memory its Achilles Heel, mainly by charging way more than most for pre-installed extra RAM and failing to make memory a user upgradable component, what it achieves with the memory it does install is now a competitive advantage as RAM prices rise.

Feeling the pressure

The demand for more RAM inside devices means even low-tier manufacturers will need to put more of it inside their smartphones, tablets, PCs, and everything else – and the companies and products most exposed to this will be those less able to purchase memory in vast quantities in advance.

Smaller vendors will be pressured on manufacturing costs from below, even as they’re forced to compete more fiercely for sales at the more lucrative parts of the mid-range market (where Apple is now fighting, too). The company already plans lower-cost Macs and iPhones next year.

Looking at the impact of memory prices, Counterpoint Senior Analyst Yang Wang recently said: “Apple and Samsung are best positioned to weather the next few quarters, but it will be tough for others that don’t have as much wiggle room to manage market share versus profit margins.”

Siri’s chance to laugh last

These advantages apply even if Apple must negotiate new long-term supply deals for the component next year. There are few willing to reject the kind of money a memory supply deal for Apple’s products can generate, and even if cost does increase, that economy of scale — combined with Apple’s ability to squeeze more performance from less memory — gives the company a buffer. Indeed, if Apple manages to constrain any price increases in the next 12 months, its products can only end up seeming to be an even better value than those you can obtain elsewhere. Not only that, but thanks to Apple Silicon it also seems set to deliver devices increasingly capable of running AI at the edge, a privacy-protecting story enterprise users are searching for. And they’re likely to power the upcoming private-by-design Siri.

Follow me on social media! Join me on BlueSky,  LinkedIn, and Mastodon.

Merriam-Webster, the US publisher of some of the world’s best-known dictionaries, has named “slop” the word of the year for 2025.

“We define slop as digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.” All that stuff dumped on our screens, captured in just four letters: the English language came through again,” Merriam-Webster writes, continuing:

“The flood of slop in 2025 included absurd videos, off-kilter advertising images, cheesy propaganda, fake news that looks pretty real, junky AI-written books, ‘workslop’ reports that waste coworkers’ time… and lots of talking cats. People found it annoying, and people ate it up.”

Merriam-Webster likens the word “slop” to terms like “slime”, “sludge” and “muck”, and says it conveys a wet, unpleasant sound. Something you’d rather not touch. Over the year, the word is considered to have set the tone for how the AI threat is discussed. Less apocalyptic and more mocking. An expression of a feeling that while AI wants to replace creativity, it’s not always very good at it.

The server market hit a record in the third quarter of 2025 with revenues of $ 112.4 billion, according to IDC. That’s a whopping 61 percent increase compared to the same period in 2024.

Sales of x86 servers grew 32.8 percent to $76.3 billion, while sales of non-x86 servers rose 192.7 percent to $36.2 billion. Servers with embedded GPUs grew 49.4% and accounted for more than half of the market’s total revenue.

The US was the fastest growing region with a 79.1% increase, followed by Canada at 69.8% and China at 37.6%. Asia-Pacific grew by 37.4%, Europe, Middle East and Africa by 31% and Japan by 28.1%. Latin America increased by 4.1%.

The increase is traced to massive AI investments by hyperscalers and cloud providers. According to IDC, the strong growth is likely to continue as AI adoption and new large-scale data center projects increase.

The US economy added 64,000 jobs in November, but the slide in tech jobs continued, with the telecom sector and computer systems design seeing declines.

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics said the number of people employed in November totaled 163.7 million, while the number of unemployed was 7.1 million.

The overall unemployment rate rose to 4.6%, up from 4.4% in September. (The BLS did not release a jobs report in October because of the government shutdown going on at the time.)

The telecom sector lost 600 jobs, with the number of people employed in November pegged at 598,800, down from 599,400 in the previous report, according to a sector-wise breakdown provided by BLS. The telecom sector employed 614,500 in November 2024.

The hardest-hit area involved computer systems design and related services, which lost 3,200 jobs. The number employed in that sector was 2,403,200 in November, declining from 2,406,400 previously. The employee count in that sector was 2,444,700 a year ago.

According to the US Census Bureau, these jobs include tech support, programming, and systems integration positions.

CompTIA analyzed the BLS data and pegged total tech job losses at 6,878. “The bulk of reductions occurred in the IT and custom software services and systems design category,” the group said in a statement.

CompTIA estimates technology companies employ some 5.3 million workers, with 6.6 million people in tech occupations across all sectors.

“Tech occupation employment, which encompasses employers across all industry sectors, declined by an estimated 134,000 workers,” CompTIA said.

Going into 2026, the job market in the tech industry doesn’t look any rosier, according to numbers released by Janco Associates earlier this month.

“We forecast there will continue to be a decrease in the size of the US job market for IT pros through the first quarter of 2026,” Victor Janulaitis, CEO of Janco Associates, said in a blog post.

Although IT professional hiring rose to 95,000 in October from 94,000 in September, that increase couldn’t offset the job losses elsewhere, Janulaitis said.

Many job cuts have been attributed to the rise of AI technologies, which can automate tasks typically done by humans. Challenger, Gray and Christmas, which releases its own employment numbers, attributed 31,039 job losses (tech and non-tech) to AI; that was second to 50,437 job losses due to cost-cutting measures.

The ongoing business pivot to AI is affecting software developers, who have been long in demand. That is not so much the case now, said Kye Mitchell, head of Experis North America, a division of services firm ManpowerGroup.

That softening underscores “a pivot toward data and machine learning expertise,” Mitchell said.

AI skills in job postings are up 5% currently compared to the same time in 2024. That signals early signs of structural change, Mitchell said.

Postings for data scientists are up 219%, database architects have climbed 507%, and computer network support specialists are up 349%, Experis said in additional data shared with Computerworld.

“For professionals…, it is clear: Upskill in AI, data engineering, and security to stay ahead,” Mitchell said.

I’m always on the lookout for interesting organizational upgrades. (That’s just how cool of a fella I am, y’see.) And when it comes to jotting down notes and reminders, there’s always room for a new and improved — or sometimes even just deliberately different — approach.

That’s exactly what I encountered with a new Android note app that popped up on my radar the other day. It does something I’ve not seen from any of the usual Android note-taking app champions — including the de facto default Google Keep app — and ends up offering a really intriguing efficiency and productivity upgrade as a part of it.

Grab the nearest metaphorical pen, ’cause you’ll definitely want to take (mental) notes on this.

[Psst: Like saving time? Check out my free Android Intelligence newsletter. You’ll get three new things to try in your inbox every Friday — and six instant enhancements for whatever device you’re using.]

The Android note app — notification-style

My friend and fellow organizational obsessive, allow me to introduce you to the amusingly named Joonote.

Joonote? Joonote. (If Joo-know, Joo-know.)

What makes Joonote noteworthy is the way it presents whatever notes and reminders you jot down for yourself on Android. Instead of such memos existing solely within an app — or even within a well-designed widget on your Android device’s home screen — Joonote puts all of your new items into their own notifications, which then remain present and accessible from anywhere with a single swipe down from the top of your screen.

That means they can also be accessible from your lock screen, for even easier ongoing access.

Joonote puts all your active notes and reminders into easily accessible notifications.

JR Raphael, Foundry

Any note you make with Joonote remains present in that way until you mark it as done. That sticks even after you power off or restart your device. Whenever that happens, within a minute or so of the phone starting back up again, Joonote springs back to life and restores all your pending memos so they’re there and waiting.

You can tap any note from its notification to view it in full or edit it, and you can mark it done even without fully opening it — right from the notification. That’s really what sets Joonote apart from the Android note app pack.

But as a more standard note app, Joonote is also no slouch. It sports a clean and simple design that puts the focus on simple note-taking and the info you opt to save, with the basic tools you need to make memos but no unnecessary frills or distractions.

srcset="https://b2b-contenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/joonote-android-note-app-notes-reminders.jpg?quality=50&strip=all 2160w, https://b2b-contenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/joonote-android-note-app-notes-reminders.jpg?resize=300%2C289&quality=50&strip=all 300w, https://b2b-contenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/joonote-android-note-app-notes-reminders.jpg?resize=768%2C741&quality=50&strip=all 768w, https://b2b-contenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/joonote-android-note-app-notes-reminders.jpg?resize=1024%2C987&quality=50&strip=all 1024w, https://b2b-contenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/joonote-android-note-app-notes-reminders.jpg?resize=1536%2C1481&quality=50&strip=all 1536w, https://b2b-contenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/joonote-android-note-app-notes-reminders.jpg?resize=2048%2C1975&quality=50&strip=all 2048w, https://b2b-contenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/joonote-android-note-app-notes-reminders.jpg?resize=723%2C697&quality=50&strip=all 723w, https://b2b-contenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/joonote-android-note-app-notes-reminders.jpg?resize=174%2C168&quality=50&strip=all 174w, https://b2b-contenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/joonote-android-note-app-notes-reminders.jpg?resize=87%2C84&quality=50&strip=all 87w, https://b2b-contenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/joonote-android-note-app-notes-reminders.jpg?resize=498%2C480&quality=50&strip=all 498w, https://b2b-contenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/joonote-android-note-app-notes-reminders.jpg?resize=373%2C360&quality=50&strip=all 373w, https://b2b-contenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/joonote-android-note-app-notes-reminders.jpg?resize=259%2C250&quality=50&strip=all 259w" width="1024" height="987" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px">Beyond just the notifications, Joonote also presents your notes and reminders in a clean and minimalist view when you open up the actual app.

JR Raphael, Foundry

Within its note editor, you can create lists, add labels, change the note’s background color, and add a reminder — as well as lock down a note and prevent it from appearing in your notifications and on your lock screen, if you’re ever so inclined.

Simple and frills-free are excellent terms to describe the entire Joonote experience.

JR Raphael, Foundry

Joonote has a search system along with sections for notes you’ve finished and archived as well as those you’ve deleted. Its settings serve up the single option to sync your notes with your own personal Google Drive storage, should you so desire, for easy restoring on a future phone where you’ve installed the app and signed in. But by default, everything is stored solely only on your own local device, with instant offline access available and no other sort of cloud connection.

On that same note of privacy, Joonote doesn’t request or require any significant permissions or forms of data access. It doesn’t include ads. Its developer notes that the app doesn’t so much as collect email addresses or basic analytics, either, let alone perform any manner of data-sharing or tracking.

Oh — and there is a well-designed widget where you can see and manage your notes on your home screen, if you also want to go that route.

What’s that — a widget? With interactive options and easy-to-tap commands, even? Not too shabby, Joonote. Not too shabby at all.

JR Raphael, Foundry

But mostly, Joonote’s strength is in its simplicity and the unusual notification-based note system it offers. If that sort of setup speaks to you, it may be just the advantageous Android note option you never knew you needed.

Joonote is free for a fully featured 30-day trial without any sign-ups, account creations, or credit cards required. After that, if you want to keep using it, you’ll have to pony up 15 bucks for a one-time lifetime purchase in order to keep the app fully functional.

Only you can decide if it’s worth that price, of course, but as a one-time purchase, it’s an interesting proposition — particularly if you think this is something you’d use for multiple years, thus making its per-year cost increasingly affordable.

But at the very least, Joonote is well worth your while to try, even if only for that initial 30-day trial. It’s a really interesting new way to think about notes and staying organized — and that, in my book, is a noteworthy win.

Keep the efficiency upgrades coming with my free Android Intelligence newsletter — three new things to try every Friday and my Android Notification Power-Pack as a special welcome bonus.

Google is testing a new AI-powered productivity agent that operates through the inbox, signaling a potential shift in how enterprise workers may interact with calendars, documents, and daily tasks.

The experimental tool, called CC, delivers a daily briefing to users’ inboxes and can draft emails and suggest next actions by pulling information from Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Drive, pointing to Google’s broader effort to make AI agents more proactive rather than reactive.

“This briefing synthesizes your schedule, key tasks, and updates into one clear summary, so you know what needs to be done next, whether it’s paying a bill or preparing for an appointment,” Google said in a blog post. “CC also prepares email drafts and calendar links when needed to help you take action quickly.”

Users can also guide how CC works by communicating with it directly through email, using messages to give specific instructions.

CC is launching as a consumer-focused experiment, but analysts say its inbox-first design highlights patterns that could later translate into enterprise workflows.

“Google understands, like others, that AI has far greater potential on the enterprise productivity side, and that everyone is exploring how to capture that opportunity,” said Faisal Kawoosa, founder and chief analyst at Techarc. “Microsoft has Copilot, which is now integrated across Office and is effectively the default for many enterprise users.”

Inbox as a control layer

Analysts say an email-centric AI agent is not a productivity tool in the conventional sense. It functions as a behavioral layer, shaping what employees see first each day and what they interpret as important.

“Email is the first and last thing most of us check in enterprises,” Kawoosa said. “Putting the AI agent directly in the inbox makes sense because it does not force users to detour from their normal workflow.”

Neil Shah, VP for research at Counterpoint Research, pointed out that on average, email-related workflow accounts for a significant 25–30% of the daily worker productivity. This makes it the lowest-hanging opportunity for AI to automate related workflows and boost productivity and work efficiency.

This design choice would matter especially in large organizations, where adoption often stalls when tools require users to change habits.

“The gains would show up fastest in coordination-heavy roles,” said Sanchit Vir Gogia, chief analyst at Greyhound Research. “Executives, managers, sales leaders, operations teams, and program owners spend most of their day reconciling signals from different threads. A daily operating brief reduces decision drag, not workload. It shortens the gap between knowing and acting. It also reduces the number of meetings created purely to regain shared context.”

At the same time, analysts warn that the very compression that makes these tools attractive can introduce subtle risks. Summaries inevitably strip away nuance, and prioritization logic encodes assumptions that may not align with how decisions are actually made inside an organization.

Trust and control risks

The primary governance risk is not access to data, but the combination of implied authority and lasting records. Email is where informal approvals happen, intent is inferred, and context often matters more than exact wording.

When an AI agent operates in this environment, its outputs can turn fleeting signals into durable artifacts, influencing decisions and creating records that extend beyond the original exchange.

“CIOs have to be careful about how these AI agents access, process, personalize, and share information,” Shah said. “If an employee switches roles or leaves, how is the knowledge secured with all privacy protocols in place?”

What often catches enterprises off guard, Gogia said, is that AI does not simply process information but creates new artefacts. In many cases, those summaries, extracted actions, inferred priorities, and generated content can persist beyond the moment they are created.

“Those artefacts become discoverable records whether teams plan for them or not,” Gogia said. “If IT cannot clearly account for them, the organization is creating legal exposure at machine speed.”

This means that governance must be built in from the outset. Read-only access should be the default, with explicit human approval for any actions. Equally important, all AI activity needs clear logging and ownership, while retention and deletion policies must explicitly include AI-generated content. Data residency and boundary controls should be defined before enterprise rollout, not retrofitted after a compliance or legal incident.

Microsoft 365 (and Office 365) subscribers get more frequent software updates than those who have purchased Office without a subscription, which means subscribers have access to the latest features, security patches, and bug fixes. But it can be hard to keep track of the changes in each update and know when they’re available. We’re doing this for you, so you don’t have to.

Following are summaries of the updates to Microsoft 365/Office 365 for Windows over the past year, with the latest releases shown first. We’ll add info about new updates as they’re rolled out.

Note: This story covers updates released to the Current Channel for Microsoft 365/Office 365 subscriptions. If you’re a member of Microsoft’s Office Insider preview program or want to get a sneak peek at upcoming features, see the Microsoft 365 Insider blog.

Version 2511 (Build 19426.20218)

Release date: December 16, 2025

This build offers, in Microsoft’s words, “Various fixes to functionality and performance.”

Get more info about Version 2511 (Build 19426.20218).

Version 2511 (Build 19426.20186)

Release date: December 9, 2025

This Patch Tuesday build offers, in Microsoft’s words, “Various fixes to functionality and performance.” The build also has a variety of security updates (see details).

What IT needs to know: Because this is a security update, it should be applied relatively soon. Over the next few weeks, check for reports about problematic issues, and if all seems well, apply the update.

Get more info about Version 2511 (Build 19426.20186).

Version 2511 (Build 19426.20170)

Release date: December 3, 2025

This build includes, in Microsoft’s words, “Various fixes to functionality and performance.”

Get more info about Version 2511 (Build 19426.20170).

Version 2510 (Build 19328.20244)

Release date: November 20, 2025

This build fixes a bug in Outlook that caused users to see “Contacting the server for information” repeatedly when loading some emails.

Get more info about Version 2510 (Build 19328.20244).

Version 2510 (Build 19328.20232)

Release date: November 18, 2025

This build includes, in the words of Microsoft, “various fixes to functionality and performance.”

Get more info about Version 2510 (Build 19328.20232).

Version 2510 (Build 19328.20190)

Release date: November 11, 2025

This Patch Tuesday build fixes a bug in Outlook that caused some recipients to be unable to access OneDrive links shared with them via email. The build also has a variety of security updates (see details).

What IT needs to know: Because this is a security update, it should be applied relatively soon. Over the next few weeks, check for reports about problematic issues, and if all seems well, apply the update.

Get more info about Version 2510 (Build 19328.20190).

Version 2510 (Build 19328.20178)

Release date: November 4, 2025

This build fixes a single bug, in which @mention searches produced no results in Office apps.

Get more info about Version 2510 (Build 19328.20178).

Version 2510 (Build 19328.20158)

Release date: October 30, 2025

This build introduces a new Get Data dialog in Windows that simplifies finding and using external data, and adds Analyze Data to the Data tab.

The build also fixed an bug in Outlook that prevented users from downloading web add-ins in some virtualized environments.

Get more info about Version 2510 (Build 19328.20158).

Version 2509 (Build 19231.20216)

Release date: October 21, 2025

This build has, in Microsoft’s words, “various fixes to functionality and performance.”

Get more info about Version 2509 (Build 19231.20216).

Version 2509 (Build 19231.20194)

Release date: October 14, 2025

This build has a variety of security updates (see details), along with various fixes to functionality and performance.

What IT needs to know: Because this is a security update, it should be applied relatively soon. Over the next few weeks, check for reports about problematic issues, and if all seems well, apply the update.

Get more info about Version 2509 (Build 19231.20194).

Version 2509 (Build 19231.20172)

Release date: October 7, 2025

This build has, in Microsoft’s words, “various fixes to functionality and performance.”

Get more info about Version 2509 (Build 19231.20172).

Version 2509 (Build 19231.20156)

Release date: October 1, 2025

This build fixes two bugs, one in Excel in which ribbon controls were not rendered when rejoining Office sessions in a virtual machine, Azure Virtual Desktop, or remote desktop environment, and another that caused Outlook to terminate unexpectedly when starting.

Get more info about Version 2509 (Build 19231.20156).

Version 2508 (Build 19127.20264)

Release date: September 23, 2025

This build has, in Microsoft’s words, “various fixes to functionality and performance.”

Get more info about Version 2508 (Build 19127.20264).

Version 2508 (Build 19127.20240)

Release date: September 16, 2025

This build has, in Microsoft’s words, “various fixes to functionality and performance.”

Get more info about Version 2508 (Build 19127.20240).

Version 2508 (Build 19127.20222)

Release date: September 9, 2025

This build has multiple security updates (see details), along with various fixes to functionality and performance.

What IT needs to know: Because this is a security update, it should be applied relatively soon. Over the next few weeks, check for reports about problematic issues, and if all seems well, apply the update.

Get more info about Version 2508 (Build 19127.20222).

Version 2508 (Build 19127.20192)

Release date: September 3, 2025

This build fixes a bug in which some Outlook add-ins were getting “Office.auth.getAccessToken is not a function” errors.

Get more info about Version 2508 (Build 19127.20192).

Version 2508 (Build 19127.20154)

Release date: August 26, 2025

This build fixes a bug that caused Outlook to terminate unexpectedly when sending a meeting invite with an encryption label. It also adds support for pixelated rendering of embedded images in SVG assets for the entire Office suite.

Get more info about Version 2508 (Build 19127.20154).

Version 2507 (Build 19029.20208)

Release date: August 19, 2025

This build fixes a variety of bugs.

Get more info about Version 2507 (Build 19029.20208).

Version 2507 (Build 19029.20184)

Release date: August 12, 2025

This build fixes a bug which required users to restart Outlook to open a .msg file after initially accessing it once. The build also includes a variety of security updates (see details).

What IT needs to know: Because this is a security update, it should be applied relatively soon. Over the next few weeks, check for reports about problematic issues, and if all seems well, apply the update.

Get more info about Version 2507 (Build 19029.20184).

Version 2507 (Build 19029.20156)

Release date: August 5, 2025

This build fixes a single bug, in which users had to restart Outlook to open a .msg file after initially accessing it once.

Get more info about Version 2507 (Build 19029.20156).

Version 2507 (Build 19029.20136)

Release date: July 30, 2025

This build fixes a wide variety of bugs, including in which Outlook closed unexpectedly shortly after launch, and another in Word in which the word count sometimes displayed incorrectly.

Get more info about Version 2507 (Build 19029.20136).

Version 2506 (Build 18925.20184)

Release date: July 22, 2025

This build fixes two bugs, one that caused the Copilot Command Center to continue to be visible after disabling the Copilot user interface, and another in which when creating handouts in PowerPoint, certain characters (full-width numbers) couldn’t be properly transferred to the handout.

Get more info about Version 2506 (Build 18925.20184).

Version 2506 (Build 18925.20168)

Release date: July 15, 2025

This build fixes two bugs, one that caused Visio 32-bit to close unexpectedly when using the Drawing control, particularly in setups involving COM components or .NET integrations, and another in Word in which copying and pasting content between documents sometimes changed the applied style unexpectedly.

Get more info about Version 2506 (Build 18925.20168).

Version 2506 (Build 18925.20158)

Release date: July 8, 2025

This Patch Tuesday build fixes several bugs in Outlook, PowerPoint, Word, and the whole Office suite, including one that caused the Copilot icon to unexpectedly display in Outlook when Copilot had been disabled by the admin in government cloud.

The release also includes a variety of security updates (see details).

What IT needs to know: Because this is a security update, it should be applied relatively soon. Over the next few weeks, check for reports about problematic issues, and if all seems well, apply the update.

Get more info about Version 2506 (Build 18925.20158).

Version 2506 (Build 18827.20176)

Release date: July 1, 2025

This build fixes a wide variety of bugs, including one in Word in which print preview sometimes stopped working when printing long emails.

Get more info about Version 2506 (Build 18827.20176).

Version 2505 (Build 18827.20176)

Release date: June 26, 2025

This build introduces several new features, including one in Excel in which the PivotTables dialog box interface has been replaced by a redesigned panel, making it easier to view all of your options and simpler to change your data selection before inserting a recommended PivotTable.

Get more info about Version 2505 (Build 18827.20176).

Version 2505 (Build 18827.20164)

Release date: June 17, 2025

This build fixes a bug that caused the “Try the new Outlook” toggle to be enabled when working in Classic Outlook side by side with the new Outlook.

Get more info about Version 2505 (Build 18827.20164).

Version 2505 (Build 18827.20150)

Release date: June 10, 2025

This build fixes several bugs, including one for the entire Office suite in which a Save As attempt on an existing file didn’t complete successfully, and subsequent attempts continued to encounter issues when trying to save to a file that no longer existed.

This Patch Tuesday release also includes a variety of security updates: see details.

What IT needs to know: Because this is a security update, it should be applied relatively soon. Over the next few weeks, check for reports about problematic issues, and if all seems well, apply the update.

Get more info about  Version 2505 (Build 18827.20150).

Version 2505 (Build 18827.20140)

Release date: June 3, 2025

This build offers a variety of bug and performance fixes.

Read about Version 2505 (Build 18827.20140).

Version 2504 (Build 18730.20186)

Release date: May 20, 2025

This build introduces a new PowerPoint feature: Notification emails for mentions, tasks, comments, and replies will now contain context previews even when the source document is encrypted, and the email will inherit the document’s security policies.

Get more info about Version 2504 (Build 18730.20186).

Version 2504 (Build 18730.20168)

Release date: May 13, 2025

This build fixes a bug in which users were seeing high CPU usage when typing in Outlook. It also includes a variety of security updates: see details.

What IT needs to know: Because this is a security update, it should be applied relatively soon. Over the next few weeks, check for reports about problematic issues, and if all seems well, apply the update.

Get more info about Version 2504 (Build 18730.20168).

Version 2504 (Build 18730.20142)

Release date: May 6, 2025

This build includes various bug and performance fixes.

Get more info about Version 2504 (Build 18730.20142).

Version 2504 (Build 18730.20122)

Release date: April 29, 2025

This build fixes a wide variety of bugs, including one in which PowerPoint was unable to open a file from a network mapped drive from File Explore, another in which Word closed unexpectedly when opening .doc files, and another for the entire Office suite in which large 3D files couldn’t be inserted.

Get more info about Version 2504 (Build 18730.20122).

Version 2503 (Build 18623.20208)

Release date: April 17, 2025

This build fixes a bug that could cause Excel to stop responding.

Get more info about Version 2503 (Build 18623.20208).

Version 2503 (Build 18623.20178)

Release date: April 8, 2025

This build fixes a single bug in Word in which users may have encountered an issue with saving, seeing the message “saving…” in the title bar. It  also includes a variety of security updates. Go here for details.

What IT needs to know: Because this is a security update, it should be applied relatively soon. Over the next few weeks, check for reports about problematic issues, and if all seems well, apply the update.

Get more info about Version 2503 (Build 18623.20178).

Version 2503 (Build 18623.20156)

Release date: April 2, 2025

This build lets you use Dark Mode in Excel, which darkens your entire sheet, including cells, and may reduce eye strain. It also fixes several bugs, including one in Word in which opening specific files that contain many tracked changes and comments resulted in poor performance, and one in PowerPoint in which the app was not displaying the icon for an inserted PDF object.

Get more info about Version 2503 (Build 18623.20156).

Version 2502 (Build 18526.20168)

Release date: March 11, 2025

This build fixes several bugs, including one in which some Word files with numerous tracked changes and comments were slow. It also includes a variety of security updates: see details.

What IT needs to know: Because this is a security update, it should be applied relatively soon. Over the next few weeks, check for reports about problematic issues, and if all seems well, apply the update.

Get more info about Version 2502 (Build 18526.20168).

Version 2502 (Build 18526.20144)

Release date: March 5, 2025

This build fixes a wide variety of bugs, including one in Word in which the default font size may not be 12pt as expected, and another in which PowerPoint automatically closed when the system went into hibernate or sleep mode.

Get more info about Version 2502 (Build 18526.20144).

Version 2501 (Build 18429.20158)

Release date: February 11, 2025

This build removes the option to display Track Changes balloons in left margin in Word. It also includes a variety of security updates. See “Release notes for Microsoft Office security updates” for details.

What IT needs to know: Because this is a security update, it should be applied relatively soon. Over the next few weeks, check for reports about problematic issues, and if all seems well, apply the update.

Get more info about Version 2501 (Build 18429.20158).

Version 2501 (Build 18429.20132)

Release date: January 30, 2025

In this build, the advanced Track Changes option to set the margin for balloons in Word has been removed.

A wide variety of bugs have also been fixed, including one in which ActiveX controls used an excessive amount of GDI handles in PowerPoint, and another for the entire Office suite in which images couldn’t be pasted from SharePoint.

 Get more info about Version 2501 (Build 18429.20132).

Version 2412 (Build 18324.20194)

Release date: January 16, 2025

This build fixes one bug, in which apps would exit unexpectedly when running on Windows Server 2016.

Get more info about Version 2412 (Build 18324.20194).

Version 2412 (Build 18324.20190)

Release date: January 14, 2025

This build fixes a bug in Word in which the layout of tables were changed unexpectedly. It also includes a variety of security updates. See Release notes for Microsoft Office security updates for details.

What IT needs to know: Because this is a security update, it should be applied relatively soon. Over the next few weeks, check for reports about problematic issues, and if all seems well, apply the update.

Get more info about Version 2412 (Build 18324.20190).

Version 2412 (Build 18324.20168)

Release date: January 7, 2025

This build makes tables in Outlook more accessible for screen readers. It also fixes a wide variety of bugs, including one in Word in which a document saved to a network shared folder and set to “Always Open Read-Only” would open in “Editing” mode, and another for the entire Office suite in which application didn’t render the grid properly after switching from page break preview to normal view.

Get more info about Version 2412 (Build 18324.20168).

Version 2411 (Build 18227.20162)

Release date: December 10, 2024

This build fixes a bug in Word and Outlook where characters didn’t render correctly when using Save Selection to Text Box Gallery. It also includes a variety of security updates. See Release notes for Microsoft Office security updates for details.

What IT needs to know: Because this is a security update, it should be applied relatively soon. Over the next few weeks, check for reports about problematic issues, and if all seems well, apply the update.

Get more info about Version 2411 (Build 18227.20162).

Version 2411 (Build 18227.20152)

Release date: December 5, 2024

This build fixes a wide variety of bugs, including one in Excel in which some cells might not be rendered properly upon scrolling in a worksheet using freeze panes, one in Word which prevented emails with linked SVG content from saving or sending, and one in which some PowerPoint presentations created by third-party tools didn’t open correctly and some content was removed.

Get more info about Version 2411 (Build 18227.20152).

Version 2410 (Build 18129.20158)

Release date: November 12, 2024

This build fixes a variety of bugs, including one in Word in which all characters didn’t appear correctly when creating an Outlook task from OneNote, and one in PowerPoint in which embedded BMP images in the PowerPoint slide were not opening.

This build also includes a variety of security updates. See Release notes for Microsoft Office security updates for details.

What IT needs to know: Because this is a security update, it should be applied relatively soon. Over the next few weeks, check for reports about problematic issues, and if all seems well, apply the update.

Get more info about Version 2410 (Build 18129.20158).

Version 2410 (Build 18129.20116)

Release date: October 28, 2024

This build enables filtering capabilities for the comment pane in Excel and fixes a variety of bugs, including one in Word in which the title bar no longer showed a “Saved” status for locally saved files, and one in PowerPoint in which a graphics-related issue caused the app to close unexpectedly at times.

Get more info about Version 2410 (Build 18129.20116).

Version 2409 (Build 18025.20160)

Release date: October 15, 2024

This build fixes a single bug in Word, in which emails with linked SVG content couldn’t be saved or sent.

Get more info about Version 2409 (Build 18025.20160).

Version 2409 (Build 18025.20140)

Release date: October 8, 2024

This build fixes a variety of bugs, including one in Word in which text wasn’t clearly visible in High Contrast Mode when using “Draft with Copilot” and referencing a meeting under “Reference your content.”

This build also includes multiple security updates. See Release notes for Microsoft Office security updates for details.

What IT needs to know: Because this is a security update, it should be applied relatively soon. Over the next few weeks, check for reports about problematic issues, and if all seems well, apply the update.

Get more info about Version 2409 (Build 18025.20140).

Version 2409 (Build 18025.20104)

Release date: September 25, 2024

This build fixes a single bug, in which when you saved a file in Word, the save status was missing from the Title bar.

Get more info about Version 2409 (Build 18025.20104).

Version 2409 (Build 18025.20096)

Release date: September 23, 2024

This build improves the user experience for selecting which users should have which permissions when a sensitivity label configured for user-defined permissions is applied to a file or when configuring standalone Information Rights Management through the Restrict Access feature. This change affects Excel, PowerPoint, and Word.

The build also fixes a variety of bugs, including one in Word in which Document Mode would switch from “editing” to “viewing” if user enabled “Track Changes” and set “For Everyone.”

Get more info about Version 2409 (Build 18025.20096).

Version 2408 (Build 17928.20156)

Release date: September 10, 2024

This update will remove Flip video support when the service goes offline on October 1, 2024. The build also includes a variety of security updates. Go here for details.

What IT needs to know: Because this is a security update, it should be applied relatively soon. Over the next few weeks, check for reports about problematic issues, and if all seems well, apply the update.

Get more info about Version 2408 (Build 17928.20156).

Version 2408 (Build 17928.20114)

Release date: August 26, 2024

This build allows you to disable connected experiences for privacy concerns without impacting data security policies, such as sensitivity labels. Services associated with Microsoft Purview (e.g., sensitivity labels and rights management) are no longer controlled by policy settings to manage privacy controls for Microsoft 365 Apps. Instead, these services will rely on their existing security admin controls in Purview portals.

The build also fixes a variety of bugs, including one in Outlook that caused default SMIME labels to fail to apply when a user replied to or forwarded an unlabeled message, and one for the entire suite in which people couldn’t install Microsoft 365 apps on an enrolled device.

Get more info about Version 2408 (Build 17928.20114).

Version 2407 (Build 17830.20166)

Release date: August 13, 2024

This build includes a variety of security updates for Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, Project, Visio, and the entire Office suite. See Microsoft’s Release notes for Office security updates for details.

What IT needs to know: Because this is a security update, it should be applied relatively soon. Over the next few weeks, check for reports about problematic issues, and if all seems well, apply the update.

Get more info about Version 2407 (Build 17830.20166).

Version 2407 (Build 17830.20138)

Release date: August 1, 2024

This build fixes a wide variety of bugs, including one in which coauthoring on text boxes in Excel sometimes gave unexpected results, another in PowerPoint in which line widths were not preserved when exporting arrow shapes to PDF, and another in Word in which revisions were sometimes skipped when reviewing using VBA.

Get more info about Version 2407 (Build 17830.20138).

Version 2406 (Build 17726.20160)

Release date: July 9, 2024

This build fixes several bugs, including one in Word and Excel in which characters don’t appear correctly in Text Box Gallery. It also fixes a number of security holes. For details, see Release notes for Microsoft Office security updates.

What IT needs to know: Because this is a security update, it should be applied relatively soon. Over the next few weeks, check for reports about problematic issues, and if all seems well, apply the update.

Get more info about Version 2406 (Build 17726.20160).

Version 2406 (Build 17726.20126)

Release date: June 26, 2024

This build fixes a wide variety of bugs, including one in which Excel documents might be unexpectedly edited when a mandatory sensitivity label has not been applied, one that caused Outlook to exit unexpectedly shortly after launch for some users, and one in which pasting data from Word or Excel to an Outlook template as a link would cause an error message to appear.

Get more info about Version 2406 (Build 17726.20126).

Version 2405 (Build 17628.20164)

Release date: June 19, 2024

This build includes a variety of unspecified bug and performance fixes.

Get more info about Version 2405 (Build 17628.20164).

Version 2405 (Build 17628.20144)

Release date: June 11, 2024

This build fixes one bug, which prevented users from sending mail for a few hours after updating add-ins with on-send events. It also fixes a number of security holes. For details, see Release notes for Microsoft Office security updates.

What IT needs to know: Because this is a security update, it should be applied relatively soon. Over the next few weeks, check for reports about problematic issues, and if all seems well, apply the update.

Get more info about Version 2405 (Build 17628.20144).

Version 2405 (Build 17628.20110)

Release date: May 30, 2024

This build fixes a wide variety of bugs, including one in Excel in which an embedded workbook in .xls format might not have closed properly, one that that caused Outlook to close when using Copilot Summarize, one in Word in which content controls may have been removed when coauthoring, and one for the entire Office suite in which the Organization Chart Add-In for Microsoft programs was not loading properly.

Get more info about Version 2405 (Build 17628.20110).

Version 2404 (Build 17531.20152)

Release date: May 14, 2024

This build fixes a number of bugs, including one in Word where content controls might be removed when coauthoring, and one that caused Sovereign users to be unable to create ToDo tasks from Outlook.

It also fixes a number of security holes. For details, see Release notes for Microsoft Office security updates.

What IT needs to know: Because this is a security update, it should be applied relatively soon. Over the next few weeks, check for reports about problematic issues, and if all seems well, apply the update.

Get more info about Version 2404 (Build 17531.20152).

Version 2404 (Build 17531.20140)

Release date: May 7, 2024

This build fixes two bugs in Outlook, one in which it closed unexpectedly using the Scheduling Assistant when creating a new meeting or viewing an existing meeting, and another that caused add-in developers to hit timeouts when retrieving notifications from an Outlook client context.

Get more info about Version 2404 (Build 17531.20140) .

Version 2404 (Build 17531.20120)

Release date: April 29, 2024

This build reduces workbook size bloat from unnecessary cell formatting with a new “Check Performance” task pane. In addition, it fixes a wide variety of bugs, including one in Excel in which the default font could not be set; one in Outlook in which custom forms from MAPI form servers stopped responding; one in PowerPoint in which online videos did not play in some cases; one in which when opening certain Word documents would cause the error, “Word experienced an error trying to open the file”; and one in which the Office update installer appeared to be unresponsive.

Get more info about Version 2404 (Build 17531.20120) .

Version 2403 (Build 17425.20176)

Release date: April 9, 2024

This build fixes a number of security holes. For details, see Release notes for Microsoft Office security updates.

What IT needs to know: Because this is a security update, it should be applied relatively soon. Over the next few weeks, check for reports about problematic issues, and if all seems well, apply the update.

Get more info about Version 2403 (Build 17425.20176).

Version 2402 (Build 17328.20184)

Release date: March 12, 2024

This build fixes three bugs: one in which Access closed unexpectedly, one in which Excel closed unexpectedly when opening files with pivot tables and table design in macro-enabled files, and one in which Word closed unexpectedly when the undo function was used.

This build also fixes a number of security holes. For details, see Release notes for Microsoft Office security updates.

What IT needs to know: Because this is a security update, it should be applied relatively soon. Over the next few weeks, check for reports about problematic issues, and if all seems well, apply the update.

Get more info about Version 2402 (Build 17328.20184).

Version 2402 (Build 17328.20162)

Release date: March 4, 2024

This build fixes several bugs, including one that crashed Outlook when a link was clicked on, and another for the entire Office suite in which opened Office apps didn’t automatically start when a laptop was reopened, and an error message appeared after manual relaunch.

Get more info about Version 2402 (Build 17328.20162).

Version 2402 (Build 17328.20142)

Release date: February 28, 2024

This build fixes a variety of bugs, including one that caused Outlook to exit unexpectedly when expanding a conversation in the search results from a search of “All Mailboxes,” and another in which users were not able to create a bullet list with hyphens in PowerPoint.

Get more info about Version 2402 (Build 17328.20142).

Version 2401 (Build 17231.20236)

Release date: February 13, 2024

This build fixes several bugs, including one in which macros were being corrupted when saving Excel files and another that affected the entire Office suite in which add-ins would not load after Click trust for content add-in was selected.

This build also fixes a number of security holes. For details, see Release notes for Microsoft Office security updates.

What IT needs to know: Because this is a security update, it should be applied relatively soon. Over the next few weeks, check for reports about problematic issues, and if all seems well, apply the update.

Get more info about Version 2401 (Build 17231.20236).

Version 2401 (Build 17231.20194)

Release date: February 1, 2024

This build fixes a single bug in which expanded groups in the message list collapsed when users changed which column they were arranged by.

Get more info about Version 2401 (Build 17231.20194).

Version 2401 (Build 17231.20182)

Release date: January 30, 2024

This build fixes a wide variety of bugs, including one in which Excel would stop responding when saving changes, one in PowerPoint in which Notes and Slide layout would open with incorrect proportions when a file was opened from a protected view, and one in Word in which comment cards appeared too wide and cut off text when changing or switching the screen in use.

Get more info about Version 2401 (Build 17231.20182).

Version 2312 (Build 17126.20132)

Release date: January 9, 2024

This build fixes a number of security holes. For details, see Release notes for Microsoft Office security updates.

What IT needs to know: Because this is a security update, it should be applied relatively soon. Over the next few weeks, check for reports about problematic issues, and if all seems well, apply the update.

Get more info about Version 2312 (Build 17126.20132).

Version 2312 (Build 17126.20126)

Release date: January 4, 2023

This build introduces a new sensitivity toolbar in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint that helps users understand the security policies that apply to their documents. It’s available when users are creating copies of their documents in File / Save As. In addition, Office now had a new default theme, which Microsoft says is “more modern and accessible.”

It also fixes a wide variety of bugs, including one in Excel in which Custom Menu text was truncated when right-clicking in a cell, one in PowerPoint in which restoring a previous version of a presentation was not working as expected when using Version History, and one in Word in which the content control end tag was marked at the end of the document automatically if the document was edited in Word Online and then opened in Word desktop.

Get more info about  Version 2312 (Build 17126.20126).

Version 2311 (Build 17029.20108)

Release date: December 12, 2023

This build fixes one bug in Outlook, in which the message list was blank when switching between the “Focused” and “Other” views.

It also fixes a number of security holes. For details, see Release notes for Microsoft Office security updates.

What IT needs to know: Because this is a security update, it should be applied relatively soon. Over the next few weeks, check for reports about problematic issues, and if all seems well, apply the update.

Get more info about Version 2311 (Build 17029.20108).

Version 2311 (Build 17029.20068)

Release date: November 29, 2023

This build automatically inserts image captioning for Excel’s images. When you insert an image into a spreadsheet, accessibility image captioning is automatically generated for you.

It also fixes a wide variety of bugs, including one in Excel in which list box controls would not respond to mouse clicks after scrolling using the mouse wheel, and one in Word in which the language of a presentation was not retained when saving or exporting the presentation to a PDF file.

Get more info about Version 2311 (Build 17029.20068).

Version 2310 (Build 16924.20150)

Release date: November 14, 2023

This build fixes several bugs, including one in which Outlook failed to comply with the default browser settings for some users, and another in which new lines were added to an Outlook signature when pressing Enter in the body of the email.

It also fixes a number of security holes. For details, see Release notes for Microsoft Office security updates.

What IT needs to know: Because this is a security update, it should be applied relatively soon. Over the next few weeks, check for reports about problematic issues, and if all seems well, apply the update.

Get more info about Version 2310 (Build 16924.20150).

Version 2310 (Build 16924.20124)

Release date: Oct. 31, 2023

This build fixes a bug that caused Outlook to exit unexpectedly when clicking the More link in the Search results list.

Get more info about Version 2310 (Build 16924.20124).

Version 2310 (Build 16924.20106)

Release date: Oct. 25, 2023

In this build, the Teams Meeting App works in Outlook, too. With it, you’ll be able to configure a meeting app while scheduling an invite in Outlook. The meeting app will be ready to use when you chat or join the meeting on Teams.

A wide variety of bugs have also been fixed, including one in Excel where certain Pivot Tables would load slowly; one in which OneNote would close unexpectedly when rapidly navigating from one .PDF file to another .PDF file between different sections, or when performing an undo operation on a .PDF printout insertion; and one in the entire Office suite that caused unexpected black borders to appear around screen captures added with the Insert Screenshot functionality.

Get more info about Version 2310 (Build 16924.20106).

Version 2309 (Build 16827.20166)

Release date: October 10, 2023

This build fixes two bugs, one in which users were missing their Outlook add-ins, and another in Word in which subheading numbering with a custom Style would disappear if the file was saved and reopened. It also fixes a number of security holes. For details, see Release notes for Microsoft Office security updates.

What IT needs to know: Because this is a security update, it should be applied relatively soon. Over the next few weeks, check for reports about problematic issues, and if all seems well, apply the update.

Get more info about Version 2309 (Build 16827.20166).

Version 2309 (Build 16827.20130)

Release date: September 28, 2023

This build introduces two new features, including the ability to disable specific types of automatic data conversions in Excel and support for the “Present in Teams” button to present local files in PowerPoint Live in Microsoft Teams.

Several bugs have also been fixed, including one in which the setting to control how Outlook opens previous items at start-up was missing from the Options window, and another in Word in which the Add-ins tab was not visible when using custom toolbar information.

Get more info about Version 2309 (Build 16827.20130).

Version 2308 (Build 16731.20234)

Release date: September 12, 2023

This build fixes several bugs, including one that caused Outlook to close unexpectedly when viewing an email, and another in PowerPoint in which the presenter view slide section zoomed in and out when zooming in the notes section.

It also fixes a number of security holes. For details, see Release notes for Microsoft Office security updates.

What IT needs to know: Because this is a security update, it should be applied relatively soon. Over the next few weeks, check for reports about problematic issues, and if all seems well, apply the update.

Get more info about Version 2308 (Build 16731.20234).

Vowing to make it the “world’s most trusted software company,” Mozilla’s board of directors announced Tuesday it was appointing Anthony Enzor-DeMeo as the new CEO, whose mandate will be to achieve that lofty goal.

Enzor-DeMeo, former GM of Firefox, wrote in a blog that becoming trusted “is not a slogan, but a direction involving three strategies, key among them being that privacy, data use, and AI must be clear and understandable. Controls must be simple. AI should always be a choice — something people can easily turn off.”

In addition, he wrote, the firm’s business model must align with trust, and Firefox “will evolve into a modern AI browser.”

The new CEO, who replaces interim CEO Laura Chambers, who is returning to the Mozilla board, stated in a release, “the browser is AI’s next battleground. It’s where people live their online lives and where the next era’s questions of trust, data use, and transparency will be decided.”

Describing Mozilla’s strategy announcement as an “interesting development,” Sanchit Vir Gogia, the chief analyst at Greyhound Research, said that the debate around browser-based AI has been framed far too narrowly and often presented as a choice between two extremes.

The power of the browser has risen.

On one hand, he said, “Chrome and Edge are racing ahead, turning the browser into an always on AI surface optimized for consumer productivity, cloud integration, and ecosystem scale.”

On the other, Gogia pointed out, “Mozilla is deliberately slowing things down, keeping AI optional, bounded, and subordinate to user and enterprise consent. Enterprises recognize the logic in both positions. But in practice, they are choosing a third path.”

The core issue, he added, “is not whether AI belongs in the browser. It already does. The issue is what happens when the browser stops being a passive interface and becomes an active participant inside the enterprise trust boundary. Once AI is embedded at the browser layer, it can read across tabs, infer user intent, summarise internal systems, and, in some cases, act autonomously.”

At that point, said Gogia,” the browser is no longer just a tool. It is an actor. And that is where enterprise governance begins to fracture.”

He predicted that the next phase of this market will be defined not by who ships the most AI features, but by who solves browser level accountability first. “The browser has become too powerful to be treated as a commodity endpoint,” he said. “Enterprises are no longer asking which browser is best. They are asking which browser belongs where.”

Mozilla, said Gogia, “has helped surface the risk. Big Tech has accelerated it. Island browsers are where enterprises are quietly resolving it. Whoever manages to combine intelligence, control, and trust at the access layer will not just win CIO confidence, they will define what safe, enterprise grade AI actually looks like in the real world.”

Brian Jackson, principal research director at Info-Tech Research Group, said, “while we don’t yet know Mozilla’s AI strategy or how it will go about delivering it to users, we do know that it has an entirely different set of incentives than its competitors. Google and Microsoft are heavily invested in AI and therefore want to increase the number of users and engagement in these products.”

Mozilla, he said, doesn’t have those incentives to push users towards AI consumption, so it can continue to focus on its core mission of a privacy-first browser that prioritizes trust.

Many users, Jackson pointed out, “will like the personalized services and time-saving productivity features that come from an AI-first browser experience. But others may wonder if the data they are exposing to these AI models, and by proxy big tech giants, is worth more than having an AI agent suggest how to write an email reply for you.”

One perspective, he said, “would say that Mozilla is just behind its competitors in terms of building out an AI-enhanced web experience for its users, and that may end up costing it market share. Another point of view is that it’s not rushing to extract as much user data as it can to feed an AI algorithm as part of a competition to improve an AI algorithm.”

Jackson predicted, “if users start to feel like Chrome or Edge is pushing AI too aggressively, or worse yet, they are creeped out when AI rehashes their personal information and presents recommendations around it, they might actually look for alternatives like Mozilla.”

In addition, Gogia added, enterprises “are under real pressure to extract productivity gains from AI. They will not permanently trade capability for comfort. If Chrome and Edge succeed in stabilizing governance, improving auditability, and avoiding a major enterprise failure, tolerance for AI-first defaults will rise. Mozilla’s challenge is execution. It must prove that governance first does not mean capability last.”

With Apple Silicon its current crown jewel, Apple has continued to rapidly build its presence in enterprise computing throughout 2025, generating significant market share gains as companies accelerate Apple deployments across their fleets.

What’s driven Apple’s progress this year — and what should we expect from the company in the year ahead? To find out, I spoke to execs from a range of companies in the space: Fleet, Hexnode, Iru, Jamf, JumpCloud, MacStadium, SAP, and a newer entrant in the Apple enterprise scene, MacPaw.

For the most part, everyone I spoke with agreed that Apple Silicon and the profound power and performance advantages of the current Mac fleet has been the biggest thing to celebrate. They also suggest that what Apple does in artificial intelligence (AI) may be the biggest inflection point for the coming year. 

What Apple says

Speaking in November, Apple’s Jeremy Butcher, who handles business product marketing, told me: “It’s so great to see the momentum [around Macs in the enterprise]. As you know, it’s very intentional.” Butcher also stressed how the company considers what business users need and works to introduce those features as they make sense. 

“We’re seeing tremendous momentum around Mac in the enterprise,” said Apple’s Colleen Novielli, who focuses on MacBook product marketing. “We’re seeing this amazing spectrum of adoption across the Mac range.”

With that in mind, it makes sense to speak to people leading the charge in the enterprise, including Apple’s device management partners, major deployment partners, and others.

SAP: The mass deployment story

Martin Lang heads up enterprise mobility at SAP. He has led the company to deploy tens of thousands of Macs, iPhones, and iPads worldwide. For him, Apple in 2025 was all about scale. “At SAP, Macs now account for about 50% of our workforce, more than 54,000 devices. I didn’t quite think this was possible just a few years back,” he said.

That deployment has translated into, “verifiably fewer support cases and longer productive workdays,” he told me. “People trust the devices to serve them well for years, and that’s true for both entry-level and high-performance machines.”

Apple made significant improvements to its mobile device management (MDM) systems in 2025, and these changes extended to visionOS devices. SAP has about 100 Vision Pro units deployed across the company; most are now managed to the same compliance standard as other devices, making them viable for use with corporate data.

“One thing I’d consider ‘bad’ is that Apple still struggles with enterprise-scale logistics,” said Lang. He noted that iPhone 17 has been severely backordered since launch, meaning some SAP staffers have waited months for a new device, and speculated that distribution and supply chain challenges might have contributed to the delays.

Lang also wants to see Apple tout its enterprise success stories. “Enterprise customers did amazing things with Apple in 2025, however many of those stories stay hidden,” he said. “Enterprises want concrete, peer-driven examples, not just platform announcements…. I think Apple could push people more to share stories.”

Looking forward, Lang shared his hope that enterprise users will learn that iPhones have a much wider set of use cases than just collaboration and time management. “In our personal lives, we fully leverage mobile-specific capabilities like push notifications, biometrics, location awareness, [and] offline intelligence. However, in enterprises, mobile devices are still mostly just used for collaboration purposes,” he said.

He also noted how SAP is using Badges in Apple Wallet to provide door entry access across the company. “This is an example of how these tools can be used for so much more in business.”

JAMF: Now we have the hardware, here comes the AI

Michael Covington, vice president of portfolio strategy at Apple device management and security vendor Jamf, called 2025 an “incredible year” for Apple in the enterprise. Jamf continues to give IT teams ever more power to configure, secure, and support their fleets, but it all starts with the hardware.

“This year’s release of the MacBook Air with the M4 processor may have been the quiet highlight for many large organizations that have been waiting for the right price and performance boost before making Apple’s renowned end-user experience part of the standard issue tech,” he said.

Covington has also seen more businesses begin to deploy Macs. “Over the course of the year, we watched as organizations from across a broad set of sectors, stopped treating the Mac as an ‘exception’ and embraced it as the device that is driving growth,” he said.

In part, this is because the MacBook Air now delivers the kind of performance you’d once look to a pro machine to achieve, all at a cost that makes it easy and attractive for mass deployment. “Couple these hardware advancements with Apple’s investment in expanding management and security hooks, and you’ve got a recipe for success in the enterprise.”

AI is the next opportunity for Apple, Covington said. “It’s no secret that Apple waited for generative AI technology to mature before introducing its own Apple Intelligence suite to the market.”

In part, this reflects the company’s deep commitment to user privacy, which makes AI development challenging, but “also presents a huge opportunity to differentiate how AI is presented to end users for work.

“We are excited to see how Apple continues to enable their devices to seamlessly fit into enterprise IT in the year ahead,” Covington said. “As AI becomes a more integrated component of the end user experience, Apple is uniquely positioned to unlock a new wave of productivity, while also ensuring users feel safe and secure — whether engaging with a work application or personal data.”

MacStadium: Power and consistency

MacStadium CTO Chris Chapman saw lots of great moves from Apple across the year. In hardware, the M4 Air increased RAM and added powerful AI processing at a sub-$1,000 price. “This opened the floodgates for the TCO and value discussion around Apple as a preferred device in business,” he said.

Once you have the hardware, how do you manage it?  Declarative Device Management was a “missing enterprise capability” that has now been realized. “DDM opens the door for Apple to be considered an enterprise platform that IT teams can use to manage Apple devices as business-owned assets,” Chapman said.

He also welcomed the ’26 series of operating system upgrades. “While we love creative names like Tahoe and Sierra, IT departments are tasked with consistency, repeatability, and stability.  Apple finally adopted consistent, standard versioning with OS26, iOS26, etc. Now, a fleet of devices can be tracked by a linear-based version across form factors. This is a step toward IT standardization that has long been missing, giving IT administrators a much-needed capability.”

Chapman, like others, is watching Apple’s unfolding AI strategy. Apple now has “some of the best and most powerful hardware to run local AI models with very low energy consumption,” he said, but lacks its own compelling solutions for enterprise AI. 

“Apple’s individual assistant features are lagging compared to other AI platforms like ChatGPT or Gemini,” he said. “It’s also very focused on performing tasks for the individual, but not as capable of learning or knowing your business or corporate data. Many IT departments blocked or disabled Siri because of visibility and management concerns. For the enterprise, this is a miss and somewhat confusing compared to Microsoft’s Copilot. Apple is still formulating its broader AI play, but the vague approach taken this year was lackluster for the enterprise.”

Those challenges may not last, Chapman says. “Apple is restructuring its AI team, and there is talk of a partnership with Google. Moving Apple into a strategic position to be leveraged for AI in business is an intriguing and powerful direction.”

Still, Apple’s visionOS work continues to seek use cases, Chapman said. “How Vision Pro can be an effective enterprise device and used at scale is unclear,” he said. “To be fair, I don’t think anyone has nailed the use case or technology yet, but Apple seemed uncharacteristically farther away from the field in form and function.” He does expect new form factor AI devices to appear and suspects that these, combined with visionOS, will open new opportunities for business uses.

The same may be true, he said, about any new folding devices released next year, which could “open new use cases and targets for application developers.”

Fleet Device Management: Amazing hardware

Mike McNeil, Fleet Device Management CEO, was impressed by Apple’s move to open enterprise opportunities with the introduction of MDM migration tools this year. 

“Apple nailed it with openness in 2025, and I expect to see more of the same in 2026,” he said. “The push to make it easier to migrate MDMs was a major signal, even if it wasn’t quite as easy as we thought it would be at first. I see a lot of customers still using Fleet’s original custom migration tool, because it’s a bit more of a paved road. For example, one customer migrating 40,000 Macs to Fleet ‘the new way’ experienced an outage from Apple Business Manager midway through the migration, and that was tough. But I appreciate the energy Apple is investing here, even if some parts are rough around the edges.”

McNeil also told me his own personal upgrade story. “I finally upgraded from my old Intel Mac to a 15-in. M4 MacBook Air last week, and…holy cow, what a performance improvement. The fact that I’ve used a 2019 MacBook Pro through the entirety of my time building this company is a testament to the long-term value of an investment in Apple hardware, but also, the new stuff is amazing.”

Hexnode: We can get much more from Apple

I spoke once again with Hexnode CEO Apu Pavithran. He sees the conversation around Apple in the enterprise changing. Where before it might have been characterized by searching for reasons to deploy Apple’s kit, it is now all about maximizing the benefits of equipment business users already have.

“This is big in and of itself and Apple’s surely happy the fundamentals continue to move in their favor: happier employees, better retention, lower support costs,” he said. “As AI capabilities mature and management tools deepen, Apple’s privacy-first approach becomes a competitive differentiator. I expect the momentum we’ve seen to accelerate as the business case strengthens.”

Pavithran saw a lot to celebrate during the year: Mac sales are accelerating, user satisfaction is high, and Apple can continue to show a “positive feedback loop between workplace performance and subsequent tech investment.” 

Apple Silicon delivers the best possible power, performance, and reliability. “I’m consistently impressed with Apple’s hardware — it’s never been more reliable than right now,” said Pavithran. “Failures are so low on the list of IT problems with five-year device lifecycles becoming standard. Again, the improved total cost of ownership, sustainability benefits, and resale value only strengthen the company’s business case.”

Pavithran, too, sees the Apple hardware story forming strong foundations for the company’s upcoming AI story. “From my perspective, Apple’s done a terrific job embracing this AI moment in line with the privacy requirements of big business. The one-two punch of stronger hardware and on-device data processing makes it easier for security-conscious companies to say yes. Unlike cloud-dependent competitors, Apple’s privacy-first approach goes a long way toward alleviating data concerns about AI. They’re threading the needle between market evolution and compliant, careful onboarding.”

As for device management, Pavithran sees Apple’s willingness to continuously refine its approach as proof that it is listening to enterprise IT.  “For example, it’s promising to see more granular restrictions on Apple Intelligence being released after we discussed it earlier this year. As usual, this shows the company cares about what enterprise users want and adapts its solutions accordingly.”

Challenges continue, of course – regulatory oversight, particularly in Europe, will likely make IT harder in the region, while spatial computing continues to seek real use cases. “We hope for additional shared device management features: Return to Service, Shared iPad, and Authenticated Guest Mode are available, but currently lack depth. Admins should be given extra room when it comes to isolating sessions, user sandboxing, and pre-staging apps based on the next user’s role,” he said.

Iru – another Mac story

Weldon Dodd, distinguished engineer at Iru (the company formerly known as Kandji) also sees Apple Silicon as a triumph. “[The] Mac has never been in a stronger hardware position where it now simply dominates the price, performance, and battery life balance for most use cases.” 

Dodd also noted that while we wait for Apple to introduce the next evolution of its approach to AI, its existing hardware ecosystem is ready for action. “While it doesn’t enter into the equation for enterprise AI model training with specialized server hardware from vendors like Nvidia, Apple’s chips have been shown to be very capable at running AI workloads on the endpoint,” he said.

And while 2026 may be an inflection point where the advances slow a bit, “I expect Apple to maintain its lead on hardware performance through the year.”

Enterprise deployment is part device and part device management. Like most such firms in the Apple space, Iru makes use of the systems Apple creates; this year’s big upgrade was around Platform SSO, which Apple improved at WWDC, Dodd said.

“Platform SSO continues its siren song luring Mac admins towards an integration with cloud identity that still presents a bit of friction for admins to fully implement. PSSO improved in a few important ways this year in macOS 26 Tahoe, where the two big features are authentication with Automated Device Enrolment during Setup Assistant for initial account creation with IdP credentials and being able to use PSSO sign in at the File Vault unlock screen. This launched with support from a single IdP vendor, but another has joined. And it would be great to see more support from other vendors in 2026, as well as further improvements from Apple to make this into a truly seamless marriage between macOS and cloud identity.”

Dodd also sees a second wave of change coming for AI. He believes we all became more aware of the limitations of genAI during the year, which means IT admins will now focus on learning how to use Model Context Protocol with agentic AI to pull together disparate systems. “There’s real potential for a new kind of integration layer in enterprise IT that will allow for real insights to be developed by bringing data together from what have been separate tools,” he said.

JumpCloud: Reality must catch up

Joel Rennich, senior vice president for product management at JumpCloud, welcomes the improvements in DDM and Platform SSO, but warns: “It will take some time for MDM vendors and Identity Providers (IdPs) to actually support this,” he said.

“Apple mostly kept improving on the security and identity threads that they’ve been pulling at for the last few years. There weren’t any major new changes for vendors to have to pivot to, or new flows to support,” he said.

But he warned that few vendors “support the full scope” of the changes that Apple has instituted in recent years. “Since much of the Apple improvements over the last few years are not in any way industry standard, this has become very hit or miss,.”

Rennich warned that the biggest challenge for Apple in the enterprise is Apple itself. “The aspects that make Apple great in the consumer space are many times inherently at odds with what enterprises are looking for, and in most cases Apple refuses to compromise on aspects like user privacy and experience,” he said. While he doesn’t expect Apple to change its stance, he expects business users to continue to request more controls and management tools.

From the admins: Armin Briegel

Apple this year achieved “steady continuous improvement, based on groundwork laid years ago,” said Armin Briegel, who writes at Scripting OS X/MacAdmins.news, a weekly briefing for Apple IT. He sees continued maturation of the device management technologies Apple offers, including DDM, Platform SSO, managed device attestation and network relay.

“These have become, after some rough starts, powerful tools for enterprise management,” he said. “Features often need to iterate over a view years before their utility is apparent. There are some features, like the new ManagedApp settings, declarative app deployment, or protected services, that are very limited now, but seem promising for the few cycles.”

Briegel is more critical of the App Store: “Apple is proving a poor steward to the App Store and the wider ecosystem on their platforms. iPad and even more so Vision Pro are excellent hardware held back by lack of great applications.”

He warned that Apple’s App Store rules and its reaction to regulation are “discouraging third-party enthusiasm and investment in the platforms and undermining trust in the overall ecosystem.” He also pointed out that even after all these years, it remains impossible for enterprise admins to manage deployment of in-app purchases or subscriptions. “At this point, I would consider opening up iOS and the other platforms to unrestricted side-loading. Apple has to bring App Store rules, restrictions and management up to a point where consumers, developers, and system administrators want to use them, rather than grudgingly accept them.”

MacPaw: A new wave for enterprise IT

Ukrainian developer MacPaw recently introduced CleanMyMac Business to the Jamf Marketplace. Dan Jaenicke, MacPaw’s director of B2B product strategy, also sees Apple’s enterprise success as powered by Apple Silicon. “The hardware continues to outperform competitors, and Macs are lasting longer than ever. That longevity is invaluable for IT teams, allowing them to focus on productivity and strategic initiatives instead of constantly replacing devices,” he said.

However, the AI story must evolve, he said, pointing to MacPaw data that shows almost 60% of Mac admins already use AI at work. 

“The spotlight in 2026 will be on Apple’s progress in enterprise AI. IT leaders are looking for tools that make workflows smarter and more secure. With key developer and executive departures on the horizon, the entire community will be closely watching to see whether Apple can maintain momentum, lead in AI adoption, and continue to balance hardware and software innovations,” he said.

You can follow me on social media! Join me on BlueSky,  LinkedIn, and Mastodon.

One of the most enticing uses for generative AI is to help you write. Anyone can get writing help from Microsoft’s Copilot genAI tool via the free Copilot web or mobile app. But Copilot becomes especially useful when it’s integrated with various Microsoft 365 apps.

As you compose, edit, or view a document in Word, for example, you can summon Copilot to assist you in several ways: It can generate rough drafts, polish or change the tone of your writing, and summarize long passages of text. Copilot can also help you compose or summarize emails in Outlook and help you rewrite or summarize notes in OneNote.

In this article:

• Who can use Copilot in Microsoft 365 apps
• Have Copilot generate a rough draft
• Ask Copilot for suggestions to improve your writing
• Have Copilot rewrite text
• Have Copilot summarize long documents, notes, emails, or threads

Who can use Copilot in Microsoft 365 apps

If you have a Microsoft 365 Personal, Family, or Premium subscription, Copilot access in Word, OneNote, Outlook, and other Microsoft 365 apps is built into your plan. But Microsoft 365 business and enterprise subscriptions do not include Copilot integration in the apps. Your company has to purchase an additional Microsoft 365 Copilot plan, which costs $30 per user per month when paid annually. (Microsoft does offer plans that bundle the M365 apps and M365 Copilot, but the costs are the same.)

This guide goes over how to use Copilot in Word, Outlook, and OneNote to help you compose, revise, and summarize text. I’ll demonstrate using Copilot with an individual Microsoft 365 Premium account, but most of the steps and user interfaces are similar under a Microsoft 365 business plan. I’ll also note additional features that are available only under the business versions of Copilot and Microsoft 365.

Note: Microsoft 365 apps aren’t completely consistent on different platforms, so you might see a somewhat different interface for a feature than is shown here. What’s more, some features are available in the web apps but not the desktop apps, and vice versa — and if you have a work or school Microsoft 365 account, your administrator may allow some Copilot tools but not others.

Have Copilot generate a rough draft

Copilot can help you compose text drafts in Word, Outlook, and OneNote. You use Copilot through a toolbar or pane that appears within the body of your document, email draft, or note, or via an entry box that appears above a blank document in Word. Copilot is also available from a sidebar that opens along the right of these apps.

Using the Copilot toolbar or pane

In Word: When you start a new, blank document, you’ll see three example prompts above the blank document. Clicking one of these will trigger Copilot to generate text as described in that prompt.

Below these prompts is a text entry box that says, “What do you want Copilot to draft?” That’s where you type in a prompt that describes what you want Copilot to write. (More on prompt writing in a moment.)

When you start a new document in Word, you’ll see some prompt suggestions and the Copilot toolbar above the document.

Howard Wen / Foundry

At the right end of the text entry box you can optionally click the paperclip icon (Reference your content) and select a document in your OneDrive, SharePoint, or on your PC. Copilot will base its output on the document, including content, writing style, and formatting. (Business users can select up to three files for Copilot to reference.) You can also type a / (forward slash) inside the text entry box to select a document for reference.

If your Word document already has text in it, place the cursor where you want to insert new text generated by Copilot. Click the pen icon that appears in the left margin.

In a document that already has text, place your cursor in the file and click the pen icon in the left margin.

Howard Wen / Foundry

This will open the Copilot toolbar, where you can type your prompt into the text entry box and optionally use the paperclip icon to upload a document for Copilot to reference.

When you click the pen icon in the left margin, the Copilot toolbar appears in the body of your document.

Howard Wen / Foundry

On the dropdown below the toolbar, there are three selections:

• Click Keep writing if you want Copilot to generate more text based on the context of the rest of the document.
• I’ll describe Writing suggestions in detail later in this guide.
• Chat with Copilot will open the Copilot sidebar, also described later in this guide.

In Outlook: With the cursor in the message body of a new or draft email, click the Copilot icon that appears in the left margin. Or you can click the down arrow to the right of the Copilot button at the right end of the ribbon toolbar. On the dropdown menu that opens, click Draft.

Select Draft from the Copilot dropdown, then type your prompt into the Copilot toolbar.

Howard Wen / Foundry

The Copilot toolbar opens in the body of your email draft. Type your prompt inside the text entry box or choose one of the example prompts in the dropdown menu below the toolbar to have Copilot generate text as described in the prompt.

In OneNote: With the cursor on the page of a note (blank or with information already on it), click the Copilot icon that appears to the left of the cursor.

On the dropdown menu that opens, click Take notes with Copilot. A pane will open in which you can type a prompt to Copilot. (If you click the Copilot icon while on a blank page, you’ll be taken to this pane immediately.) Type your prompt inside the text entry box, then click Generate or press the Enter key. The second button, Inspire me, will enter suggested prompts based on the context of your other notes.

Enter your prompt or click Inspire me to see suggested prompts.

Howard Wen / Foundry

Crafting your prompts

Prompts are sentences you enter to instruct Copilot (or other AI assistants) how to compose the text that you want it to create. Your prompt should minimally include the subject and a few specifics about the writing you want it to generate.

To get started, describe the kind of text you want Copilot to generate and add a detail or two about it. These prompts can be simple or a little more complex. For example:

• Create a brief business pitch for a new vegan restaurant that will be located in downtown Atlanta, Georgia.
• Write an opening paragraph describing my interest in a technical support job opening at Microsoft.
• Write a few sentences that inquire if there are any job openings in technical support at Microsoft.
• Compose a polite follow-up with the recipient about a video call we had last week.

The more specifics you include in your prompt, the more likely you are to get good results. For instance, if you have notes that contain specific data points that you want to include in the generated text, copy and paste those notes into your prompt (or upload a document in Word as described earlier in the story). If you have an outline for the topics you want to cover in the draft, paste that in as well.

But frankly, there are no hard rules about writing prompts — just use your imagination and see how Copilot responds. It may not generate results that you like (if it generates any at all). But keep experimenting with the descriptions in your prompts until you coax Copilot to produce a useful response.

Once you’ve entered your prompt, click the right arrow (Generate) at the right end of the entry box or press Enter on your keyboard and wait for Copilot to work its magic.

The results are in – actions you can take

When Copilot has generated a draft, it appears in the document, email, or note with a toolbar below it.

In Word, use the toolbar below the generated draft to keep, retry, discard, or refine the text.

Howard Wen / Foundry

In Word and OneNote: You can use the toolbar to perform the following functions:

• Click the Keep it button to keep the newly minted words in your document or email. You can then edit the generated text in the doc or note as you see fit.
• Click the Regenerate button (two circular arrows) if you’re not satisfied with the result and want Copilot to generate a whole new one.
• Click the Discard button (a trashcan) to discard the result.
• Refine the result by typing more prompts in the text entry box (e.g., “add more details,” “make this sound more professional,” or “make it shorter”) and clicking the arrow. Copilot will generate an updated result using your additional commands and descriptions.
• Click the pencil icon above the toolbar so that you can edit the prompt you wrote, or enter an entirely new prompt, in the text entry box. The current results that Copilot generated will be discarded, and it’ll generate another set of text based on your revised or new prompt.
• Optionally click the thumbs up or down icon in the upper-right corner of the toolbar to rate the quality of the result that Copilot generated. Presumably, this helps train the AI to produce better results in the future.

In Outlook: Using the options in the dropdown menu below the toolbar, you can have Copilot change the length of the generated text (by selecting Make it shorter or Make it longer) or the tone of the text (by moving the pointer over Change Tone and selecting Direct, Casual, Formal or Like a Poem).

Copilot-generated text in Outlook, with options for taking action on it.

Howard Wen / Foundry

Important: All AI-generated content can contain errors or outright fabrications, known as hallucinations. When you insert text that Copilot has generated into a document or email, be sure to fact-check it carefully. (See our tips for curbing hallucinations in Copilot.)

AI-generated content also tends to be generic and a bit boring, so you’ll likely want to edit it to inject your own personality or writing style.

Customize email draft instructions in Outlook

Outlook offers an additional way to make Copilot’s email drafts sound more like you: give it custom instructions for composing messages. Click the down arrow to the right of the Copilot button that’s at the right end of the ribbon toolbar. On the menu that opens, select Settings.

On the Settings panel that opens over the page, click Draft Instructions. Then on the right side of the panel, under “Custom Instructions,” click on the switch for Use custom instructions when drafting email. Type in your custom instructions, including specifics like length, tone of voice, your customary greeting and closing, and so on. Then click the X at the upper-right corner of the panel to close it. You can further adjust these instructions at any time.

You can specify custom instructions for Copilot to use when generating email drafts.

Howard Wen / Foundry

Using the Copilot sidebar

In Word and OneNote, click the Copilot button toward the right end of the ribbon toolbar on the Home tab. In Outlook, start a new email message and click the Copilot button at the upper right.

This will open the Copilot sidebar to the right. Type your prompt inside the text entry box. Optionally, you can click the + to search for and select a document in your OneDrive, SharePoint, or on your PC to use as a reference. This works the same as the aforementioned “Reference your content” function while using the Copilot toolbar in Word. You can also type / (forward slash) to activate this function.

When you are done entering your prompt and adding a document for reference, click the arrow button or press Enter on your keyboard. Copilot will generate text and display it inside the sidebar.

Generated text in the Copilot sidebar in Word (left). If you scroll down in the sidebar, you’ll see icons for inserting the text or copying it your clipboard (right).

Howard Wen / Foundry

In Word, you can click + in the row of icons that appear below the generated text to add the text to your document or note. (This option isn’t available in Outlook or OneNote.) In all three apps, you can click the Copy button to copy the writing to your PC clipboard. You can then paste it into your document, email, note, or elsewhere.

Or you can refine Copilot’s results. In the sidebar below the generated text you’ll see some suggested prompts, such as “Make it more specific to our industry” or “Expand into a full section.” You can select one of these and/or type additional prompts into the entry box.

Ask Copilot for suggestions to improve your writing

If you’d rather compose emails and documents yourself but would like some suggestions for improvement, there’s a nifty Copilot feature in Outlook to assist you. Called “Coaching,” it critiques an email draft and offers recommendations for making it stronger. You can then make changes yourself or request that Copilot do so.

Word has a similar feature called “Writing suggestions” that uses Copilot to suggest ways to improve your writing, and you can choose to apply them to your document.

Outlook: Get coaching on an email draft

After you’ve written an email draft, click the down arrow to the right of the Copilot button at the right end of the ribbon toolbar. On the menu that appears, select Coaching.

Or, in your email draft, click the Copilot icon in the left margin to open its toolbar. From the dropdown below the toolbar, select Get coaching.

Copilot will review your draft and offer specific suggestions for improving it in terms of tone, reader sentiment, and clarity. At the bottom of this report, you can click Apply all suggestions, which will trigger Copilot to rewrite your email draft according to its suggestions, or click Dismiss to close the report with no changes made to your email draft.

Copilot can critique your email draft and offer suggestions for improvement.

Howard Wen / Foundry

Word: Get writing suggestions for a document

Click the pencil icon in the left margin of your document. Or, if you want Copilot to evaluate a specific section of the document, highlight the text you want critiqued and then click the pencil icon.

On the dropdown below the Copilot toolbar, click Writing suggestions. Copilot will analyze your writing. A panel will open that displays one or more suggestions. You can read through them by clicking the left and right arrows on the top of this panel. Each suggestion has a blue checkmark that you can uncheck if you want to disregard the suggestion.

If you want to apply any of the checked suggestions to your writing, click the Apply selected suggestions button.

Copilot can offer suggestions for improving a document in Word.

Howard Wen / Foundry

Have Copilot rewrite text

You can have Copilot rewrite passages of text in a Word document, an email, or a OneNote page. This can be useful if you feel that the text could use a little more detail, or if a paragraph sounds too wordy. Microsoft says Copilot’s rewriting ability works best at under 3,000 words.

In all three web apps, you can use the Copilot sidebar for rewriting. In Word, you can also use the “Rewrite with Copilot” panel, and OneNote has a similar rewriting tool.

Using the “Rewrite with Copilot” panel in Word

Highlight the passage of text that you want Copilot to rewrite, then click the pencil icon that appears in the margin to the left of the text that you highlighted. Alternatively, you can right-click on your highlighted text, and on the menu that opens, select Draft with Copilot.

On the dropdown that opens, you can select Auto rewrite to prompt Copilot to rewrite the passage wholesale, or you can choose one of the other items on this dropdown to have Copilot rewrite the text in a specific way: Fix spelling and grammar, Structure and refine, Make shorter, or Make formal. (Writing suggestions will have Copilot offer targeted suggestions for improving your writing, as covered in the previous section of this story.)

Copilot offers several approaches for rewriting your document.

Howard Wen / Foundry

After you make a selection from the dropdown, the “Rewrite with Copilot” panel appears below your highlighted text. Copilot will generate and present up to three rewritten versions in the panel. Click the right and left pointing arrows at the top of the panel to cycle through these rewrites to review them.

Reviewing Copilot’s suggested rewrites for the highlighted text.

Howard Wen / Foundry

Below the rewritten text, you can click the following buttons:

• Replace will replace the original text that you highlighted with the currently visible rewritten version.
• Insert below will insert the rewritten version below the original text you highlighted (so that you can decide later if you want to keep it).
• The Regenerate button (two circular arrows) will generate another result.
• In the Word web app, there’s a text entry box where you can refine the result by typing more prompts.

Note: Users with Copilot and M365 business subscriptions can also have Copilot rewrite messages in Teams. This feature works similarly to the Rewrite with Copilot panel in Word.

Using the Copilot icon in OneNote

The OneNote Windows app has its own built-in rewriting tool. To use it, click the top bar of a text field on a page, then click the Copilot icon to the left of the text field and on the next menu, select Rewrite this.

Select Rewrite this from the Copilot menu.

Howard Wen / Foundry

This action will trigger Copilot to rewrite everything inside the text field. The rewrite will then be set inside the top of the text field.

The rewritten text appears in the text field above the original text.

Howard Wen / Foundry

Using the Copilot sidebar in Word, Outlook, or OneNote

You can use the Copilot sidebar for rewriting in Word’s Windows and web apps, and in the Outlook and OneNote web apps — though it’s less convenient in Outlook and OneNote.

On the Home tab in the ribbon toolbar, click the Copilot button to open the Copilot sidebar to the right.

In Word: To have Copilot rewrite the whole document or note, type rewrite in the text entry box. To have it rewrite a specific paragraph, supply the paragraph number or select the paragraph you want rewritten. You can also describe how you want the text to be rewritten, such as rewrite the first paragraph to be shorter or rewrite paragraph 3 to sound more professional.

In Outlook or OneNote: Here you can’t simply select the text you want rewritten; you have to paste the text into Copilot’s text entry box and tell the AI how you want it rewritten.

Copilot’s rewritten text appears in the sidebar. In Word, you can click + in the row of icons that appear below the generated text to add it to your document. It will be added in the spot where the cursor is on your document. In all three apps, you can use the Copy icon to copy the rewritten text to your clipboard, and then paste it where you like.

A rewritten paragraph in the Copilot sidebar.

Howard Wen / Foundry

If you want to adjust Copilot’s rewriting result, you can click one of the suggested prompts that appear in the sidebar below the generated text — or you can type more prompts in the text entry box.

Having to copy and paste text to and from the sidebar in Outlook and OneNote is a bit of a hassle. For rewriting tasks in those apps, it’s simpler to use Outlook’s Coaching feature or OneNote’s “Rewrite this” tool via the Copilot icon.

Have Copilot summarize long documents, notes, emails, or threads

You can have Copilot generate a brief summary of a long document in Word or a page in OneNote. Microsoft says Copilot can summarize up to 1.5 million words. In Outlook, Copilot can summarize a long email and, even more useful, the conversation within an entire email thread.

Using the Copilot summary panel in Word

When you open a document that already contains text in the Word web app, Copilot automatically generates a summary of it in a small panel above your document; click View more to expand the panel so that you can view the entire summary.

Click View more (top) to expand the summary panel and see the full summary (bottom).

Howard Wen / Foundry

Throughout the summary, you may see citation numbers that refer to passages of text within the original document. Moving the pointer over one of these numbers will pop open a snippet of the cited text in a small panel. Clicking a number will jump your view of the document in the main window to the cited text in it.

Hover over a citation number to see a snippet of the cited text.

Howard Wen / Foundry

Using the Copilot sidebar in Word

With the document opened in Word, highlight the text that you want summarized. If you want a summary of the entire document or page, skip this step.

Click the Copilot button on the Home tab of the ribbon toolbar to open the Copilot sidebar. Inside the text entry box, type summarize and click the arrow button.

Copilot will generate a summary and display it inside the sidebar.

Copilot’s summary of a long document in the sidebar.

Howard Wen / Foundry

Below the summary, there’s the familiar + icon you can click to add the generated text to your document and the Copy button to copy the summary to your PC clipboard. Below that you may see suggested prompts that you can click to revise the summary.

Using the Copilot icon or sidebar in OneNote

Click the top bar of a text field on a page. Click the Copilot icon to the left of the text field and on the next menu, Summarize this. This action will trigger Copilot to summarize everything inside the text field. The summary will then be set inside the top of the text field.

In OneNote, Copilot’s summary appears at the top of the text field.

Howard Wen / Foundry

To summarize an entire notebook, open the Copilot sidebar, type summarize in the text entry box, and click the arrow button. Copilot will generate a summary and display it inside the sidebar, along with the usual Copy button and suggested prompts for refining the output.

Summarizing emails and threads in Outlook

Open the email or conversation that you want to summarize. Click Summary by Copilot or Summarize at the top of the email thread. Copilot will generate a summary of the email or thread.

A Copilot-generated summary of an email.

Howard Wen / Foundry

This summary will be posted at the top of the email or thread. Thread summaries may include citations that Copilot used in generating the summary. Clicking a citation (denoted by a number) will scroll down the thread to the cited email for you to view.

This Copilot-generated summary of an email thread includes citations you can click to go to the source email.

Howard Wen / Foundry

Getting a summary when sharing a Word doc (business plans only)

If you have Copilot with a Microsoft 365 business plan, you can use Copilot to generate a summary of a Word document when you share it with your co-workers. This summary is inserted as a passage of text inside the message that your co-workers receive inviting them to collaborate on the document.

Note: This feature works with the web version of Word, not the desktop apps.

With the document open in Word, click the Share button toward the upper right. On the Share panel that opens, click the Copilot icon inside the lower right of the “Add a message” composition box. The AI will generate and insert the summary. You can edit the summary before you send out the invite.

This article was initially published in August 2024 and updated in December 2025.

Related:

• How to curb hallucinations in Copilot (and other genAI tools)
• Microsoft cheat sheets: Dive into Windows and Office apps

AI agents must be able to cooperate, coordinate, and execute across large contexts and long time periods, and this, says Nvidia, demands a new type of infrastructure, one that is open.

The company says it has the answer with its new Nemotron 3 family of open models.

Developers and engineers can use the new models to create domain-specific AI agents or applications without having to build a foundation model from scratch. Nvidia is also releasing most of its training data and its reinforcement learning (RL) libraries for use by anyone looking to build AI agents.

“This is Nvidia’s response to DeepSeek disrupting the AI market,” said Wyatt Mayham of Northwest AI Consulting. “They’re offering a ‘business-ready’ open alternative with enterprise support and hardware optimization.”

Introducing Nemotron 3 Nano, Super, and Ultra

Nemotron 3 features what Nvidia calls a “breakthrough hybrid latent mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture”. The model comes in three sizes:

• Nano: The smallest and most “compute-cost-efficient,” intended for targeted, highly-efficient tasks like quick information retrieval, software debugging, content summarization, and AI assistant workflows. The 30-billion-parameter model activates 3 billion parameters at a time for speed and has a 1-million-token context window, allowing it to remember and connect information over multi-step tasks.
• Super: An advanced, high-accuracy reasoning model with roughly 100 billion parameters, up to 10 billion of which are active per token. It is intended for applications that require many collaborating agents to tackle complex tasks, such as deep research and strategy planning, with low latency.
• Ultra: A large reasoning engine intended for complex AI applications. It has 500 billion parameters, with up to 50 billion active per token.

Nemotron 3 Nano is now available on Hugging Face and through other inference service providers and enterprise AI and data infrastructure platforms. It will soon be made available on AWS via Amazon Bedrock and will be supported on Google Cloud, CoreWeave, Microsoft Foundry, and other public infrastructures. It is also offered as a pre-built Nvidia NIM microservice.

Nemotron 3 Super and Ultra are expected to be available in the first half of 2026.

Positioned as an infrastructure layer

The strategic positioning here is fundamentally different from that of the API providers, experts note.

“Nvidia isn’t trying to compete with OpenAI or Anthropic’s hosted services — they’re positioning themselves as the infrastructure layer for enterprises that want to build and own their own AI agents,” said Mayham.

Brian Jackson, principal research director at Info-Tech Research Group, agreed that the Nemotron models aren’t intended as a ready-baked product. “They are more like a meal kit that a developer can start working with,” he said, “and make desired modifications along the way to get the exact flavor they want.”

Hybrid architecture enhances performance

So far, Nemotron 3 seems to be exhibiting impressive gains in efficiency and performance; according to third-party benchmarking company Artificial Analysis, Nano is the most efficient among those of its size, and leads in accuracy.

Nvidia says Nano’s hybrid Mamba-Transformer MoE architecture, which integrates three architectures into a single backbone, supports this efficiency. Mamba layers offer efficient sequence modeling, transformer layers provide precision reasoning, and MoE routing gives scalable compute efficiency. The company says this design delivers a 4X higher token throughput compared to Nemotron 2 Nano while reducing reasoning-token generation by up to 60%.

“Throughput is the critical metric for agentic AI,” said Mayham. “When you’re orchestrating dozens of concurrent agents, inference costs scale dramatically. Higher throughput means lower cost per token and more responsive real-time agent behavior.”

The 60% reduction in reasoning-token generation addresses the “verbosity problem,” where chain-of-thought (CoT) models generate excessive internal reasoning before producing useful output, he noted. “For developers building multi-agent systems, this translates directly to lower latency and reduced compute costs.”

The upcoming Nemotron 3 Super, Nvidia says, excels at applications that require many collaborating agents to achieve complex tasks with low latency, while Nemotron 3 Ultra will serve as an advanced reasoning engine for AI workflows that demand deep research and strategic planning.

Mayham explained that these as-yet-unreleased models feature latent MoE, which projects tokens into a smaller, latent, dimension before expert routing, “theoretically” enabling 4X more experts at the same inference cost because it reduces communication overhead between GPUs.

The hybrid architecture behind Nemotron 3 that combines Mamba-2 layers, sparse transformers, and MoE routing is “genuinely novel in its combination,” Mayham said, although each technique exists individually elsewhere.

Ultimately, Nemotron pricing is “attractive,” he said; open weights are free to download and run locally. Third-party API pricing on DeepInfra starts at $0.06/million input tokens for Nemotron 3 Nano, which is “significantly cheaper” than GPT-4o, he noted.

Differentiator is openness

To underscore its commitment to open source, Nvidia is revealing some of Nemotron 3’s inner workings, releasing a dataset with real-world telemetry for safety evaluations, and 3 trillion tokens of Nemotron 3’s pretraining, post-training, and RL datasets.

In addition, Nvidia is open-sourcing its NeMo Gym and NeMo RL libraries, which provide Nemotron 3’s training environments and post-training foundation, and NeMo Evaluator, to help builders validate model safety and performance. All are now available on GitHub and Hugging Face. Of these, Mayham noted, NeMo Gym might be the most “strategically significant” piece of this release.

Pre-training teaches models to predict tokens, not to complete domain-specific tasks, and traditional RL from human feedback (RLHF) doesn’t scale for complex agentic behaviors, Mayham explained. NeMo Gym enables RL with verifiable rewards — essentially computational verification of task completion rather than subjective human ratings. That is, did the code pass tests? Is the math correct? Were the tools called properly?

This gives developers building domain-specific agents the infrastructure to train models on their own workflows without having to understand the full RL training loop.

“The idea is that NeMo Gym will speed up the setup and execution of RL jobs for models,” explained Jason Andersen, VP and principal analyst with Moor Insights & Strategy. “The important distinction is NeMo Gym decouples the RL environment from the training itself, so it can easily set up and create multiple training instances (or ‘gyms’).”

Mayham called this “unprecedented openness” the real differentiator of the Nemotron 3 release. “No major competitor offers that level of completeness,” he said. “For enterprises, this means full control over customization, on premises deployment, and cost optimization that closed providers simply can’t match.”

But there is a tradeoff in capability, Mayham pointed out: Claude and GPT-4o still outperform Nemotron 3 on specialized tasks like coding benchmarks. However, Nemotron 3 seems to be targeting a different buyer: Enterprises that need deployment flexibility and don’t want vendor lock-in.

“The value proposition for enterprises isn’t raw capability, it’s the combination of open weights, training data, deployment flexibility, and Nvidia ecosystem integration that closed providers can’t match,” he said.

This article originally appeared on InfoWorld.