Microsoft unveils AI‑powered future for OneDrive and beyond

One of the key new features announced by Microsoft is the addition of AI features related to Copilot in OneDrive. These features will allow users to create a "personal assistant" that helps manage the editing and sharing of files in the cloud storage. Following the changes, OneDrive is also expected to broadly "facilitate" collaboration on files within small teams. Visually, colourful folders, among others, are expected to assist with this, and these folders will be added to File Explorer in Windows, making it more convenient to find the right directories.

OneDrive is also expected to gain significant "under the hood" improvements, making it run faster. Microsoft claims higher online and offline performance, with data synchronisation to follow later. Meanwhile, Copilot is expected to assist in the analytical context as well. The assistant will help summarise document content, compare files, and answer user queries regarding the content of specific documents. This is intended to enhance work efficiency, especially with large collections of files within a given storage.

The announced changes also concern the mobile OneDrive on smartphones. Microsoft mentions improvements to the search function, which will help find images depicting specific objects the user enters in the query. Sharing files with other users is also expected to be easier - even in cases where the other parties are not using OneDrive and may not have a Microsoft account, which is generally necessary to log into the service.

This is still not the end of the new features of OneDrive, as Microsoft has also announced the ability to import photos from other clouds (Google Drive or Dropbox) and new plans for OneDrive with virtual drives of approximately 5,000 and 10,000 GB. There are even more changes. They will be gradually introduced this year and next, in some cases initially for business customers.