Microsoft unveils AI‑powered evolution in OneDrive update

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 editing and sharing files in the cloud storage. After the changes, OneDrive is also expected to broadly "facilitate" collaboration on files within small teams. Visually, colourful folders, among others, are expected to help with this, and these folders will be added to the 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 synchronization to follow later. Meanwhile, Copilot is expected to assist in the analytical context as well. The assistant will help summarize document content, compare files, and answer user queries regarding the content of specific documents. This is intended to help work more efficiently, especially with large collections of files within a given storage.

The announced changes also affect OneDrive on mobile 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 when 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 OneDrive's new features, 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 year, initially for business customers in some cases.