Copilot content rewrite and image suggestions

What it does

Select an existing block of text in the editor and Copilot will rephrase it, shift its tone, or make it shorter or longer, offering a few variations to choose from. A companion capability suggests images from your own asset library that suit the content you have written. Neither creates new assets from nothing — rewrite works on text you already have, and image suggestion picks from what is already uploaded.

Key facts

Content rewrite left preview on 22 September 2026 and is now generally available. Image suggestion and AI tagging for images are still preview — the two halves of this page no longer share a maturity, so check them separately.
Available in the United States only, in English only. That is the single most important fact on this page for a UK or EU delivery.
Enabled by default in the US. Elsewhere it is governed by the Global opt-in consent toggle under Settings > Overview > Feature switches.
Needs at least 10 words of selected text. Below that the Rewrite option is disabled, which reads as a bug to users who do not know the threshold.
Works across emails and email templates, forms, text messages, and push notifications.
The contextual menu offers Get ideas, Tone, Shorten and Lengthen.
Documented tone options are engaging, formal, casual, luxurious and adventurous.
Suggestions can take up to about 15 seconds; you apply one with Insert text.
Built on GPT-3.5. Personal data is masked in suggestions, and human review only happens on content that has been reported.
Image suggestion — Copilot picking images from your library that match the content — is also in preview. Separately, AI tagging for images is a preview feature switch under the Library section that auto-generates descriptive tags on upload.
Nothing here generates images. There is no text-to-image capability documented in this app; every suggestion comes from assets already in the library.

When to use / skip

For a US-based, English-language client this is a straightforward win — it is the feature marketers reach for most often once they know it exists, because shortening a paragraph to fit a template is a daily annoyance. Turn it on, show it once, and it gets used.

For everyone else, do not put it in the scope document. It is US-only and English-only today, and a client outside that will see the menu absent and log a support ticket. Set the expectation in discovery rather than fielding it later.

The image side is worth enabling wherever the client has a genuine asset library. If the library holds forty stock images someone dumped in during migration, suggestions will be poor and AI tagging will produce tags nobody trusts. Get the library curated first, then turn the AI features on — in that order, or the client's first impression is that the AI is useless.

Configuration decisions

Whether the client is in a region where rewrite works at all. Establish this before anything else, and record it.
Global opt-in consent on or off. It is shared with content ideas and other Copilot features, so this is one decision covering several capabilities.
Whether to enable AI tagging for images, and whether auto-generated tags are allowed to sit alongside the taxonomy the client's brand team maintains.
How much library curation happens before the AI features are demonstrated, and who does it.
Whether preview features are permitted in production at all. Rewrite is GA and no longer needs that conversation; the image capabilities still do.
Whether rewritten copy re-enters the normal approval workflow or is treated as a minor edit.

Gotchas

The 10-word minimum is silent. Users select a headline, find Rewrite greyed out, and conclude the feature is broken.
Regional availability is by service region, not by the user's location. A UK marketer working in a US-hosted tenant may see it; a US marketer in an EMEA tenant will not. This produces genuinely confusing "it works for her but not for me" tickets.
Global opt-in consent is a single switch across several Copilot capabilities. Turning it off to close one objection removes content ideas as well.
Tone changes can quietly strip personalisation tokens or break formatting inside a rewritten block. Always check the block after inserting, especially in templates.
AI-generated image tags are not reviewed. They will occasionally be wrong in ways that are embarrassing if the client's search relies on them.
Image suggestion and AI tagging are still preview, so their click path and menu wording can still change. Screenshots of the rewrite menu are now safe for training material; screenshots of the image side aren't.

Consultant notes

Check region availability in the actual tenant before you demo. Discovering it live that the Rewrite option is missing is a bad five minutes.
Demo Shorten, not Get ideas. Shortening copy to fit a design is the pain point marketers recognise instantly; open-ended idea generation looks like a toy.
Tell the client plainly that no image generation exists here. Someone will have seen text-to-image elsewhere in the Microsoft stack and assumed it is in this app.
Make library curation and tagging a real work item in the plan, not an afterthought. Every AI feature touching images depends on it.
Before go-live, confirm the consent switch state and re-check it after any environment copy — it does not always carry across.

Worth another look if rewrite extends beyond the US and English — that would change the scoping advice entirely. Last refreshed 2026-09-23: rewrite reached GA; image suggestion and AI tagging remain preview.