The European Commission has fined Google a total of €890 million ($1 billion) for its breaches of the Digital Market Act (DMA).

Just over half the fine — €460 million — was because Google illegally gave preference to its own services in Google Search results.

The remainder was because in the Google Play store for Android apps, the company prevented app developers from leading consumers to alternative, often cheaper, purchase channels. Under the DMA, app developers who distribute their apps via Google Play or Apple’s App Store should be able to inform customers of alternative offers.

Now Google must give third-party services featuring in its results the same treatment as its own services, and allow developers of apps in the Play Store to communicate about offers both in and outside the Play Store, or face further fines.

The Commission first raised these issues with Google in March 2025. In April of this year, the Commission laid out plans as to how Google should allow other third-parties to share its searches, suggestions that the tech firm firmly resisted. Earlier this month, the Commission also said  Android should be open to other AI agents and not limited to Google’s own Gemini.

Google is not the only US company to have fallen foul of the DMA. In April 2025, Apple was fined €500 million for breaching the Act and, last month, the Commission fired the first shots at cloud hyperscalers Microsoft and Amazon.

Healthy software companies typically don’t suddenly eliminate one-fifth of their workforce, but monday.com is doing just that as it bets on flatter teams, AI agents, and customer implementation expertise as the winning combination in the AI era.

Monday.com co-founder and co-CEO Eran Zinman today announced the “very difficult decision” to reduce the AI work platform company’s global workforce by about 20%, or 620 people.

The move has nothing to do with increasing margins or replacing humans with AI, he insisted in his post on LinkedIn; rather, it’s a calculated decision to trim down and hone the company’s focus as AI becomes integral to day-to-day workflows.

“This is not a distress signal; it is a deliberate reset, disclosed with its price attached,” said Sanchit Vir Gogia, chief analyst at Greyhound Research. “The industry has quietly swapped the meaning of productivity, and this filing is the clearest exhibit yet.”

A ‘significant opportunity’ in technology

In a SEC filing this week, monday.com said its restructuring plan reflects the “ongoing transformation of its product, marketing, and go-to-market strategy.” The move is intended to support a “leaner, more focused operating model” as the company continues to invest in its AI-driven strategy.

Zinman noted in his post that the company has shifted to “doing the work with AI and not just managing it,” and is focused on building environments where “people and AI agents [work] together in one workspace.”

In recent months, monday.com has evolved its products, strategy, and the way it serves its customers, and Zinman contended that “the organization we built for our previous chapter is not the organization that fits the new AI era.” Monday.com needs to “execute more decisively,” take on new challenges, and quickly respond to market changes, he said.

“We have never seen such a significant opportunity in software, driven by such exciting technology,” Zinman noted. He emphasized that the reduction is not to replace people with AI, nor to improve margins; the “vast majority” of savings will be reinvested into talent, products, and AI.

The restructuring will result in a “flatter organization” with fewer management layers and smaller, more autonomous teams, and monday.com also has a new go-to-market model, Zinman explained. Customers expect “deeper implementation support” as they deploy AI, and the company will work more closely with customers, increase its on-site presence, create new roles, and “adapt many existing ones.” In its SEC filing, the company said it expects to continue hiring in “key strategic areas” throughout 2026.

Workers will be expected to work better, “not harder,” Zinman noted. He pointed to several past examples where work could have been done in a few days, but instead took many months with “multiple meetings and endless friction.”

“This wasn’t people’s fault and everyone was frustrated by this,” he said. “Our new org changes ownership to allow people to make decisions and move fast.”

A spokesperson for monday.com declined to comment further on the staff reductions.

Monday.com’s key market advantages

Monday.com certainly isn’t struggling; the company expects 19% to 20% year-over-year growth in 2026.

“Companies in that position do not restructure because they must,” Greyhound’s Gogia noted. “They restructure because they have decided to become something else.”

Melody Brue, VP and principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, pointed out that organizational redesign is important for real AI transformation, but while it can signal confidence to the market, it can still be “devastating” to humans.

While the company looks as though it’s trying to do right, that ultimately remains to be seen, she said. “There are often hidden internal bruises that can surface long after layoffs.”

Monday.com’s advantage is in its “structured substrate,” Gogia noted; its boards, permissions and typed workflows give agents something firmer to act on than just documents and chat history. The company highlights its natively built agents that can be configured by any team member, as well as connectors with Claude, Microsoft Copilot, and ChatGPT, and dedicated routes for external agents to authenticate and operate.

“For some time, the sharper enterprise question has been shifting from who has an agent to who owns the governed runtime in which an agent can safely act,” he said. “Structured work is a serious claim on that runtime.”

But parts of monday.com’s agent estate remain in staged release, and its product is ultimately “mid-transition,” Gogia pointed out; its agent builder carried a beta label as recently as March,. Also, the company’s pricing model changed in May to a hybrid model charging for seats as well as mandatory AI credits. And, while its AI-powered no-code builder monday vibe passed $1 million in annual recurring revenue within two and a half months, monday.com has not released subsequent outcomes, usage volumes, or attach rates.

Further, there’s an element of “gravity” with its competitors, he observed. Asana is reorganizing teams around agents, Atlassian is wiring agents into the developer estate, and others are simply bundling them into their offerings: Microsoft is doing so across the productivity stack, and ServiceNow across enterprise operations, each with identity and procurement built in.

“Their pull is strongest exactly where monday.com wants to grow, in the largest accounts, where control-plane depth and administrative reach decide the deal,” said Gogia.

Actions for the near-term

Going forward, buyers should focus on operating risk, not headline risk, Moor’s Brue noted. In practice, that’s continuity of service, roadmap consistency, and strength of enterprise support. Productivity should be valued as better outcomes per unit of organizational effort, not mere activity.

“It should be a measure of how much smoother, faster, and more effective the operating model becomes when AI is built into the work,” said Brue.

Gogia noted that strain surfaces first in customer service, and monday.com’s attention is being redistributed. The company’s annual report disclosed that its focus is now concentrated on the largest accounts, with support for medium-sized clients moved to an AI-first and human-supported model.

During the first month of the transition, buyers should track named account continuity and escalation times, he advised. By the first quarter, keep an eye on whether credit governance and admin controls mature on schedule, and if the roadmap beyond the AI estate keeps pace. By the half-year mark, determine whether promised implementation depth is producing outcomes or “simply more billable engagement.”

Support tiers should be enumerated in writing before renewal, and buyers should contract for “side exits,” Gogia emphasized, with overage pricing fixed in advance, the right to pause consumption, and portability for workflows and agent configuration “if the relationship sours.” Finance should also insist on monthly consumption reporting by capability. Further, integration efforts, partner dependency, and change management should be considered first-class costs of the agent era, “not as afterthoughts to a license.”

“A license was a known cost,” said Gogia. “A meter is a behavior, and behavior is harder to forecast than headcount.”

This article originally appeared on CIO.com.

Building a presentation can take lots of time. There are design choices to figure out: the slide layouts, fonts, theme colors, and so on. You can use a template to skip this hassle, but you still have to paste your text and other content into the slides and edit it all so that the results are visually appealing.

In PowerPoint, Microsoft’s Copilot AI assistant can now automate the heavy lifting of presentation creation. It can generate a first-draft presentation in minutes, then help you edit it. You can also prompt Copilot to help you quickly understand the contents of a presentation and glean insights from it. Use the tips in this guide to save oodles of time as you create and work with presentations.

Who can use Copilot in PowerPoint

Individuals with a Microsoft 365 Personal, Family, or Premium subscription have access to Copilot from within PowerPoint and other Microsoft 365 apps. Users with a Premium plan have higher Copilot usage allowances and access to advanced AI features.

For business users, it’s more complicated. Organizations with more than 2,000 users must pay for Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses for their users in addition to their regular Microsoft 365 licenses. Users at organizations with fewer than 2,000 users can use Copilot within M365 apps even without the M365 Copilot add-on licenses, but there are limitations in usage, speed, and feature availability.

To see what kind of access you have, log in to Microsoft’s Copilot Chat web hub and look for your name in the lower left corner. If you see “M365 Copilot (Premium)” under your name, you can use Copilot in M365 apps with priority access and advanced features. “M365 Copilot (Basic)” means you can use Copilot in M365 apps with lower-priority access and limited features. If you see “Copilot Chat (Basic)” or nothing below your name, you can’t use Copilot in M365 apps.

(Copilot Chat Basic users do get some Copilot functionality, including the ability to generate presentations, via the Copilot Chat hub. See our Copilot Chat tutorial for details.)

In this article:

• Working with Copilot in PowerPoint
• Create a presentation template
• Create a presentation from a document
• Add content from a document to a slide
• Refine your slide text
• Find or create an image
• Expand your presentation with relevant slides
• Summarize a presentation
• Answer questions about a presentation
• Help you navigate a large presentation
• Generate speaker notes and/or an FAQ

Working with Copilot in PowerPoint

First, let’s quickly go over the notable settings of the Copilot sidebar.

When you have a presentation open in PowerPoint, click the Copilot icon; it may be floating at the lower-right corner of your PowerPoint window or parked at the right end of the Ribbon toolbar. The Copilot sidebar will open along the right of the page. You’ll type your prompts to Copilot inside the chat window in this pane.

Agent mode: By default, Copilot can build a new presentation or make changes to an existing one in the main PowerPoint window. This is known as “agent mode.” To change this so that Copilot can’t take direct action on a presentation (all its responses appear in the sidebar), click the Allow editing button above the chat window and change it to Chat only.

The tips in this guide require that Copilot be in agent mode, so make sure you see Allow editing above the chat window.

Choice of AI model: Behind the scenes, Copilot has access to various genAI models, including different versions of Anthropic Claude and OpenAI GPT.  By default, it decides which model to use based on your prompt. You can set it to use a particular model: click Auto at the upper right of the Copilot pane and select a model from the dropdown that opens.

The tips in this guide should work fine on the default Auto setting. But feel free to experiment switching to specific models to see which give you the best results for particular tasks.

Important: Remember that generative AI output often includes errors, so always check Copilot’s output for accuracy. (Also see our tips for reducing hallucinations in Copilot.) You’ll likely want to rewrite it in your own voice as you’re reviewing it.

1. Create a presentation template

For many people, the hardest part of creating a presentation is getting started. What types of information should be included on the slides, and in what order? Copilot can give you a leg up by creating the type of presentation you need, with placeholder data that you can later replace with your own.

Start a new presentation, open the Copilot sidebar, and type your prompt into the chat window. It’s best to provide very specific details in your prompt. The more context or details you provide, the more likely Copilot will generate a presentation template that suits your needs.

A good prompt should contain the slide count, subject, audience, and tone. Example:

• Create a 6-slide presentation for a sales meeting focusing on Q1 revenue. The audience is the sales team, so keep the tone professional and focused on the sales data.

Copilot may ask a series of follow-up questions, such as your preferred visual style and desired level of detail. Then it will generate a presentation template.

You can optionally prompt Copilot for revisions, and when you’re happy with the template, swap in your own data.

2. Create a presentation from a document

You can attach a document (such as a Word document, Excel spreadsheet, or PDF) and prompt Copilot to generate a presentation based on its contents. This works best with a structured-format document (such as a business plan, project proposal, or summary report) that contains sections with headings.

Copilot can extract the document’s text and structure to generate the slide content for the new presentation. This can especially be useful for quickly turning a long report into a visually appealing presentation.

In the Copilot pane, click the + icon at the bottom of the chat window. A list of documents that you’ve recently accessed appears. Select the one that you want Copilot to use. Alternatively, click the magnifying glass icon and inside its search box, type a few letters of the filename for the document you want. (Business users with an M365 Copilot license can select up to five files for Copilot to pull from when creating a presentation.)

Then in the chat window, you can enter a prompt that’s as simple as “Create a presentation,” although as always, providing more details and context is better. This is especially important for corporate users who reference multiple source files. It’s useful to tell Copilot what data to pull from each document.

Answer any follow-up questions that Copilot asks, and it will then generate the presentation.

Note: Your marketing department may have created one or more branded company templates for Copilot to work from. If that’s the case at your organization, simply open the appropriate company template as your first step. Then you can upload docs and type a prompt as described above. Copilot will create a presentation using the branded template.

3. Add content from a document to a slide

Manually copying text or other content from a document and pasting it into a new slide is a chore. Instead, you can prompt Copilot to extract information directly from a Word document, Excel spreadsheet, or PDF to create new slides.

In the Copilot pane, attach the document using the same steps described in tip 2, then tell Copilot to create a slide from the document. As always, it helps to provide details such as the new slide’s focus or what data to include:

• Add a slide based on the attached document.
• Use the attached file to add a slide about the project budget that focuses on Q1 projections.
• Summarize only the financial section of the attached document as a slide.

4. Refine your slide text

A presentation should be visual and display only the core message. Conciseness and proper writing tone are essential for your slides, so that they don’t lose the attention of your audience.

You can prompt Copilot to refine text on an individual slide in various ways, such as rewriting it in a more professional tone or making it more concise. Highlight the text inside a text box on the slide. On the toolbar that appears over the highlighted text, click Edit with Copilot.

On the menu that opens, you can select a preset prompt to refine the text, such as Condense or Make professional. Or, at the top of this menu, you can type a prompt to rewrite the highlighted text.

Note that this feature affects all the text inside the text box. To rewrite only a portion of text inside a text box, you must split that portion out into a separate text box.

Alternatively, you can prompt Copilot to analyze your entire presentation and tighten up the wording throughout all of its slides. For example:

• Make these slides more visual and use less text.

5. Find or create an image

If you have Copilot generate a presentation from an existing Word document that contains images, it will incorporate those images into the presentation. If there are no images in the source document, you can ask Copilot to find or create one and add it to a slide.

To add a stock image or an image from your organization’s brand library, tell Copilot what you’re looking for:

• Add a stock photo of young adults in a cafe drinking boba tea.
• Add a photo from our asset library of young adults in a cafe drinking boba tea.

To have Copilot create an image using Microsoft’s Designer image generation tool, describe your desired image. As always, specificity is helpful:

• Create a photorealistic image of a diverse group of 5 or 6 fashionable young adults sitting in a cafe drinking boba tea. They’re smiling or laughing, and some are looking at their phones.

Just as you need to review any text output from Copilot, take a close look at generated images to be sure nothing looks off.

Also note that Copilot image generation isn’t always reliable in PowerPoint. For some time during our testing for this story, Copilot said it couldn’t create an image because “the image generation service is returning a server error on every attempt.” After about a day and a half, the service began working again.

6. Expand your presentation with relevant slides

As you’re building your presentation, you may find that it’s become text heavy. Or perhaps it could use more visually oriented slides to break things up and make its progression flow better. Copilot can generate and insert new slides that are based on the content of the slides already in the presentation.

In the Copilot pane, specify exactly where you want the new slide to go. This helps Copilot to analyze the content of the slides before and after where you want the new slide. Then it can generate a slide to bridge between the two slides. Examples:

• Add a slide after slide 3 about our competitive advantages.
• Add a slide after slide 11 that transitions to slide 12.

7. Summarize a presentation

Maybe you need a quick refresh of your presentation before an important meeting. Or maybe a co-worker has sent you a presentation that’s packed with lots of slides. You can prompt Copilot to generate a summary of the presentation’s overall messaging.

In the Copilot pane, just type “summarize this presentation.” You can also have Copilot flag key slides that contain important information: “show me key slides.”

8. Answer questions about a presentation

As you’re reviewing a presentation, especially one that you didn’t create and are not familiar with, you can get Copilot to pull key data points from its slides.

In the Copilot pane, type specific informational questions. Examples:

• What are the action items in this deck?
• What is the proposed budget mentioned here?

If Copilot can’t find the exact answer to the question you ask, it will provide related information from the presentation.

This method can also help you validate that your presentation includes everything you want it to. If you ask Copilot about the action items in a presentation and it can’t find any, you know you need to add them. (Copilot will likely offer to generate them for you based on the rest of the slides.)

You can even take this tactic a step further and ask Copilot if the presentation is missing any important data, if any slides are weak or confusing, if there are any awkward transitions, if there are key points that should be better emphasized, and so on.

9. Help you navigate a large presentation

In the business world, presentations with dozens of slides are not uncommon, such as for financial reports or project documentation. Trying to find a specific slide or multiple slides can be tough. Copilot can help you navigate such a presentation.

In the Copilot pane, prompt Copilot to find slides based on specific topics. Example:

• Show me the slides about the project timeline.

Copilot will analyze the presentation and reply with a list of links to the relevant slides. Click one of these to jump directly to that slide.

10. Generate speaker notes and/or an FAQ

Here’s a great timesaver when you’re preparing to show your presentation to an audience: Copilot can automatically generate suggested speaker notes for you, based on the content of your slides. Example prompt:

• Write speaker notes for every slide with one talking point per slide.

In a related feature, Copilot can create a frequently asked questions list (FAQ) for you to consult in your speaker notes or to present as a slide:

• Write an FAQ for these slides.

Copilot will ask where you want the questions and answers added — as a new slide at the end, integrated into the speaker notes of relevant slides, or somewhere else that you designate. Make a selection, and Copilot will generate the FAQ based on the content of your presentation.

Related reading:

• 11 cool things Copilot can do in Excel
• 9 ways Copilot can turbocharge OneNote
• PowerPoint for Microsoft 365 cheat sheet
• Copilot Chat: Your hub for document creation and analysis
• How to curb hallucinations in Copilot (and other genAI tools)
• Microsoft Copilot can boost your writing in Word, Outlook, and OneNote — here’s how
• More Microsoft tips and tutorials

Here in this high-tech era of 2026, keeping important info backed up and synced should be effortless and something that just happens on its own, automatically, without any actual thought or ongoing human effort.

In many areas of our digital life, that mercifully does Just Work™ in exactly that way. Fire up an email in most modern mail services, and you can stop at any point and find your in-progress draft in that same app on any other device. The same applies to any file you’re finessing within Google Drive or other cloud storage services or document you’re dawdling over in Docs.

One area where seamless syncing somehow still doesn’t occur, though, is in the domain of downloaded documents on Android. If someone sends you a PDF or a Word file and you save it to your phone, that file exists in an archaic-seeming silo — only locally, on that one gadget. And that, of course, means (a) you can’t access it from any other device, and (b) if you misplace your phone or move into a new one at some point along the way, the file will be left behind in time and entirely unavailable.

Well, take a moment to join me in celebration: Amidst all the Gemini gobbledegook that no one asked for (and that often falls somewhere between “pointless” and “actively counterproductive”), Google’s giving us a major upgrade to Android’s backup capabilities right now. It’s a simple-seeming switch buried in your system settings, and it’s up to you to find and activate it.

Once you do, though, those once-orphaned documents on your Android device’s local storage will be perpetually synced and protected, automatically, without any ongoing thought or effort.

All you’ve gotta do is find and flip that one new switch.

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The Android backup lowdown

So, for a quick bit of pertinent context on this: Android’s backup systems have actually come a really long way over the years.

‘Twas a time, y’see, when little to nothing about you would sync and carry over automatically from one Android device to another. Years ago — back in the ancient-seeming prehistoric era of the early 2010s — Android enthusiasts in the know would rely on community-created third-party apps for everything from remembering and resyncing downloaded apps to restoring data from within those apps and onward. And reconfiguring your system preferences would be a whole time-consuming song and dance every single time you reset a device or moved into a new one, as little to nothing would automatically carry over.

Most of that stuff is now effortless and automatic. And, thanks to apps like Google Messages, Calendar, Drive, and Docs, many other areas of important data are also synced on their own at the app level — outside of any system mechanisms.

Locally stored files, however, have remained an awkward omission. To this day, anything you download on any Android device exists only on that one device and isn’t synced or backed up anywhere. The only way that happens is — in a blast-from-the-past twist — if you go out of your way to find and set up a third-party app to handle the heavy lifting.

That brings us to today. Right now, as we speak, Google’s in the midst of sending out a quiet under-the-hood update that (brace yourself…) adds in the option to automatically sync and back up any documents on your device as a native part of Android’s backup setup.

See?

The option is on its way to all devices running 2018’s Android 9 release and higher. (If you’re still using a phone with an Android version older than that, you’re now a whopping eight years out of date, and you have much bigger problems.)

Once the added option is present and available for you, you’re literally lookin’ at 10 seconds to find and activate it.

Lemme show ya how.

Android’s document backup addition

I promise: This couldn’t be much simpler.

No matter what kind of Android device is in front of you, just head into your system settings and open the section called “Accounts and backup,” “Back up or copy data,” or something along those same lines. (The exact wording can vary based on who made your device and when it was released or last updated.)

Either tap the line labeled “Google Backup” or look for an option to “Back up data” via Google Drive. You should then either see a series of options for different areas of available backup right then and there — or, depending on your device, you might have to tap a line labeled “Other device data” (or something similar) to find the full list of possibilities.

However you get there, once you’re lookin’ at that list, you’ll see a newly added line for “Documents” if this latest under-the-hood update has reached you.

And from there, all that’s left is to tap it and enable the switch to include that in your automated backups from that moment forward.

If you aren’t seeing the option yet, don’t panic. Google always sends these under-the-hood updates out bit by bit over time, so the change probably just hasn’t reached your device quite yet. As long as you’re running Android 9 or higher, it’ll get there. Set yourself a reminder to check back once a week or so. Odds are, you’ll see it pretty soon.

Notably, all documents synced in this way are always encrypted for security, and they’re kept in your personal (or, depending on the nature of your account, perhaps company-connected) Google Drive storage. That does mean they’ll count against your overall Google storage total, so keep an eye on your Drive storage total to make sure you’re in solid shape and look to the Google One storage hub if you ever want some simple suggestions for freeing up space.

Speaking of other Google services: If you ever want to keep other types of locally stored non-document files from an Android device synced and available elsewhere, you can easily rely on Google Photos for syncing screenshots and other images — after enabling sync in general, be sure to look in the app’s “Collections” areas to find the “On this device” folder and then flip the toggle to “Backup all device folders” (or get more nuanced and open specific individual on-device folders if you want to sync some but not all of those areas) — and you can still turn to those aforementioned third-party apps for broader syncing of anything else imaginable.

But with documents now being handled automatically and natively, that’s one big worry now out of your hair. Just note that the onus will fall on you to find and flip the switch and actively opt in to the feature on each and every Android device you’re using.

Take 10 seconds to do that, though, and you’ll have one less void in your Android data arena. And you don’t need Gemini to tell you that that can only be a good thing.

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