Microsoft rebuilds Copilot around Home, Code and a proactive Autopilot agent

Home brings Chat, Cowork and Office together

Home is the new starting point in the Copilot app. Microsoft says it combines Chat and Cowork, and that users can review recent activity, get suggestions on what Copilot can help with and pick up work where they left off.

Chat is described as instant and conversational, suited to quick questions, lookups and drafts. Cowork is for delegated work: the user defines a task and it runs end-to-end to return a completed result, such as an RFP response, a launch kit, a customer briefing or a financial close package. Microsoft says that soon users will not need to choose a mode, as Copilot will route a request to Chat, Cowork or Code.

With Office in Copilot, the full power of Word, Excel and PowerPoint is built into the experience. Microsoft says Copilot can create or update a real, editable document, workbook or presentation, and users can @mention a teammate so their edits show up as they are made. Other changes include PowerPoint keeping decks on-brand automatically, Excel showing what changed and why when Copilot or a collaborator edits, and Copilot recommending the best chart for the data. Skills, such as financial skills in Excel and legal skills in Word, bring specialized expertise into the apps.

Code and Autopilot extend what Copilot can build and do

Code lets users describe an app, tracker, dashboard, automation or workflow in natural language, after which Copilot chooses an approach and builds it. Examples from Microsoft include persistent desktop widgets, interactive dashboards and cloud-hosted internal apps that can be shared with a team. Microsoft says Code is powered by the same underlying technology as GitHub Copilot, runs in a sandboxed environment and can be hosted securely within a company's tenant. Software developers continue to use GitHub Copilot for daily work.

Alongside it, Microsoft introduced Microsoft Copilot Managed Runtime, hosting infrastructure that lets code run inside a company's Microsoft 365 environment. It is governed by IT, and the company says it also supports apps built in Cowork and Copilot Studio and is being opened to third-party and pro-code developers. It is now in preview and will also be accessible inside Code.

Autopilot, previously called Scout, is described as a persistent, proactive and personal agent. Users give it a name, a role and a goal, and it watches channels, follows up on threads, runs recurring work and resumes projects days later without waiting for a prompt. Microsoft gives the example of managing a full supplier review process. Autopilot is cloud-hosted and lives in the customer's tenant with its own identity, memory, computer and workspace. It appears in Teams, Outlook, chats, channels and documents, and can be @mentioned like a colleague, with permissions, audit and governance behind it.

On timing, Microsoft says Home and Code will start rolling out in its Frontier program in the coming weeks, and Autopilot is expanding to private preview at the end of the month. Code is also due in preview for Microsoft 365 Premium and Pro subscribers later this year.

More business context, plugins and a new billing split

Copilot is grounded in Microsoft IQ, which Microsoft describes as its unified intelligence platform for enterprise AI. Fabric IQ brings context from data, including the 20+ million semantic models in Power BI, into Copilot. It is generally available in Chat and Cowork, with Code integration coming through Frontier. Grounding in data and workflows from Dynamics 365 and Power Platform is rolling out in public preview over the next month. Microsoft's example is a salesperson drafting a proposal with deal history and support tickets included directly in the document.

A new plugin registry will bring Microsoft, partner and custom-built plugins into one catalog. IT can approve and manage plugins centrally, while developers and partners can publish once to extend Copilot across supported experiences. Microsoft says it is rolling out now and will be generally available across surfaces in the coming weeks.

On cost, Microsoft separates everyday AI from agentic work. A user subscription license (USL) covers Copilot in Chat and across Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams, plus model selection and new capabilities and models, at a fixed cost. Its Auto feature weighs accuracy, speed and cost on each request to pick a model. Agentic work runs on usage-based billing (UBB), which lets customers choose models and match cost to value. According to Microsoft, Cowork, Code, Autopilot and frontier models like Astra and Fable all run on UBB. The company adds that it is evolving Copilot pricing alongside these changes and introduced new FinOps for AI capabilities to help manage spend.

What it means for users

For organizations already using Microsoft 365, the update moves Copilot from an assistant in individual apps toward a workspace that can delegate tasks, build small internal tools and run an agent in the background. Most of the new pieces are in Frontier, preview or phased rollout, so availability will vary. The split between fixed-cost licenses and usage-based billing means that agentic features will be metered, which makes the new spend-management tools a practical part of any rollout.