Microsoft Copilot Cowork: from assistant to agent

Microsoft Copilot is familiar ground for many organisations by now: summarising an email, writing a first paragraph, catching up on a meeting. Useful. But afterwards you still did the real work yourself. That is changing. Copilot Cowork, released to all Microsoft 365 Copilot users on 16 June 2026, carries out tasks from start to finish. You describe what you want to achieve, and Cowork handles the rest.

From “draft something for me” to “go ahead and send it”

The difference sounds subtle, but in practice it is large. Regular Copilot prepares something; Cowork also carries it out.

Do you say: “Prepare me for Friday’s client meeting”? Cowork retrieves the relevant documents, searches recent email threads and gives you a tailored briefing. Do you say: “Clear my calendar for next week”? Cowork detects conflicts, moves meetings and books focus blocks.

Cowork shows every step while it works. For critical actions, such as actually sending an email or scheduling a meeting, it always asks for your approval. You stay in the driving seat; Cowork takes over the execution.

Example from practice: a sales manager pointed Cowork at a stalled pipeline. The result was a ranked list of at-risk accounts, showing for each account exactly which follow-up had been dropped. Work that would normally take a week of manual searching was done in one morning.

What Cowork handles for you

Cowork has a set of built-in skills. The ones business professionals use most:

• Emails and Teams messages: drafting, replying, sending and forwarding through Outlook; posting messages in Teams channels; creating and distributing newsletters.
• Creating documents: Word documents, Excel files, PowerPoint presentations and PDFs, based on your instructions and the information already in your Microsoft 365 environment.
• Calendar and meetings: scheduling meetings in plain language (“schedule a 30-minute check-in with Alex tomorrow”), detecting conflicts and preparing meetings with the relevant documents.
• Daily briefing: every morning an overview of what is coming your way that day, based on your mail, calendar and current projects.
• In-depth research: Cowork searches multiple sources and brings the findings together in a structured summary or Excel analysis.
• Scheduled automation: setting up recurring tasks that run automatically, such as a weekly status report ready every Friday.

Cowork can also be extended with plugins from the Microsoft 365 App Store. Think of integrations with Miro, Monday.com and, soon, Adobe, Box and Canva. Your administrator can also roll out organisation-wide plugins for everyone at once.

How does Cowork know what is going on in your organisation?

Cowork’s strength lies in Work IQ: the intelligent layer that runs through your entire Microsoft 365 environment. Cowork reads context from email threads, Teams conversations, calendar history, SharePoint files and Excel workbooks at the same time. That way it understands the connections between pieces of information, not just the individual documents.

Unlike tools that run locally on your computer, Cowork works entirely in Microsoft’s cloud, within your existing Microsoft 365 tenant. Your files are not stored on third-party servers, tasks keep running even when you close your laptop, and security follows the compliance settings your IT department has already configured. All actions are auditable by default.

What does it cost and how do you start?

Copilot Cowork requires a Microsoft 365 Copilot licence as its basis (roughly 28 to 30 euros per user per month, depending on your subscription). On top of that licence you pay through Copilot Credits: a consumption model in which you only pay for what Cowork actually executes.

There are two options:

• Pay-as-you-go: 1 cent per credit, no annual commitment. Ideal for getting started or running a pilot.
• Prepaid (P3): an annual commitment to a volume of credits, in exchange for a lower price per credit. Worth considering once Cowork is a structural part of your work processes.

The cost per task depends on the AI model used, the amount of context retrieved, the number of tool calls and the runtime. Comparative research by Microsoft showed that Copilot Cowork is on average 30 to 40 per cent cheaper per prompt than Claude Cowork with the Microsoft 365 connector.

In practical terms: Cowork is switched off by default and has to be enabled by your administrator. In the Microsoft 365 Admin Center you set spending limits and alerts per user, team or for the whole organisation.

Note: organisations that previously took part in the Microsoft Frontier preview programme have a grace period up to and including 30 June 2026 to set up usage-based billing. Without linked billing, access ends on 1 July.

Getting started

Copilot Cowork changes the relationship between employee and AI: no longer just assisting, but executing. The productivity gain does not come from one big intervention, but from the sum of the tasks you lose time to every day on emails, meeting preparation and reports.

In our custom AI training, your employees learn not only how to prompt but also how to use Cowork for the workflows that take the most time in their own role. Does your team work a lot in Excel? Then also take a look at our Microsoft Copilot in Excel for finance professionals training. Would you first like to know which tasks in your organisation would benefit most from automation? Get in touch for a no-obligation conversation.