Copilot Cowork: Microsoft 365 Copilot that performs tasks, not just answers

Copilot Cowork is an agentic automation layer that lives inside Microsoft 365 Copilot. You describe a task in natural language, and Cowork breaks it into steps and executes it across your M365 apps.

Concretely, Cowork can:

• •Write and send emails in Outlook
• •Schedule and manage meetings and calendar
• •Create Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF files
• •Post in Teams and build adaptive cards
• •Search across the organization (Enterprise Search)
• •Do deep research that synthesizes multiple sources
• •Run prompts on a set schedule

Cowork shows each step as it goes, and you approve sensitive actions with a built-in risk-level indicator. You can pause, resume or cancel a task at any time. The functionality is built from skills: built-in skills (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF, Email, Scheduling, Calendar, Meetings, Daily Briefing, Enterprise Search, Communications, Deep Research, Adaptive Cards), up to 50 custom skills, and plugins from the Microsoft 365 App Store.

Data stays within your M365 tenant boundary, and all actions are auditable.

Regular Microsoft 365 Copilot answers, summarizes and drafts in the app you're in. You ask a question, and you get an answer back right away.

Cowork works over time. You give it a task, and it executes multiple steps on its own across apps until the task is done. Think of the difference as someone answering a question versus someone receiving a task and delivering the result.

Both run on Work IQ, Microsoft's context engine. Work IQ is the reason Copilot and Cowork understand your business: it connects signals from files, emails, meetings, chats and business systems. Cowork uses that context to know which documents, people and data a task is about.

Cowork is not a standalone purchase. You need a Microsoft 365 Copilot license first, and on top of that Cowork tasks are billed on a usage basis via Copilot Credits.

The prerequisite is one of these Copilot licenses:

The Cowork usage itself is billed like this:

The price per task depends on model usage, context retrieval, tool calls and runtime. A short email costs very few credits, while deep research across many sources costs significantly more. It's a new usage-based pricing model, so you should verify concrete figures with your CSP partner (Cloud Solution Provider).

Cowork is powerful. It can take routine work like report drafts, meeting prep and research fully or partly off your employees' hands.

But be honest about the cost. Copilot Credits are a variable and potentially unpredictable expense on top of the per-user license. Two employees with the same license can have very different Cowork bills depending on how heavy the tasks they run are.

Our recommendation for a small business:

• •Start with a pilot group of a few users, not the whole organization
• •Define concrete tasks you want to test, and measure the actual time saved
• •Watch credit consumption from day one, so the bill doesn't surprise you
• •Budget with a cap, and evaluate after a month

When you can see that the savings exceed the credit consumption, you roll out to more people.

Cowork became generally available worldwide on June 16, 2026. You access it in three places:

• •In the browser at m365.cloud.microsoft
• •In the M365 Copilot desktop app (Windows and Mac)
• •In the mobile app (iOS and Android)

The prerequisite is that your users have an M365 Copilot license. If you don't have that yet, the first step is choosing the right Copilot license (Business at $21 for up to 300 users, enterprise at $30, or E7 where Copilot is included).

Start small: pick 2-3 concrete tasks, let a pilot group run them through Cowork, and approve sensitive actions manually until you trust the result. Remember you can always pause or cancel a task along the way.