Microsoft 365 Copilot is no longer just a chat assistant. With Copilot Cowork, Microsoft introduces an execution layer that carries out real tasks across your Microsoft 365 environment — sending emails, scheduling meetings, creating documents and posting in Teams — while you stay in control.
Cowork is currently available through the Frontier preview program and marks a fundamental shift in how AI fits into daily work.
What is Copilot Cowork?
Cowork turns Copilot from a conversational assistant into a task executor. Instead of giving you suggestions you then act on manually, Cowork does the work itself.
You describe an outcome — "send a meeting recap to my team" or "create a slide deck summarizing Q3 results" — and Cowork breaks it down into concrete steps across multiple Microsoft 365 apps. It drafts the email, builds the presentation, schedules the calendar invite, and asks for your approval before sending or publishing.
What Cowork can do
Cowork works across the full Microsoft 365 suite with 13 built-in skills:
- Communication — Draft and send emails, post in Teams channels, create HTML newsletters, manage your inbox by sorting and responding to messages
- Documents — Create Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF files from scratch, edit existing documents, organize files in SharePoint and OneDrive
- Calendar — Schedule meetings with natural language, manage conflicts, decline meetings with a reason, get daily briefings
- Research — Search across your organization, perform deep research across multiple sources, browse SharePoint and OneDrive
- Automation — Run prompts on a schedule so recurring tasks happen automatically
You can also create up to 20 custom skills by adding a `SKILL.md` file to `/Documents/Cowork/Skills/` on OneDrive. Cowork picks them up automatically.
How it works in practice
A typical Cowork interaction follows five steps:
- Describe your task — Tell Cowork what you need in natural language. You can also attach files.
- Watch it work — Cowork breaks your request into steps and executes them one by one. You follow along in real time.
- Steer when needed — Interrupt at any point to add context or adjust direction.
- Approve actions — Before Cowork sends an email, posts a message or takes any sensitive action, it pauses and asks for your approval. A risk indicator shows you the impact level.
- Review results — Check the output, download documents or ask Cowork to make changes.
Compliance and data: Claude models via Microsoft
Copilot Cowork uses Anthropic's Claude models as underlying AI technology. This raises a fair question: does my data go to Anthropic?
The short answer: no. Here is what you need to know:
- Copilot Cowork is a Microsoft product, not an Anthropic service. It runs entirely within the Microsoft 365 platform, under Microsoft contracts and Microsoft Enterprise Data Protection.
- Anthropic is a sub-processor of Microsoft, listed in Microsoft's DPA and Product Terms. There is no direct contractual relationship between your organization and Anthropic.
- All data stays within your Microsoft 365 tenant and is subject to Microsoft Purview, eDiscovery, audit logs and retention policies — just like any other Copilot feature.
- Claude models do not train on your data and do not store prompts or output persistently.
In short: from a compliance perspective, Copilot Cowork is equivalent to other Copilot features. The model may be different, but the data governance is the same.
> Copilot Cowork vs. Claude Cowork — these are two separate products. Claude Cowork is Anthropic's own SaaS offering. Copilot Cowork is Microsoft's product that happens to use Claude models under the hood. Different platform, different contracts, different data processing.
Availability: preview, not yet in the EU
Cowork is currently in preview through the Microsoft 365 Copilot Frontier program. There is an important regional limitation: Cowork is not yet available in the Netherlands or the EU.
This is not a compliance issue — it is a rollout decision. Microsoft is launching agentic services region by region with full legal and operational coverage. EU regions are expected to follow, but Microsoft has not communicated a date.
In practice this means you can install Cowork, but you will see a "service not available in your region" error when trying to use it. We will update this article as soon as EU availability is confirmed.
How Cowork compares to other Copilot features
| Feature | Status NL | AI models |
|---|---|---|
| Copilot Chat | Generally available | GPT + Microsoft |
| Copilot Agents | Generally available | GPT + Microsoft |
| Copilot Cowork | Preview (region-locked) | Multi-model incl. Claude |
What this means for your organization
Cowork represents the next step in Microsoft's AI strategy: moving from assistance to execution. For organizations already using Copilot, this means:
- Less manual follow-up — Tasks that required multiple app switches now happen in one conversation
- Consistent output — Recurring tasks produce standardized results every time
- Full control — Every action requires explicit approval, so nothing happens without your consent
- Same compliance posture — No new data processing agreements needed beyond your existing Microsoft contracts
Get started
Want to explore Copilot Cowork for your organization? Contact Universal Cloud — we help you set up Microsoft 365 Copilot, enroll in the Frontier program, and prepare your organization for the next wave of AI productivity.
