Microsoft 365 Copilot
Copilot Cowork
The agentic AI layer that autonomously completes multi-step tasks across Microsoft 365.
Generally available since June 16, 2026. You delegate the work and stay in the loop while Cowork breaks it into steps, reasons across your files and tools, and carries the work forward.
From prompts to execution
Where Copilot Chat helps with individual prompts and gives you content or insights to act on, Cowork runs long-running, multi-step tasks that unfold over time — generating documents, organizing files, scheduling meetings, and sending communications across Microsoft 365.
New to Cowork? Read our Copilot Cowork explainer or the news on the GA release.
Powered by Work IQ
Work IQ grounds Cowork in your organizational context — the emails, meetings, files, chats, people, and business systems you have access to. That lets Cowork plan intelligently and produce actionable results instead of generic output.
What Cowork does for you
Not loose answers like in Copilot Chat, but finished outcomes that span multiple steps, apps, and files — with your approval on every sensitive action.
Rebalance your week
Analyzes your calendar, proposes which meetings to accept, reschedule, or decline — including emailing the organizers — and applies the changes one by one after you approve them.
Wrap up and archive a project
Finds all project files in OneDrive, creates a shared archive folder, and builds a clean HTML recap page with the headline deliverables.
A weekly status that writes itself
Gathers progress from meetings, emails, and files, drafts your weekly status, and sends it — as a recurring, scheduled task.
Onboard a new hire
Builds a 30-60-90 day plan, an interactive "Getting started" dashboard, and schedules recurring check-ins with the new hire.
Deep research with a citation map
Reads through a whole folder of documents and delivers a structured, grounded brief with a citation map — not loose answers but one actionable overview.
Clean up your inbox and calendar
Clears unanswered questions from a week of threads, drafts replies, and sends them after your approval.
Start small, scale up
Tasks are grouped into three tiers, so you can start with a quick win.
Lightweight tasks
Quick, everyday jobs you can hand off in a few minutes.
Everyday workflows
Recurring, multi-step work that fills your week, returning finished deliverables.
Hard problems
Big, multi-part assignments you would normally block out serious time for.
Extensible with plugins
Plugins extend Cowork into the tools your team already uses. A plugin consists of Skills (custom instructions that teach Cowork how your organization works) and/or Connectors (data integrations that pull data and, where supported, write updates back).
Alongside native integrations such as Fabric IQ and Dynamics 365, there are connections to various external platforms and tools.
Licensing and cost
Cowork is an extension of Microsoft 365 Copilot — not a standalone SKU.
License
Requires a Microsoft 365 Copilot User Subscription License (USL) per user. Cowork sits on top of your existing Copilot licenses.
Usage-based (PayGo)
Billed through Copilot Credits (PayGo: $0.01 per credit), based on what users run: model responses, tool and skill calls, image generation, and browser tasks.
Explicitly enabled
Cowork is not on by default — an admin must first enable usage-based billing.
Cost control
Admins see consumption in the Microsoft 365 admin center and set per-user or per-group limits. Universal Cloud helps you set this up and keep it under control.
Curious about license pricing? See our up-to-date Microsoft 365 Copilot price list.
Control costs with Cost Management
Your Microsoft 365 Copilot license remains the fixed baseline; only the variable usage of power users and agents runs through Copilot Credits. Cost Management in the Microsoft 365 admin center keeps that fully under control.
Metered — by consumption
Services, users, and agents are billed by what they consume. New capabilities such as the Work IQ APIs are consumption-only.
Pooled — one currency
A single shared currency — Copilot Credits — as tenant-wide capacity, with policy controls to steer it.
Governed — in control
Admins get visibility, forecasting, and limits, built into the admin center where they already work.
Pay-as-you-go
$0,01 per credit
Scale up or down flexibly, with no upfront commitment. Ideal to start and let consumption grow with value.
Pre-Purchase Plan (P3)
Lowest price per credit
Paid up front for one year, with built-in tiered discounts: the larger the tier, the bigger the discount.
Worked example (illustrative)
A sample scenario of 25 users, modeled with the Cowork cost estimator (pay-as-you-go at $0.01 per credit, assuming Anthropic Opus 4.8). Cost is driven mainly by heavy usage — light, medium and heavy are the number of prompts per user per month:
Credits per prompt: light 125 · medium 500 · heavy 1,200
| Profile | Users | Light | Medium | Heavy | Credits/mo |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Corporate knowledge worker | 10 | 5 | 3 | 2 | 45,250 |
| Customer-facing knowledge worker | 10 | 5 | 3 | 2 | 45,250 |
| Manager / senior leader | 5 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 1,250 |
| Total | 25 | — | — | — | 91,750 |
≈ $36.70 average per user per month
Total ~$918 per month at pay-as-you-go (list price). A Pre-Purchase Plan lowers the price per credit.
Illustrative sample scenario based on custom assumptions; the default values come from Microsoft’s aggregated, anonymized Frontier data. Actual usage and cost vary per organization.
Estimate it for your organization
Calculate in a few clicks what Copilot Cowork costs your organization per month — based on your users and their expected usage.
Policies, limits, and alerts
- •Spending policies at tenant, group, and user level; the most targeted policy wins.
- •Monthly hard caps per policy to prevent overspend.
- •Optional per-user ceilings to protect shared credit capacity.
- •Alerts to admins and stakeholders as usage approaches a limit.
Common scenarios
- •Agents using premium services for everyday tasks — remove those services from the policy.
- •Users consuming credits unchecked — set a per-user limit so one person can’t drain the team budget.
- •A department overspending its allocation — set a limited monthly budget on the group.
Universal Cloud sets up Cost Management for you — from activating a default policy and configuring budget limits to choosing between pay-as-you-go and a Pre-Purchase Plan.
Administration and governance
Enable access
Cowork is not on by default: an admin first enables usage-based billing.
Phased rollout
Enable or disable per security group and control discoverability for end users.
Manage plugins
Decide which plugins (Skills + Connectors) are available and deploy them centrally via the Microsoft 365 App Store.
Govern models
Turn individual models (Claude Opus/Sonnet, GPT 5.5, Imagen 2) on or off in Copilot settings.
Browser use
The "Cowork Browsing" tenant setting governs web tasks in Edge; existing Conditional Access, DLP, and allow/blocklists still apply.
Security and compliance
Cowork operates within the existing security and governance boundaries of Microsoft 365.
Inherits your permissions
Cowork only sees what the user can already access; sensitivity labels are inherited and displayed.
Microsoft Purview
Full coverage: audit logging, Communication Compliance, DSPM, Insider Risk Management, Data Lifecycle Management, and eDiscovery.
Isolated execution
Runs in a secure, sandboxed cloud environment; data residency follows the same model as Microsoft 365 Copilot.
Human in the loop
Sensitive actions (sending email, posting in Teams) require approval with a risk indicator; you can pause, resume, or cancel anytime.
Good to know
- •Works with files in OneDrive and SharePoint, not local files.
- •Cannot delete files or folders.
- •Cannot read encrypted files, even if the user has access.
- •Attachments must be smaller than 200 MB.
- •Custom skills are not validated by Microsoft — review their output.
- •Available in Anthropic-supported regions (Cowork uses Claude as a subprocessor) — verify this per tenant.
Where it is available
Cowork works in the browser at m365.cloud.microsoft, in the Microsoft 365 Copilot desktop app (Windows and Mac), and in the mobile app (iOS and Android).
Outputs are saved to OneDrive/SharePoint and keep progressing after you close your laptop — cloud-native and secure by design.
Read more on the blog
Our articles about Copilot Cowork.
Copilot Cowork is now generally available
What the GA release means: Work IQ, plugins, licensing, cost, and the Frontier action before July 1.
Read the article →ExplainerCopilot Cowork: the AI execution layer in Microsoft 365
How Cowork carries out multi-step tasks across Outlook, Teams, and Excel — on your behalf.
Read the article →Roll out Cowork responsibly?
Universal Cloud helps you with the right licensing, governance, cost control, and plugins — so Cowork safely delivers value in your organization.
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