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.
When to use Copilot, when to use Cowork?
Not every task needs to be handled by Cowork. The question isn’t “can Cowork do this?”, but “should Cowork do this?”.
When do you use Copilot?
Use Copilot for personal productivity and knowledge work:
- Writing or improving emails
- Creating presentations
- Summarizing meetings
- Carrying out research
- Analyzing information
- Drafting reports, blogs or quotes
- Working with Copilot Notebooks for research and knowledge building
For this kind of work, Copilot is often more than enough.
When do you use Cowork?
Cowork delivers the most value when an entire task or process needs to be carried out. For example:
- Creating a management report and distributing it to the managers involved
- Collecting and following up on action items from meetings
- Bringing together and processing information from multiple sources
- Automating periodic tasks
- Running recurring processes that normally require multiple manual steps
Here AI shifts from giving answers to actually doing the work. That is exactly where Cowork proves its value.
Control over cost and usage
Successful organizations don’t use Cowork without limits — they set guidelines up front on:
- Which employees may use Cowork
- Which processes are suitable for Cowork
- Budgets per team or user
- Monitoring of Copilot Credit consumption
- Periodic evaluation of usage and added value
Cowork is one of four ways to organize work with Copilot. Read when to use Notebooks, Pages, agents or Cowork — and how smart organization saves Copilot Credits.
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.
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.
Tip: with a Pre-Purchase Plan (paid one year up front) you get tiered discounts on the price per credit — the larger the tier, the bigger the discount.
Worked example (illustrative)
A sample scenario of 25 users (pay-as-you-go at $0.01 per credit, assuming Anthropic Opus 4.8). Users are split across light, medium and heavy usage profiles; heavy usage drives most of the cost. Use the interactive estimator below to model your own prompt mix and scenario:
Light, medium and heavy show the number of users per usage profile; together they make up the total number of users.
| Profile | Users | Light users · 1,000 cr | Medium users · 3,500 cr | Heavy users · 8,000 cr | Credits/mo |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Corporate knowledge worker | 10 | 5 | 3 | 2 | 31,500 |
| Customer-facing knowledge worker | 10 | 5 | 3 | 2 | 31,500 |
| Manager / senior leader | 5 | 2 | 2 | 1 | 17,000 |
| Total | 25 | 12 | 8 | 5 | 80,000 |
≈ $32.00 average per user per month
Total ~$800 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.
Want to know more about cost management and billing? Read our support article on Copilot Cowork cost management.
Copilot Cowork Jumpstart
In a single online session we make your organization Cowork-ready — so you can start safely and cost-consciously right away.
How Universal Cloud helps you get the most out of Cowork
Just as we already do for your Azure services — where cost management demands expertise, experience, and smart processes.
Technical activation
Turn Cowork on and configure your tenant correctly.
Licensing
The right Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Credits setup.
Budget alignment
Model expected consumption and set limits.
Knowledge sharing
Teach your team how to use Cowork effectively.
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.
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Read the article →Copilot Cowork is now generally available
Microsoft 365 Copilot Cowork is generally available: long-running, multi-step tasks that Copilot carries out for you autonomously, with your approval along the way.
Read the article →Copilot Cowork: your AI execution layer in Microsoft 365
Copilot Cowork is now generally available — Microsoft 365 Copilot's execution layer that runs multi-step tasks across Outlook, Teams and Excel, billed via Copilot Credits.
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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