The new Copilot brings chat and delegated work into one place, lets anyone build small apps with GitHub Copilot's technology and adds Autopilot - a persistent agent in the cloud. Long agentic work and frontier models run on usage-based billing.
- Home brings Chat and Cowork together, and Word, Excel and PowerPoint come inside as Office in Copilot.
- Code builds apps, dashboards and automations from a description, in an isolated environment, and can be hosted within the company.
- Autopilot, formerly Scout, enters private preview at the end of the month; Cowork, Code and Autopilot run on usage-based billing.
The most important paragraph in Microsoft's announcement is almost at the bottom, and it is about money.
Everyday work - quick answers, drafts, summaries - stays on a fixed per-user licence. Everything long and agentic moves to usage-based billing: Cowork, Code, Autopilot, and frontier models like Astra and Fable. So the more the agent works, the bigger the bill.
Who will write the software
Microsoft says that until now the unit of office work has been the file - document, spreadsheet, deck - and adds a fourth: a small app anyone makes for the task at hand. It sounds like democracy. In a big company it also sounds like hundreds of apps nobody in IT knows about.
Code comes with an isolated environment, and Copilot Managed Runtime, where these apps can live, is governed by IT. The fence is up on day one.
The FinOps section is the first thing to open, before the first Autopilot starts. Limits go in before the bill, not after it has arrived.