Three surfaces instead of one chat box
Microsoft announced on Friday that the Copilot app now has three capabilities rather than a single assistant: Home, Code and Autopilot.
Home is the starting point, merging what were separate Chat and Cowork modes. Chat handles quick questions; Cowork takes a delegated task and runs it end to end — the company’s examples are an RFP response, a launch kit, a customer briefing, a financial close package. Office in Copilot puts Word, Excel and PowerPoint inside the experience, so a request produces a real editable file that stays in sync with the Office apps. Microsoft says that soon users will not have to pick a mode at all: Copilot will route the request to Chat, Cowork or Code itself.
Code is the part aimed at people who do not write software. Describe an app, tracker, dashboard or automation in plain language and Copilot builds it, running on the same underlying technology as GitHub Copilot, inside a sandbox that can be hosted in the customer’s own tenant. Microsoft frames this as adding a fourth unit of knowledge work alongside the document, the spreadsheet and the deck.
Autopilot is the actual shift
Autopilot — previously called Scout — is a persistent agent rather than a session. You give it a name, a role and a goal, and it watches channels, follows up on threads, runs recurring work and picks a project back up days later without a prompt. Microsoft’s worked example is running a full supplier review: building the schedule and workback plan, then handling prep, meetings and follow-ups, including chasing stakeholders for updates.
The detail that matters is where it lives. Autopilot sits in the customer’s tenant “with its own identity, memory, computer and workspace”, Microsoft says, and appears in Teams, Outlook, chats, channels and documents so it can be @mentioned like a colleague, with permissions, audit and governance attached. It is cloud-hosted and keeps running while the user is offline.
That is an agent with a corporate identity and a machine of its own, inside the tenant, running unattended. The governance question that follows — what an unattended identity is allowed to touch — is the one every enterprise buyer will have to answer before switching it on.
The price model changes with it
Microsoft is splitting Copilot pricing in two. A user subscription licence keeps covering everyday AI at a fixed cost: Chat, Copilot across Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams, and model selection. At the centre of it is Auto, a router that weighs accuracy, speed and cost per request and picks the model.
Usage-based billing covers the rest. Cowork, Code, Autopilot, new long-running agentic capabilities and frontier models — Microsoft names Astra and Fable — all run on consumption. Alongside it the company is shipping what it calls FinOps for AI: cost management in Agent 365 extending to Code and the Copilot Managed Runtime, with Copilot Studio agents planned for October; spending policies with API access; credit-request routing into existing approval workflows; and per-user credit balances visible inside Copilot.
Admins can also restrict which model families each group can reach, and those limits shape what the Auto router is allowed to choose from — a cost control and a capability control in the same setting.
Dates
Home and Code start rolling out through Microsoft’s Frontier programme in the coming weeks; Code reaches Frontier at the end of this month, with preview for Microsoft 365 Premium and Pro subscribers later this year. Autopilot expands to private preview at the end of the month. The Today command centre in Home enters private preview in October, as does @Copilot in Teams. Fabric IQ grounding is generally available in Chat and Cowork now; Dynamics 365 and Power Platform grounding rolls out in public preview over the next month.
The next checkpoint is Ignite, 17–20 November in San Francisco, where the gap between preview and general availability on the agent side should start to close.
