Copilot Cowork
A cloud sandbox inside Microsoft 365: access is granted by an admin, actions land in the audit log.
How to check: Ask your Microsoft 365 admin which region the tenant was bought in and whether Copilot is enabled: this is not visible from outside.
Verified: Sep 28last change: Sep 28next price check: Dec 27
Facts with sources
- Built on Claude Cowork technology, sold under the Microsoft brand. Source (in Russian)
- Agent Mode became the default mode in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint: the widest install base among the agents in the review. Source (in Russian)
Strengths
- Lives inside Microsoft 365: sends email, builds Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF files, searches SharePoint and OneDrive.
- Every sensitive action (email, meeting, Teams post) waits for approval; a running task can be paused, resumed or cancelled.
- One meeting-prep request returned a Word brief, finished a half-built deck and listed key risks in about 18 to 20 minutes.
- 13 built-in skills plus up to 50 custom ones; skills can be shared with colleagues and tasks can run on a schedule.
Weaknesses
- Credits are billed on top of the Copilot licence: 1 credit = 1 cent by default, and model choice is the biggest cost lever.
- When a group hits 100% of its monthly spend-policy quota, Cowork stops for everyone under that policy.
- You cannot call the Researcher agent (free with the licence) from inside Cowork, only a research skill that burns credits.
- The tenant must have Anthropic enabled as a subprocessor, or the admin cannot switch Cowork on at all.
Example from practice
Prepping for a quarterly customer review
The presenter asked Cowork to get him ready to run an executive business review with Contoso Coffee: an executive briefing document, a summary deck and a list of key risks. The job took roughly 18 to 20 minutes; Cowork picked the Word and PowerPoint skills on its own, wrote the brief and completed a deck he had started with three slides, adding five risks, six questions and one commitment per attendee that nobody asked for. The same question in plain Chat came back as a text summary in under 10 seconds, but with no files. Outputs landed in OneDrive under Documents/Cowork/Tasks.
What reviewers say
Reviewer opinions on their own tasks and hardware, not measurements. Links go to the videos; transcripts live in docs/raw-data.
- Microsoft Copilot CommUnity Aug 2026: Copilot Cowork – When to Use It and How to Get the Most Value · Microsoft Copilot CommUnity Connection, Aug 24The hosts (Microsoft staff) argue Cowork is for one-off, multi-app, multi-deliverable work only; quick questions belong in Chat, repeatable jobs in an agent, and keeping the model on auto is the safest way to control credits.
- NEW Copilot Updates Are Here – September 2026 · M365 Copilot Connection, Sep 2The reviewer walks through September changes: an effort slider, GPT and Claude model sections in the prompt box, a /cost skill showing session spend and remaining monthly quota; some features had not reached his production tenant yet.
- Microsoft Copilot Cowork Explained: The AI That Actually Does the Work! · Seema Solutions, Aug 13The author sees the shift from AI that answers to AI that acts as the point, but stresses that Cowork respects M365 permissions, cannot reach local files, and its emails and documents are drafts until reviewed.
What it can do for you
- A Word report from emails and SharePoint files
- An Excel summary sheet from tracker exports
- A quarterly results presentation
Models in this agent
Score is from our manager-task benchmark; models without a score are not measured yet.
What changed
- Copilot Cowork uses usage-based billing: the bill scales with the work you delegate →
How to brief an agent like this
The four-line brief is the Foundation module: prompt structure, LLM agents and MCP, an AI policy for the team. It starts with the free open module.