Microsoft on Friday, Sept. 25, redesigned Copilot into a single work app with three tabs: Home, Code and Autopilot. Jared Spataro, chief marketing officer for AI at Work, said the goal is one place to ask, delegate, build and automate. Autopilot is the cloud remake of Scout, the always-on agent Microsoft showed earlier this year. If companies adopt it, AI agents that run for long stretches would sit under the same Microsoft 365 controls that companies already set for Copilot Chat and Office.
Home is the default starting screen. It combines Copilot Chat with Cowork, a mode for handing off whole jobs from start to finish, such as answering a request for proposals or putting together a launch kit. Office in Copilot builds in Word, Excel and PowerPoint, so drafts and slide decks stay live, editable files instead of text pasted from a chat. Spataro says Copilot will soon send each request to Chat, Cowork or Code without the user picking a mode first.
Code lets people who are not developers describe an app, tracker, dashboard or automation in everyday language. Microsoft says it uses the same underlying technology as GitHub Copilot, runs in a walled-off space inside the customer's own Microsoft 365 environment, and can publish internal apps hosted in the cloud. Microsoft has put Copilot Managed Runtime, the service that hosts that work, into preview. Microsoft said Code would reach Frontier at the end of September, with a later preview for Microsoft 365 Premium and Pro subscribers.
Microsoft describes Autopilot, previously called Scout, as a digital teammate with its own identity, memory, computer and workspace inside the customer's environment. Users can name it, give it a role and a goal, and @mention it in Teams, Outlook, chats and documents. Microsoft says it is built on Microsoft IQ, with permissions, audit and governance behind it. Annie Pearl, corporate vice president of Copilot Product, said in an interview that many organizations struggled to bring agents into the enterprise because of security, compliance and governance concerns.
Pricing separates everyday chat from work the AI does on its own. A user subscription license covers Copilot in Chat and across Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams. Cowork, Code, Autopilot and what Microsoft calls frontier models, the most capable AI models, such as Astra and Fable, run on usage-based billing. Microsoft's FinOps for AI tools are meant to show how many credits a company uses and to set spending rules. On Sept. 25, Microsoft said Home and Code would start rolling out to Frontier in the coming weeks, and that Autopilot would expand to a private preview at the end of September.
Update (Nov. 7): Microsoft says Code began rolling out to Frontier, its early-access program, on Oct. 21. In its roundup of October changes to Copilot, published Oct. 30, Microsoft said the new Home was reaching Frontier in October and would reach all customers in November, and that Autopilot would reach Frontier in November.