Microsoft unveiled a new version of Copilot on September 25, with CEO Satya Nadella calling it on social media the biggest update to Copilot yet and positioning it as "a new operating system for work." The revamp splits Copilot into three entry points — Home, Code and Autopilot — folds full versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint directly into the Copilot window, and splits billing into two separate tracks.
Three entry points, three different jobs
Home merges what used to be Chat and Cowork. Chat still handles quick questions and drafting; Cowork takes on multi-step tasks — pulling together a client briefing, prepping launch materials, building a financial package — moving back and forth across Excel, Outlook, Teams and SharePoint. Users can open and edit Office files directly inside Copilot while a colleague edits the same document in the traditional Office client at the same time.
Code is built for people who don't write code: describe the app, dashboard or automation you want in natural language, and Copilot builds it in a sandbox inside the user's own tenant. According to Techzine, the underlying technology shares its roots with GitHub Copilot.
Autopilot is a standing agent, previously code-named Scout and built on the open-source project OpenClaw. It has its own identity, memory and workspace, can be @-mentioned inside Teams and Outlook, keeps an eye on group discussions in Teams, follows up on conversations, and keeps projects moving while the user is away. A separate proactive dashboard called Today rolls up email, calendar, Teams conversations, meetings and to-dos.
The rollout comes in stages: Home and Code reach users over the coming weeks through the Frontier early-access program; Autopilot expands into a broader private preview by the end of September; Today is slated to enter private preview in October. A preview for Microsoft 365 Premium and Pro individual subscribers is planned for later this year.
Billing splits in two
The change with the biggest impact on enterprise purchasing is how it's billed. The per-seat, per-month license still covers everyday use: chat, plus Copilot features inside Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams. Heavier workloads — Cowork, Code and Autopilot — draw down usage-based Copilot Credits, and calling the newest frontier models is metered the same way; Microsoft specifically named OpenAI's Astra and Anthropic's Claude Fable. Usage-based billing is coming to consumer subscriptions later this year too.
Jared Spataro, who runs marketing for Microsoft's AI office products, laid out the reasoning to GeekWire:
"Our view is that there are two kinds of AI at work... They call for two very different ways of paying."
Neither the price per Credit nor a rough estimate of how many Credits a single Cowork task burns through has shown up in public reporting so far, leaving enterprise buyers to wait for a rate card before they can budget.
To keep a handle on this layer, Microsoft is using Agent 365 to give agents an identity, monitoring, security policies and spending caps, while the hosting environment, Microsoft Copilot Managed Runtime, moves into public preview alongside it. Jacob Andreou, the executive who runs Copilot, put it bluntly: "The hallmark of an amazing, long-running agent is autonomy and flexibility. That is the same thing that makes them absolutely terrifying to an IT admin." In other words, the same autonomy that makes a long-running agent useful is exactly what keeps IT admins up at night.
Measured against the field
Almost every piece of this release has a direct counterpart at a rival. Cowork shares its name with Anthropic's Claude Cowork, and GeekWire notes the key difference is where each one runs: Claude Cowork executes in a local virtual machine, while Microsoft's version runs in the tenant's cloud, managed centrally by IT. Code lines up against "describe it and it builds itself" tools like Claude Code and Lovable, while Autopilot overlaps with other vendors' standing-agent products.
Microsoft's edge is distribution and compliance. Citing figures GeekWire reported, Microsoft 365 Copilot paid seats stood at 20 million in April and passed 30 million by July, and Microsoft says conversations per user have nearly doubled year over year. It's also no longer locked to a single model: the new version lets users switch between GPT, Opus and an automatic mode. In the announcement, Nadella said enterprises should build their own private evaluation suite, keep tuning against it, and stay free to swap models at any time.
For companies that have already bought Copilot seats, only two things are certain right now: the monthly fee for everyday features isn't changing, and the more an agent gets used, the more it costs. How much Credit consumption a round-the-clock product like Autopilot will actually rack up won't be clear until the first wave of private-preview customers sees their bills.
Sources: GeekWire, Techzine, CocoLoop, iPhone in Canada; verified the functions and rollout timing of the three entry points, the billing split, and the Microsoft 365 Copilot paid-seat figures.